Trends In Social Media And Cloud Computing Connecting Citizens With Government Services
Local governments, public agencies, and service delivery organizations continuously strive to enhance citizen and constituent services through a structured, centralized and efficient service delivery system. Such an ambitious objective, however, is not devoid of serious challenges and limitations, particularly in a world of shrinking budgets and tax dollars. Not only are government decision makers generally expected to deliver both qualitative and quantitative improvements to service delivery over time while dealing with regulations and keeping costs in check, but they often have the additional public sector limitation of maximizing the utility of existing assets and resources.
Recent industry research conducted by Gartner emphasizes two key trends that are affecting how governments deliver public services:
- One, there is a large consumer social media impact on the relationship and interaction between citizens and service providers. While services traditionally emphasized the different channels used to collect information for requests, widespread use of social software has expanded the role of providing services by emphasizing the outbound flow of information. This tends to enhance the transparency and responsiveness of government provided services.
- Two, the trend towards adoption of the cloud computing model as an alternative to one of traditional on-premise implementation and management. Cloud computing has recently gained favorable attention due to its efficient use of resources and its optimal ability to provision new users and computing cycles,amongst other things. Additionally,a cloud-based implementation eliminates the need for an upfront investment in hardware, software and skilled personnel to install, configure, manage and monitor an operational service system.
To that end, our Office of Civic Innovation (OCI) team has delivered an end-to-end modern service center framework - nicknamed "311" - designed to help local governments empower citizens, increase productivity, improve responsiveness and decision making and personalize the delivery through multiple access channels. The framework provides the building blocks that are needed in a modern citizen services center. One component is a self-service citizen web portal allowing citizens to submit requests, view the status of open cases, read announcements, follow twitter feeds, and search for relevant information. The citizen services framework incorporates the use of all browser-enabled devices so citizens can submit requests from mobile phones.
In total, our Citizen services solution supports the complete lifecycle of case management and fully automates the processes needed to streamline the operations of a modern service center.
There are wider implications for the public sector. While our OCI team chose to configure this framework to showcase a 311 service center operation, we emphasize a generic template approach that can be configured and customized to accommodate any service type. As such, our 311 service center framework was immediately utilized to deliver services to students in the context of Campus311 and Student311 services. Our colleagues elsewhere are extending the solution framework to use in retiree-oriented and similar services.
Gone are the days when government agencies developed enterprise solutions from scratch through their local IT department, and it is increasingly prohibitively expensive to purchase and train staff on dedicated enterprise solutions that try to address every need of every agency. The optimal approach to delivering enterprise solution is to start with a versatile platform and tailor it to your needs through configuration.In this case, we used the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform to configure a specific solution that addresses the public sector services space.