Tips for Embracing Modern Digital Government

Technology is shaping the world around us – from how we shop to how we communicate with our friends and family. Equally impacted is the public sector and the expectations that citizens have for it.

A modern digital government is one that understands these changing citizen expectations mean embracing new ways of service delivery, including how they communicate and how they organize their website.

At Granicus, we wanted to survey the landscape to see just how prevalent modern digital government is today. That’s why we surveyed hundreds of public sector professionals from across the United States and published the findings in our 2018 State of Digital report. We found that progress continues as government marches toward digital, but there is significant room for improvement.

So how can government organizations make improvement? Included in the report were three tips to get started:

Analyze the data

At Granicus, we love metrics. In fact, we love them so much that we annually publish the Granicus Benchmark Report, which has the specific aim of helping government organizations assess how their digital communications stack up to peers.

In today’s digital age, there’s no shortage of metrics to measure: Every email that a subscriber opens or page on your website that a visitor lands on is providing you with insight and telling you a story. And yet only 32 percent of respondents said they look at key website metrics on at least a monthly basis. If you don’t know what your citizens want, are you effectively serving them? Probably not.

Start mapping customer journeys

A citizen customer comes to your website to accomplish a task.

Now what?

The customer journey shouldn’t be long and arduous—modern digital government strives to put service delivery front and center. That means frequently used services are easy to access. The best way to accomplish this? Start mapping the journey (including using the website analytics that you’re already viewing based on our last tip!) a citizen makes from the moment they have a question or request to the time it takes to finish it.

Embrace the cloud

Acquiring new technology isn’t an easy task for government. Long approval processes and tight budgets mean that by the time government is up and running with a new piece of tech, it isn’t exactly new anymore.

That’s why embracing the cloud is key to the success of modern digital government. How so? By eliminating hardware purchases, government can simply pay for access to tools maintained by reputable organizations. No need to deal with security or downtime issues, which means more time to deliver the services citizens expect.

Right now only about half of government organizations are using cloud-based technologies, according to a report by Gartner. But given that government is the fastest-growing segment of cloud tech, don’t be surprised if more public sector orgs don’t hop on once they see the obvious value proposition.

Want more insight into the State of Digital in 2018? Download the report today.