Citizen Engagement Blog

Federal, State and Local governments are promoting shared services to check some critical boxes:

• Saving money by taking greater advantage of existing IT resources
• Improving citizen customer service with limited resources
• Reducing redundancy from multiple distributed and duplicative IT functions
• Taking the next step in IT optimization, which began with datacenter consolidation
• Supporting the move from on-premise infrastructure to the cloud

Take stock of shared service options and benefits to increase citizen customer service efficiencies. These facts and proof points will help.

This week, large city and county CIOs and CTOs came together at the Government Technology (GovTech) Digital Communities Large City/County Fly-In hosted by the Washington D.C. CTO, Archana Vemulapalli, and her team. Important and common government priorities being discussed included: IoT governance, identity and security management, government workforce and technology opportunities.

As a technology sponsor of this event, we were invited to join the discussion and learn from technology leaders from some of the top cities and counties in the U.S. As COO at Contact Solutions, a Verint Company, I was privileged to have deeper discussions with many city and county leaders, along with our Operations Analyst, Christina Mero, and offer these timely collective insights. 

Population aging has been called the “silver tsunami,” as cited in the Pew Internet Project’s 2001 “Wired Seniors” report, which was a catalyst early warning sign of things to come. Now, it appears the wave of Baby Boomer retirements from the government is about to hit.

While this retirement juggernaut was originally supposed to crest in 2011, many public sector employees delayed their exit due to the economic effects of the recession. Currently, 2017 is the target year. Are you ready?

To achieve the state of the art in contact centers, government organizations must look beyond the traditional model: reliance on the phone and live agents; on-premises infrastructure; distributed, siloed applications, data sources and security; and cumbersome manual processes.

Healthcare is a touchy subject. Throw in program management complexities government healthcare participants don’t see and your program will develop chronic aches and pains at the 10-point level.

For example, the well-publicized, glitch-filled Affordable Care Act enrollment launch last year shined a spotlight on citizen frustration with government health insurance programs. The Healthcare.gov website has since been fixed, but the fallout has been slower to dissipate. State and local health programs, particularly Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and the health insurance exchanges (HIX) are under greater scrutiny than ever.

Navigating the procurement RFP process has always been tricky. At a recent conference, Karen Painter-Jaquess, Director of the State Systems Office in the USDA Food and Nutrition Service, offered these best practices for State EBT Administrators to engage successfully with vendors and obtain optimal contracts with their SNAP and WIC procurement processes.

How bad is child neglect and abuse in the U.S.?   And how much of an impact are State Child Protective Services departments having on this critical problem? States are making progress, but better technology and citizen engagement can help. 

The Big, the Bad and the Ugly

According to UNICEF, as many as 275 million children worldwide are exposed to violence in the home, with 339,000 to 2.7 million estimated in just the U.S. alone.

A USA Today article broke down customer service failures by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service for the 2015 tax filing period. This is exactly the type of publicity no government agency wants. Yet at the state and local level, an embarrassing customer service meltdown may be inevitable. If, like the IRS, a state or local agency relies primarily on contact center agents or state workers to personally resolve an issue, a huge bottleneck can occur during peak usage periods or when an interruption or disaster occurs. And what if systems in place fail first, like this example shows?