Industry
Public Services
Digital Transformation of Government Agencies and Public Services
Highlights
- Technology transformation can change the fundamental ways government operates and deliver time and cost savings to government agencies.
- A cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution can transform government operations and deliver business, technology, and workforce benefits.
- Government agencies will benefit by moving ERP to the cloud to improve efficiency and future-proof critical IT business systems against obsolescence.
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Transforming government operations
Technology transformation is a fundamental lever to modernize government operations.
Government agencies face ongoing budgetary constraints while striving to improve financial transparency. These difficulties surmount governments’ challenges with outdated accounting methods, financial analysis, budget formulation, allocation, and execution.
Forward-thinking government organizations are adopting new technologies and changing their cultures to attract and develop a workforce with advanced digital skills, encourage employees to engage more effectively, and leverage proven technologies to improve operating performance, constituent experiences, and targeted outcomes.
Government priorities – including higher citizen engagement, improved productivity, and stronger economic growth – all depend on the effective use of digital technologies. Technology transformation enables government organizations to do more with less and focus on higher-value activities.
How can technology transformation change the fundamental ways governments operate and deliver time and cost savings? And how can government agencies ensure the success of a new technology implementation for both the workforce and constituents?
A cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution can transform government operations and deliver both business and technology outcomes.
The government modernization imperative
Many state and local governments still rely on legacy systems and cumbersome tools to collect data and analyze financial information.
Government finance and budgeting professionals provide financial and analytical support for difficult decisions on how to budget, account, and allocate scarce government resources. With legacy systems and inadequate tools, analysts spend most of their time chasing down and reconciling numbers instead of doing the actual analysis that adds value to the decision-making process. The central control units must have a holistic picture of the organization across the entire enterprise to make informed data-driven decisions. Today, many are stuck trying to collect information, which resides in siloed systems within various agencies and programs.
Government agencies face increasing expectations for a high-quality citizen experience, the influence of legislators, regulatory shifts, and the rapid expansion and impact of technology. In addition to financial and analytical pressures, government agencies face the persistent loss of experienced and skilled workers. According to the Center for American Progress, there are 695,000 fewer people employed in state and local government jobs than before COVID-19.
Governments’ employment recovery has been notably slower than that of the private sector, and the wave of experience walking out the door has many concerned about a lack of qualified candidates to take their places. The public finance workforce also has a particularly large age gap, which means more retirements loom for finance and accounting professionals than elsewhere in the workforce. A recent National Association of State Treasurers study found that 60% of public finance workers in the United States (US) are over 45, nearly a third are 55 or older, while fewer than two in 10 public finance workers are below 34.
In response, governments are considering how technology can help them adapt to a smaller workforce without compromising service delivery. Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, the internet of things (IoT), and virtual reality (VR) can streamline workflows and processes, freeing up employee time for higher-level decision-making, and potentially having a great impact on the way a government operates and delivers services to people. Some agencies are also looking at expanding non-traditional benefits — like working from home — to attract new employees.
Government agencies are modernizing their expensive-to-run monolithic information systems to improve efficiency and better serve people. Legacy systems are becoming difficult to manage and support, hindering innovation and technological advancements.
Modernizing information technology and adapting to change may seem overwhelming, but optimized investment helps overcome current challenges and future-proofs critical systems against obsolescence.
Transformational approach to staying forever modern
Government employees often work with legacy technologies and operate largely in a transactional manner, making it difficult to predict or anticipate change.
In most government agencies, a lack of integrated systems requires manual intervention and introduces data inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and poor reporting. Paper-based environments, manual processes, and the lack of flexibility of legacy systems leave government agencies with an array of redundant, time-consuming, and unreliable processes.
The modern back office, comprising critical administrative and support systems, provides enhanced connectivity and business automation and can help government employees serve constituents anywhere, anytime. Cloud-based technologies revolutionize back-office processes and empower the workforce to operate in a dynamic and demanding environment. Modern business tools and systems that meet user needs will transform business operations in both quantitative and qualitative ways.
Automating processes and eliminating standalone systems will increase accuracy and decrease process cycle times and associated staff time. As staff becomes proficient in new tools and efficiencies, service levels will improve, even with reduced staffing.
Modernizing operational and critical applications can springboard an organization in its digital transformation goals. Forever-modern back-office systems reduce the need for another costly and time-consuming modernization in the future because these systems are designed to evolve with the organization’s evolving requirements, changing external pressures, and advancements in technology.
With modern, intuitive, and efficient systems, government agencies can work faster and more accurately. This allows employees to focus on helping customers and supporting strategic priorities, instead of spending time on redundant tasks.
Moving to the cloud
Cloud-based ERP has become the preferred solution for businesses for more than a decade.
Cloud computing entails transferring business services to the cloud to boost innovation, economies of scale, and flexibility. Modernizing ERP systems in the cloud helps to future-proof critical IT business systems against obsolescence. Industry-leading cloud applications also offer business opportunities that outdated legacy systems cannot, including:
Lower costs: With a cloud-based ERP, government agencies can significantly reduce the cost of running a physical data center and eliminate laborious and costly procedures like software patching and hardware installation.
Accessibility: Cloud-based systems will allow workers and constituents access to data anytime, anyplace, and on any device, increasing flexibility and access to critical information, while improving the way governments deliver critical services to people.
Agility: Cloud-based ERP allows organizations to respond quickly and easily to changing industry conditions, emerging technologies, and constituent demands.
Scalability: Each application has built-in scalability that has been tested in extreme scenarios, so organizations do not need to worry about outgrowing their technology. Because businesses only pay for the resources they need, they can scale up or down quickly, easily, and cost-effectively. Cloud computing provides unrivalled scalability through additional storage space, computing power, and virtual resources whenever an organization needs it.
Higher security: Cloud-based ERP systems are designed for maximum security to protect government data and reduce risk. US-based safe data centers and self-repairing systems, tailored for government, undergo regular monitoring and upgrading, which does not often occur in small, government-based data centers. Systems are designed to prevent security breaches, care for disaster recovery, data backup, and business continuity requirements.
Reduced errors: Automated business processes and unified data access reduce errors dramatically.
Unlock data potential
A strong data strategy will allow governments to harmonize data across the enterprise, tackle data proliferation, and create the single source of truth for data-driven decision making.
An investment in modern ERP technology will serve as the foundation to standardize core processes and automate many manual tasks. This integrated technology environment will promote one-time data input and reuse of data across the enterprise.
To unlock data potential, governments can develop an interoperable and connected data landscape, where data collected by any government entity is available where needed, security and privacy are safeguarded, and adequate legal, technical, and organizational protections prevent the misuse of data. A proper data strategy delivers benefits such as increased efficiency, improved usability, and value-creating opportunities.
Technology advancements and visualization capabilities in modern ERP systems help accelerate financial modelling. Modern ERP also leverages data aggregation technologies with predictive analytics, cognitive, and machine-learning capabilities to provide a streamlined experience for organizations to generate high-impact insights.
The ability to generate financial insights in near real time allows for agile scenario planning, empowering organizations to shift their focus from analysis to decision-making. One source of truth and timely visibility into operations aids informed decision-making.
Once business process changes are made through an ERP implementation, government operations can expect to see important benefits, such as:
Ready access to data and reporting, with drill-down capabilities
Data-driven decision-making and reduced stress on the organization
Adherence to policies and procedures
More effective interfaces with external parties, such as regulatory authorities
Support for succession planning
Additional purchasing efficiencies and cost savings with strategic sourcing
Improvements in collaboration, transparency and efficiency across HR, finance, and other functions
Embrace hybrid work for a future-ready workforce
Centrality of the office is a thing of the past and remote teams are emerging as a durable component of the work landscape.
Legacy, on-premises ERP cannot support the new hybrid workforce. Governments must transform their ad hoc and inefficient remote team workflows into something that approaches the efficiency of the office.
Remote team efficiency is about having all the government’s data in the cloud. Without a cloud-based backend infrastructure, working with files and data (especially financial) becomes both a logistical nightmare and a security risk.
While cloud-based ERP brings many benefits, especially in terms of financial management, it also helps with remote team efficiency in at least three areas:
Data centrality with fine-grained permissions
Complete operational visibility
Process standardization
Achieve more, faster
Improve flexibility and avoid legacy technology pitfalls.
Digital transformation is driving governments to reconsider their technology strategy, including moving beyond the organizations’ legacy ERP systems. Instead of investing in on-premises systems, organizations have turned to cloud-enabled ERP systems for flexibility, agility, and cost efficiencies. Cloud-based systems are easy to configure and update, and quick to implement and use.
The ERP landscape has taken a drastic shift with cloud-based ERP solutions that offer high availability, optimized performance, faster time-to-market, and improved user experience. Leading cloud-based ERP solutions designed for governments simplify the experience for users, improve management, and speed up the digitalization journey, cost-effectively. These forever-modern solutions have low implementation and migration cost, scalability, and almost 99.99% uptime.
Cloud-based ERP embeds end-to-end business best processes enabled by industry-leading applications and technologies. By embedding next-generation digital technologies, such as cloud, mobile, AI, and IoT, the right solution automates daily business activities, allowing organizations to achieve more, faster, and with less resources.
