Everyone have heard government leaders talking about cutting costs. This is a budgetary policy that is happening in every EU country. Now in times of global health, social and economic crisis, these conversations are taking place more often than ever. Making cuts in the budgets seems like a shortcut to getting numbers in order. But shortcuts are not everything. A long-term cost optimisation policy is the smarter way to go for a variety of reasons.
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Shortcut plan vs long-term strategy?
The use of outdated systems in the public sector has led to reduction of the work load and challenged the efficiency of areas like regulatory enforcement in the peak of the covid-19 in Europe. More specifically the inspection management part of the regulatory agencies was challenged when strict social distance measures applied. This affected the citizens and the efficiency of the workforce, operating on the inspection management part.
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As a result there are a lot of conversation about cutting costs in government agencies now. However, optimizing costs is the direction for government agencies that are using outdated systems to run their processes.
“Government leaders often fall into “salami-slicing” budget cuts across the board. “Government leaders’ approach is to make incremental cuts to budgets areas across the board, rather than taking a more strategic cost optimization approach. These cuts can be particularly damaging to IT, derailing digital projects and ignoring the positive impact that budget spent on IT can have in reducing costs elsewhere in the organization.” says Cathleen E. Blanton, research vice president at Gartner.
Digital Transformation Drives Efficiency and Cost Optimisation
With the events that happened in 2020, government CIOs must evaluate whether the government agencies can deliver their services to the public with the current work model. After this assessment is made, the CIO must research alternative models of work. We’re living in the age of cloud technologies, so if we talk about transforming an overlooked field like inspection services, the cloud alternative must be on the top of the list.
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By researching cloud alternatives, CIOs must focus on the values of the cloud, but also to make sure that the new work models won’t be a challenge for the workforce. The values may vary. For example in the inspection management part the value may be about optimizing costs for travel of inspectors, in the case management part it may be about optimizing the processing time. The values vary at the different levels of government organizations. The good news is that with a good plan, CIOs may have an overview of the expected outcomes before buying a cloud software for inspections or for somethings else.
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Plan smart, implement cloud smarter
Adopting cloud for government agencies is not a simple task. It must be planned carefully and at different stages. If we look at the wholesome of processes behind regulatory enforcement, we will see room for different software solutions – inspection scheduling, inspection management, compliance management, case management, self-service portals and other e-government solutions. If the cloud implementation is planned to cover different solutions at different stage, then it will be one smart plan that will not only implement cloud, but will also do it in progressive way. It means that at every stage the workforce will be more mature to extract the values that are promised by the cloud.
Related: How route optimisation reduces costs in regulatory agencies?
The strategic approach of cost optimisation requires long term planning skills. This approach starts with formulating clear strategy and then implementing it.
Related: How to formulate cloud adoption strategy?
How to choose the right cloud service supplier?
There are hundreds of options on the SaaS market of cloud solutions for e-governments. However, when choosing a cloud service supplier, CIOs must look for something more than that. They need to identify a supplier, who is willing to be a partner and contribute to the planning of the most optimal cloud adoption plan.
Do you need help for cloud integration of inspection software and case management platforms for government agencies? Or you just want to start with gathering data via self-service portals and plan the further cloud adoption for other public services?