Global governments have spent decades building trust with their communities, but times are changing and patience is eroding because many governments cannot keep up with their constituent’s rising expectations that they will have the same rapid, reliable digital experience with their governments as they have with corporations and other organizations. The private sector, with greater resources and flexibility, is outpacing the public sector when it comes to technology and automation. 

The pandemic put a spotlight on the gap and heightened demand by constituents for online management of their important interactions with their governments. Governments know that it is now more important than ever to get the right technology stack in place and move quickly to automate common processes such as permitting, complaints, and requests.

The heightened awareness and understanding that the current digital wave in government is necessary can be seen in the rise of new key governmental agencies being formed - like the Canadian Digital Services, United Kingdom’s Government Digital Services, and Singapore’s Government Technology Agency - that are all dedicated to improving both citizen and employee experience in the government sector. How do they accomplish this?  The answer is that they are committed to leveraging leading digital technologies to level up and more efficiently and intuitively knit together legacy systems and automate their regulated processes.

Why have government organizations lagged to keep up with modernization via technology?

One reason is that automating bureaucratic processes in a regulated environment can be scary: it takes time, is complex, and governments are not allowed to make mistakes. Existing processes that take significant time to execute without automated systems have the benefit of being reliable, if not fast. But, where the rest of “customer experience” has now progressed so far in terms of the speed, accuracy, and transparency of that experience, a tipping point has been reached with respect to expectations of public sector interactions. There is a clamor – as well as a desire in governments themselves – to analyze current manual processes that use island of automation, and implement end-to-end automated workflows that eliminate manual interactions when possible and knit together systems to transform slow bureaucratic processes into fast ones!  This is where BPMS and workflow automation software help enormously. 

Disconnected, manual organizational processes hinder governments’ ability to provide better constituent and employee experiences, and prevent continuous innovation. But, using an intuitive BPMS / workflow software solution allows governments to rapidly connect processes and systems – and also to provide transparency to process participants. And, simultaneously, BPMS / workflow software usually has the inherent ability to capture the audit trail left behind – providing confirmation that regulatory processes are and were followed.

Giving public sector teams visibility into process designs and ongoing workflow delivers efficiency and public confidence. These insights create impactful, lasting change – change that delivers results and builds community trust.