Finding the friction and digitizing it

In Santa Monica, California, residents know what to do when they need their oversized trash picked up: They call the non-emergency hotline, 311. Sounds simple enough, but until recently, each and every individual request would be forwarded to the waste department, then forwarded to garbage truck drivers on the road. If a resident felt the pickup was taking too long, they might call again, restarting the cycle. And because the requests were distributed on a first-come, first-served basis, drivers were zigzagging around the city, sometimes heading to a location that had already been serviced by a different driver. “We had a lot of duplicates, and there was no coordination,” says Prasanna Joshi, enterprise architect and digital development manager for the City of Santa Monica.

The problem for the City of Santa Monica is a common one across the public sector, where siloed teams and functions create the biggest challenge for good customer and employee experiences, according to a survey by ThoughtLab and ServiceNow.

Santa Monica put a new system in place that logged the pickup requests on a map viewable by all drivers and created itineraries based on location. When there are duplicate requests, they appear on the map, so the drivers can resolve them on the iPads they received. Pickups now happen faster, and the number of open requests dropped immediately and dramatically — from around 400 to 50.

Cybersecurity for the people

While all organizations need to protect customer data, governments have a unique responsibility to safeguard tax records and other sensitive information on behalf of all their citizens. Yet one-third of public sector organizations in the ServiceNow/ThoughtLab survey scored in the “least prepared” cohort in terms of their capabilities and plans for cybersecurity.

Contributing factors included silos between IT, risk, innovation, and other key functions (60%), and challenges striking “the proper balance between innovation and risk control" (60%).

In recent years, the City of Raleigh, North Carolina, has increasingly modernized its systems and processes, replacing them with digital tools and automation. But when it came to cybersecurity, progress came in fits and starts, according to Beth Stagner, assistant IT director of enterprise applications and data. “We were using tools to monitor and identify vulnerabilities, but then they were just kind of being managed off to the side and dropped into Excel spreadsheets. It just wasn’t effective and efficient,” she says. Raleigh then consolidated around a single platform with a view of all devices and cloud assets.

The security issues and risks driving digital transformation in the City of Raleigh and elsewhere are only going to grow more critical in the face of rapid AI advances. Dr. Raj Iyer, ServiceNow’s global head of public sector and the former CIO of the U.S. Army, says the public sector needs to put a focus on improving cybersecurity capabilities: “Not doing anything is not an option.” Public sector organizations need “greater due diligence into understanding the risks and what mitigation can be put in place.” 

Building trust with a blank slate

Estonia, a Baltic nation with 1.3 million residents and more than 2,000 islands, didn’t have to contend with aging legacy systems when the government began its journey toward a digital strategy in the 1990s. It was starting from scratch. “We started off being a pretty poor country with a very limited amount of resources,” says Carmen Raal, government digital transformation advisor at e-Estonia, the Estonian government's portal. With limited funding for high-tech equipment or high-priced programmers, the government turned to public-private partnerships with impressive results. 

Today, every Estonian votes from home, logging in to e-Estonia with their state-issued electronic identity key, used by both public and private institutions. Officials are learning how to make their systems and online forms more accessible.

“We used to be IT-centric, and the language used was complicated,” says Raal.  “Nowadays, we understand that we have to be more user-centric and digital services have to be more intuitive.”

For example, now that it is more attuned to the needs of its constituents, Estonia is revamping its public health patient portal with better navigation to make it easier to use by providing a better online experience, thus reducing the number of people calling in to customer support. Computer education for all citizens and distributed cybersecurity support for local municipalities have laid the foundation for online public service portals and a digital society. The upshot, says Raal, is that “Estonia doesn’t really have a digital divide.”