Citizens and businesses around the world expect the same level of access, responsiveness, and service quality from government and public institutions as they do from private businesses. To meet these demands, governments are diligently looking for methods to use tech to digitally transform at scale.
However, government CIOs must overcome the barriers of longstanding legacy systems and employee attitudes, tight budgets, conventional IT procurement policies, and fluctuating political winds, all of which affect their capacity to plan for the years ahead.

Let’s talk about the top 5 barriers that government CIOs come across-

1. Working in Silos

Government silos emerge when agencies operate separately and do not exchange information. Different departments do not always collaborate even though nothing stops them from doing so. Silos have an impact on government organizations of all sizes and types because they reflect a mindset challenge rather than a structural one. Individuals prefer to work hard and concentrate on their field of expertise but collaborative efforts across departments provide greater outcomes than several individual ones.

Advance’s Solution
A shift from ‘my department’ mindset to ‘Our Organization’ mentality. ADVANCE suggests eliminating government silos by introducing simplified digital workflows that help all the departments and teams to collaborate and generate reports in real-time to make informed decisions. Allowing visibility across departments assists leadership in managing projects and making better-informed decisions that add value. Keeping this need in mind- ADVANCE has a smart solution – CityCloud , built on the ServiceNow platform. This helps eliminate silos and encourages simpler digital workflows.

2. Difficulty in Allocating Funds

CIOs in the public sector are still concerned about funding their digital transformation projects. A workable plan needs to be in place, that projects the expected ROI (both qualitative and quantitative) of your digital transformation initiatives. It is essential to correlate technology investments with projected results, as Gartner proposes.

Advance’s Solution
Governments should invest in solutions that simplify their Citizen Engagement Journey early on so that they can derive the full value from their efforts and can plan for their budgetary needs better. CityCloud as a service can boost your staff’s efficiency, reduce manual data entries and paperwork and help the workforce become more productive, which is a win-win for any organization!

3. Complex Digital Solutions

A lack of IT business resources is a significant barrier along with the challenge to implement and use a complex solution. This hampers the adoption of important tech domains like digital workflows & IT automation.

Advance’s Solution
The adoption of simpler tools, built on world-class platforms that help eliminate digital clutter, should be the go-to solution for any organization or government body. One must choose a citizen and staff-friendly solution that automates all manual paperwork and brings all the town’s information in the palm of one’s hand – in real-time. CityCloud helps a government CIO tackle all these challenges, to know more read about CityCloud.

4. Lack of Necessary Digital-Age Skills

Many public-sector organizations are stuck in a vicious cycle in which they acquire technical debt while struggling to recruit fresh young talent to modernize legacy systems, causing them to fall behind in digital public services. The continuous demand for digital services and solutions contrasts with shrinking budgets and growing talent shortages.

Advance’s Solution
Low-code / No-code technology enables the development of quick, easy, and customizable applications to address operational and Digital Workflow challenges. For improving your citizen engagement and service delivery, CityCloud is built using low code no code technology and is powered by ServiceNow!

5. Fear of Transformation

Government staff and service delivery experts are not open to the changes that come along with digital transformation. They are used to the old ways and set methodologies and practices. This can act as a blocker to initiating a smooth digital transformation journey.

Advance’s Solution
The government should seek out reliable and easy-to-implement technology that helps automate manual tasks, helping their staff save valuable time. They should look for solutions that simplify the digital workflows, update all town information in one place, help their staff search records and generate reports for each department and dashboards for a complete overview. Governments should adopt a solution that simplifies government and citizen engagement and makes their citizens happy. a good solution should help in reducing the cost of ownership, support, and maintenance for government officials. ADVANCE’s solution CityCloud built especially for local governments and municipalities helps knock off all these challenges.

Conclusion

While many government CIOs want to keep their foot on the DX accelerator pedal, the emergence of brand-new technology brings with it new difficulties, prospects, and rewards. In the public sector, when budgets are limited, legacy systems are in place, and resources are scarce, a well-thought-out IT strategy that fits with organizational and public objectives is critical.

CityCloud- An ADVANCE Solution

CityCloud, a product of ADVANCE, is an application that is built on the most modern and futuristic low-code platform- ServiceNow. It is an all-in-one solution to automate government processes, eliminate data and information silos, unify departments to enhance collaboration, save time and costs, and boost overall citizen engagement, communication, and experience.
With its robust self-service functionalities, CityCloud helps the government reduce the number of protracted service calls, provides FAQs, assistance through chatbots that are available 24/7, and accurate information about departments and agencies. The portal also offers a complete Content Management Solution (CMS) and a Citizen Relation Management (CRM) tool. It can be accessed from different devices and is incredibly useful in times of emergency or crisis for maintaining continuous and efficient means of communication between the government and citizens.

Are you looking forward to transforming your way of delivering digital citizen services?
Let’s Talk.

**Article inspired by Gartner.