Technology impact on local government
Government organizations at all levels have been negatively affected by the global economic recession. Many local governments have been hard hit financially by reduced federal and state funding appropriations, stretched budgets due to the economy and inflation, shrinking funding sources from erosion of their tax base, and structural deficits such as unsustainable union contracts. These financial issues further exacerbate long standing organizational issues of limited enterprise wide application platforms, lack of cross functional integration, and IT organization's lack of proper business acumen and effective business unit partnerships. Operationally they suffer from problematic annual budget reconciliation processes, non-optimized procurement and asset management processes, limited and/or flawed records management processes, badly needed infrastructure modernization and a insufficient leveraging of IT platforms to achieve business results.
Many of these issues require the same solutions implemented by private sector companies to reduce their operational costs, increase their revenues, and enhance their customer satisfacion. These include:
- Business process analysis and optimization
- IT architecture blueprint development
- System consolidation, and data integration
- Citizens portal - conduct business 24x7
- Business intelligence, analytics and management dashboards for transparency
- Document management strategies and implementation
- eProcurement and asset management systems
- Content management strategies and implementation
- Cloud based strategies and implementation
- Locator Services
- Address and mail management services
(address cleansing, move updates, pre-sort discounts)
- National DMV integration
- GIS center of excellence
Side note, I would recommend an article link since I could reference your blog (side note). In terms of government, they find IT as a luxury and do not understand how the initial short term investment could return a bigger long term return of investment. With budget cuts, they could operate that seems to save pennies but will cost $1 or more over the life time of operation. It is always understanding value.. But like many Cisco rep tells me.. You have to overcome the "8th" layer which is cost
ReplyDeleteThanks David for the suggestion and comment. Many government organizations, even if they face the issues as that of the private sector companies, still resist taking similar technological approaches to address them. They appear to want to maintain the thinking that they are different than the pivate sector. Many are now however starting to change their thinking and are now adopting technologies like Cloud/SaaS, and data mining with predictive analytics. Stay tuned...
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