Full of opportunity
Multiple integrated legacy systems have traditionally characterized the public sector. Creating room for error, often the workers working in the public sector still carry out the process of exchanging information between themselves manually for the completion of a process or for providing a service, which also increases the costs including errors. Improving the speed and efficiency of services in the public sector is expected by the citizens and businesses to become more proactive and data-driven as the public and private sectors embrace data and automation with slick precision. A declining majority of employees thanks to demographic change along with increasing work pressure due to new legislation and the demands of citizens as it’s inevitable that the public sector automates.
The expectations of the self-services via seamless digital channels have only increased and accelerated since the pandemic.
Work in progress
There is a great response from many public sector organizations to the process of responding to the rapid digitization of services and new regulations. There are many such examples like the example of a particular state pension service in Europe. Resulting of a rising demand for services we can see that currently, its workforce isn’t expanding, whereas, the state’s population is growing and ageing. With the best digital tools, the future workforce demands more flexible, virtual work, When the pandemic reinforced the need for radical technological transformation, it was actually the business, not IT, which took the lead in championing the need for greater automation meanwhile. One simple bot was able to deliver work equivalent to 20 full-time employees, within a few weeks, Meanwhile, focusing on complex work and interaction with citizens is carried out by humans.
Key Challenges
Securing the support of the whole organization is the first challenge on the journey to automation especially if it doesn’t have a Chief Digital Officer, or Chief Data Officer, to drive the digital agenda. Then the desire to avoid vendor lock-in often leads to a reliance on custom solutions that increase silos and fragmentation. Making it difficult to apply AI Next, data quality and accessibility can be challenging as well. The regulatory and compliance context often means that personal data can only be used for the purpose it was gathered for. Along with other things, leaders need to ensure their activities serve a coordinated strategy across the public sector too.
Where to start?
As evolution in citizen-centricity, your journey should focus on transformation. Firstly, starting with the vision and advantages that will be the basis of the business case: How will automation add value for citizens and rise up your efficiency? Secondly, understanding the ecosystem of the technology which is available, workforce and data. How do the processes work today? Are they documented? Are there gaps in terms of speed and availability? Can you identify backlogs or bottlenecks? Thirdly, recognise the key and important challenges and a point of view from a citizen and business, and develop a strategy and roadmap for a deal with them – you’ll need to optimize the opportunities by identifying the processes, people, and technologies.
