Reimagining the Public and Social Impact Arena 🌍

As cities emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, life is undergoing a transformation, and local governments are determined to prioritize safety and build resilience in their reopening efforts. At the same time, residents want to regain the joys of pre-pandemic life while retaining the positive changes brought about in 2020. However, it is important to acknowledge that many individuals will carry lasting scars from the challenging experience.

Even before the pandemic, governments recognized the need for digital transformations to adapt to paradigm shifts driven by the private sector. Now, as vaccinations increase and cases decrease, mission support leaders, referred to as CXOs, are grappling with several important questions:

1. How can we gradually ease COVID-19 restrictions while ensuring safety?
2. How can we reconfigure city operations to align with the new normal while maintaining high-quality services?
3. How can we efficiently manage budgets and explore avenues for increased revenue?

Their ultimate goal is to provide safer experiences across various aspects of city life, including administration, healthcare, education, work, retail, culture, recreation, and travel. To achieve this, they must reimagine service deployment and delivery through digital transformation best practices to enhance constituent experiences and satisfaction.

The use of digital tools and applications developed by the private sector has raised expectations for the public sector. Paper-based services and workflows create bottlenecks, particularly during periods of high demand, hindering the delivery of government services. Analog processes are not easily scalable.

Local governments need to accelerate their digital transformation efforts to establish a resilient present state. Their strategy should revolve around end-to-end digital processes supported by a robust and scalable IT platform, enabling the rapid and efficient deployment of service delivery functions. Additionally, these efforts should create opportunities for generating new revenue.

With declining tax revenue and economic repercussions from the pandemic, local governments must leverage sophisticated and mature technologies to deliver prompt and meaningful solutions. According to Frost & Sullivan, local governments embracing open data standards, crowd analytics, and expanded online city services are projected to increase their spending on advanced technology by 23% annually, reaching approximately $327 billion by 2025.

Digitization and automation benefit both administrations and citizens. Here's how local governments can evolve with a focus on constituent satisfaction and success:

1. Establish a multimodal digital platform: A customer-focused engagement platform acts as a digital gateway for government agencies, offering personalized experiences that enhance service delivery for residents, businesses, and employees. This platform should have a unified architecture and a data model that avoids incurring technical debt. Currently, many agencies still rely on costly and cumbersome manual processes, with 58% of constituent-facing processes and 46% of internal processes involving manual work and paper forms, according to IDC Insight.
2. Digitize processes: Local governments have the potential to significantly impact people's lives through the diverse range of services they manage and deliver. Redesigning service delivery to maximize the use of digital tools involves two key steps. Firstly, optimizing services for city residents by minimizing manual work and leveraging suitable tools for service delivery. This includes providing call center agents with remote working capabilities and transitioning from multiple disparate computer systems to an enterprise-level engagement and integration platform. Secondly, redesigning business processes by breaking them into smaller components, leveraging advanced technologies for connectivity, and reducing handoffs. This enables the rapid deployment of new services and the use of bots, algorithms, and low-code platforms for improved efficiency.
3. Explore pathways for increased revenue: COVID-19 has compelled municipal governments to explore innovative approaches to address revenue shortages. One option is to implement tiered service fees based on income, charging more for certain services. Although it may not be the right time for immediate implementation, analyzing these options and modeling scenarios for future implementation can be valuable. Predictive analytics can aid in determining optimal pricing tiers for different service types. Additionally, local governments can introduce express services for additional fees, leveraging their multimodal digital platform to expedite processes such as licensing, permitting, and inspections. Lastly, automated self-service processes empowered by rapid technological advancements can enhance the effectiveness of collecting outstanding payments and negotiating payment agreements.

In conclusion, digitalization enables progress. Local governments have the opportunity to provide constituents with easier, simpler, and faster services while equipping employees with the necessary tools and platforms for enhanced productivity and collaboration. Through digital transformation, leaders can effectively monitor, manage, and optimize both municipal and third-party services.