The Infrastructure Strain of Digital Citizen Services
Only a few short years ago, the experience of citizens interacting with government agencies involved taking time off work, waiting in long queues and completing paper forms – an experience that was both frustrating for citizens and inefficient for the government and its agencies. Thankfully, those days have passed. Technology investments have enabled interactions to move from the government office, business hours and interaction modes to occurring on citizens’ terms – from their living room during the evening or at their desk during a lunch break. Government IT has given citizens greater access to information, improved agency interactions and, more importantly, created more time to focus on family, work and personal interests by making government interactions easier.
Whether it is paying a property tax, renewing car registration fees, applying for Social Security benefits or paying a traffic fine, governments are enabling an increasing number of routine citizen transactions to be completed online. While each of these activities may seem small, a typical citizen will have 15 to 30 of these interactions each year. By moving the transactions from physical offices to online, a typical citizen saves approximately 20 hours/year for other tasks and activities. Because government agencies typically operate during weekday business hours, much of the time savings benefits employers, so their workers are able to be more productive.
However, delivering this seamless digital experience requires government IT to modernize massive legacy systems. Migrating these workloads to hybrid architectures demands flawless dependency mapping to prevent service outages.
Securing Public Data in the Cloud Era
In addition to transactions, one of the most common citizen interactions with government is accessing information. Whether citizens are accessing real-estate tax data or birth records, agencies must be flawless stewards of public data. Moving these portals into secure environments like AWS GovCloud requires validating that every database and server complies with strict FISMA and FedRAMP security baselines before the migration even begins. Most information requests occur during the evening, during weekends and other times when it is convenient for citizens, but when government offices are closed. By using modern technology, government agencies are able to be better stewards of public data and make it available to the citizens they serve.
Managing Edge Telemetry and Zero Trust
Perhaps, a fascinating example of how government IT is embracing change and enabling modern citizen experiences is in the transportation sector. Sensors embedded in roads, traffic cameras, smart traffic lights that optimize traffic flow and electronic toll collection are generating an enormous amount of data that enables agencies to not only to change how citizens interact with the government, but also how they interact with each other during day-to-day activities. By seamlessly integrating data from multiple sources that improve the efficiency of the transportation system, public infrastructure is capable of managing more users and enabling people to travel to their destination faster, cheaper and with less stress than previously.
Automating Compliance with Pristine CMDB Data
Technology is continuing to evolve and, as it does, government IT organizations are finding new and innovative ways to help the agencies they support to interact better with their citizens. Whether it is streamlined transaction processes, access to public information or optimizing infrastructure for improved experiences – IT and the data that enables it is playing a pivotal role in driving the change in government.
During the next few years, the prime opportunity for government IT will be to bridge the gaps between agencies, gathering data and leveraging it to create holistic citizen experiences. The forces that are driving efficiencies on data use in the private sector will transfer almost immediately to the public sector, resulting in faster service, lowered costs, and a better citizen experience. Blazent is the industry leader in providing data quality management solutions to governments and their agencies, and is already working to aggregate data intelligently to exceed the increasing expectations of citizens, and help create the government experiences of tomorrow.
Download the Ensuring Data Quality White Paper
Request a Federal IT Assessment