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The vital asset for today's government - Part 1

Editorial Type: Strategy     Date: 05-2014    Views: 2975   





In the first of a two-part in-depth analysis, Sean Tang, Vice President of International Business at Laserfiche, summarises a recent white paper looking at ECM deployments in government functions.

In the lifecycle of every government IT investment comes an important decision point: stay or go? Should we stay with the familiarity of our current system, even with its limitations? Or should we go ahead with investments of money, time and staff effort in a promising but new technology solution?

Many government organisations today are reaching this decision point for their enterprise content management (ECM) systems. Also pushing public sector organisations to this decision point are several new drivers for delivering more information online, with greater timeliness and responsiveness. James Burke, director of Information Technology Solutions for Olmsted County, Minnesota, brings up one example: "Complying with the Affordable Care Act will bring a lot of change and new work to our Community Services department, where we expect the medical assistance caseload to increase by 30 percent. To handle this increase, we need to either find and hire a bunch of people in a hurry or mitigate the impact by using technology to enhance the productivity of our current employees."

Additional drivers that state and local governments face include:

• New stakeholder expectations for online information. Many public sector organisations are choosing to follow the same mandates that apply to federal agencies for providing digital access to public data and documents. In addition, governments at all levels are receiving more Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for documents and are looking for easier and less costly ways to fulfil them.
• New demands for service efficiency and effectiveness. Citizens increasingly expect online access to government services, especially through self-service Web portals and automated information delivery via social media. Constrained budgets also mean that governments must look for ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of every operational function and constituent service.
• Support for data-driven decisions. There is a movement within many government organisations to become more data-driven when making decisions. To be successful, this approach requires timely, flexible and useful access to data and documents no matter where they "live" within the organisation.
• Increasing collaboration. Government work increasingly involves collaboration across agencies, departments or functions. Everyone participating in this collaboration needs the ability to access and share common information and processes.
• New types of technology. Mobility, virtualisation and cloud-based applications are examples of technology changes that have a far-reaching impact on IT services. Compatibility with these technologies is also an important factor in decisions about new investments.
• Changing employee expectations. As baby boomers retire from the government workforce, their younger replacements bring higher expectations for technology use. Mobile, social and cloud technologies are at the centre of how these employees receive and distribute information and how they perform work tasks.

The scope and pace of these drivers mean most legacy ECM systems can't keep up: legacy systems typically require difficult, lengthy and costly customisation efforts for adding any new capability. While this might be sufficient on its own to justify a new ECM solution, limited IT budgets require careful decision-making. Any new technology must offer a "too high to pass by" level of long-term value in order to receive investment approval.

Moreover, this long-term perspective isn't just about investing in an ECM system; it's also about investing in information as an important government asset.

GOVERNMENT INFORMATION: AN ASSET READY FOR INVESTMENT
How many of your organisation's functions could continue to run if they were cut off from their sources of information? Most likely, the answer is very few, if any. Data, images, forms, maps, audio and video files, and documents are too essential for running government operations and services.



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