Top five digital opportunities for the public sector

Digitizing public services can be a game changer for governments. Streamlining inefficient processes, providing digital access and delivery of services to meet public expectations, implementing technology to protect constituent data, leveraging information to make data-driven decisions and migrating outdated on-premises systems to the cloud are crucial to an entity’s success. Through these types of digital services, entities can keep scale with future demand and be better positioned to rapidly respond to changing demands.

Five digital initiatives and technologies public sector organizations should invest in

5. Digital maturity

A lack of understanding around digital maturity could be significantly impacting the success of your entity’s digital transformation efforts. Digital maturity equips entities with the strategic clarity, resource efficiency, infrastructure and adaptive capabilities needed to execute digital transformation initiatives. Without a mature digital foundation, transformation efforts may be under-resourced and less effective.

Many public sector entities struggle to determine their position on a digital maturity scale, often creating a lack of clarity around how to get started on their digital transformation initiatives – leading to delays and backlogs on projects. Additionally, public sector leaders, especially in municipalities, often find themselves operating within their own authority and may lack visibility into other departments. By bringing in an independent party to facilitate collaboration across all departments, entities can identify common themes and create a unified strategy to generate momentum that would be difficult to achieve if each department were working in isolation. Understanding and improving your digital maturity can break down silos and drive forward cohesive, entity-wide digital transformation.

Entities should look to undergo a digital strategy assessment to understand the current state of their entity from a technical, organizational and cultural perspective. As entities progress in each of these areas, they develop their digital maturity which supports the entity in establishing the capacity to self-sustain further digital transformation and innovation down the line.

4. Omni-channel experiences

Customer expectations are driving the need for digital transformation in the public sector through increased interactions with apps, mobile devices, AI and automation. By leveraging existing applications or by building custom applications, public sector entities can provide constituents access to public services through a variety of self-serve channels that create a better user experience, consistent with the experiences they’re familiar with receiving from B2C companies in their day to day lives.

As organizations that have the strongest omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, compared to 33% of organizations with weak strategies , it’s clear that public sector entities must enable a seamless customer journey across platforms. With the omni-channel approach, all integrated systems can communicate with one another to execute workflows seamlessly, creating an improved and transparent end user experience. This visibility builds confidence in the municipality’s operations and fosters a stronger relationship between the community and the entity.

To start implementing omni-channel operations, public sector entities should undertake a process assessment to uncover pain-points in current-state processes and outline opportunity areas for improvement delivered through a sequenced road map. This process involves understanding common themes across departments to identify and prioritize solutions that provide immediate value to enhance overall efficiency and service delivery.

Learn the top three digital initiatives and steps to get started by clicking the button below.