Management

Disruption Heralds Enhanced Digital Services Among Agencies

State and local governments engage in new ways, reimagining outmoded ways of doing business.

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Ryan Petersen has worked in publishing for more than two decades, most of it spent creating award-winning content and strategy for CDW’s family of tech magazine brands. As editor-in-chief, he works with his team to develop compelling and useful industry-focused stories to share with the technology world. Outside of work, Ryan enjoys spending time with his children, traveling, online gaming, and following Iowa Hawkeye sports and Cubs baseball.

In 2020, in response to the pandemic, state and local agencies that could not provide services in person transformed to provide them online, leading to a significant rise in digital services. A disruption of this size and scope was unprecedented, but governments rose to the challenge, not only to the benefit of their citizens but also their agencies.

With digital services, state and local governments can serve citizens remotely with more efficiency, faster speeds and at scale on demand. Perhaps more important, agencies gained significant productivity while enhancing engagement and interaction.

In its annual survey of state CIOs in October, the National Association of State Chief Information Officers collected observations on the importance of digital services for state governments. CIOs agreed the productivity of state employees was higher thanks to increased digital government. Some observed that employees were able to collaborate and engage more often, thereby becoming more productive.

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Disruption Brings New Engagement from Government

This engagement is critically important to the effectiveness of government. In a digital ecosystem, government employees have more opportunities to interact with each other, but they also interact with the private sector, including contractors, universities and citizens.

Agencies engage with private sector partners at a faster pace while acquiring the expertise to build out IT infrastructure to extend digital services. In a 2021 Deloitte survey, 85 percent of global government respondents said their agencies benefited from this kind of engagement with the private sector.

As part of this engagement, state governments strive to improve the citizen experience. They are doing so by mapping the journey of citizens, or government customers, across the public sector enterprise. This mapping will allow them to reimagine pathways to digital government rather than simply building up isolated touchpoints.

Agencies see a unified digital experience as key to serving citizens. Today, they have opened more lines of communication with the private sector in support of that goal.

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