Restoring public trust in government agencies by improving digital experience

Government agencies rely on public trust to successfully achieve their initiatives. Unfortunately, building public trust among constituents is difficult, particularly if agencies cannot deliver timely services to citizens and provide seamless digital experiences. In what follows, we discuss how state and local government leaders can harness and improve digital experiences to address these challenges, navigate their cloud transformation journeys, and build constituents’ trust.

Agencies need to meet constituents where they are and provide a variety of digital experiences.

Improving digital experiences

To build public trust, public agencies must focus on creating a competent reputation across all touchpoints. In addition to wanting access to traditional walk-in services in physical locations, constituents expect services to be offered and available 24/7 online, and they want flawless and secure digital experiences. Whether citizens are trying to renew a license or pay an outstanding bill, or an employee is trying to claim benefits or resolve a problem quickly, users have high expectations and low tolerance. This compels agencies to take on a complex cloud migration journey with little to no room for error.

According to the National Association of State CIOs’ (NASCIO) annual survey, digital government, digital services, and cybersecurity are top priorities for chief information officers. This makes sense considering constituents’ high expectations for accessing government services online at their convenience. These expectations — established by Amazon and other digital giants — are driving government agencies to achieve the following to gain constituents’ trust:

Seamless digital experience. Meet constituents’ high, post-pandemic expectations for digital experience, including frictionless online interactions with their agencies. Each interaction is an opportunity to gain trust.

Budget-focused move to the cloud. Achieve a successful, uninterrupted, and rapid modernization journey with an eye toward using taxpayers’ dollars efficiently. Public-sector agencies are always under heavy scrutiny when it comes to expenditures, and agency leaders have to consider optimization, security, and efficiencies as part of any large-scale initiative.

Secure data and build resiliency. Protect constituents’ data and have a resiliency strategy in place. Agencies are often targeted because they use outdated technologies. And while they can’t be protected completely, agencies should be prepared to operate despite breaches. The goal is to be able to continue delivering digital services, even if they experience challenging circumstances, such as cyberattacks, natural disasters, or economic slumps. Having secure services is also critical to restoring public trust, following numerous data breaches.

Maintain a strong workforce. Recruit and retain a skilled workforce with a focus on employee experience (EX). IT teams often struggle with repetitive, mundane work and the need to constantly respond reactively to stressful and time-consuming fire drills. Advances in automation and AI technologies can relieve them from mundane work so they can focus on strategic innovations that boost job satisfaction.

Common digital transformation challenges

While these initiatives appear straightforward, government agencies face some common challenges in digital transformation. Here are the top threats agencies face, along with how visibility and the right technology can help:

Lack of adequate and skilled IT resources. Considering 69% of state and local government human resource professionals say hiring IT professionals is difficult, it’s time for government agencies to provide a more modern work and technology environment. Adopting the right technologies can free employees from firefighting, which increases morale and promotes a positive work/life balance. This helps attract and retain a qualified and motivated workforce.

Difficulties migrating legacy applications. Maintaining legacy technology is costly in many ways. To take advantage of digital technologies, an agency needs to build or adopt technologies that are optimized for cloud or hybrid environments. Visibility into these systems is essential as organizations migrate to cloud environments, so agencies can confront and mitigate issues before they arise. The public has high expectations for the availability and performance of their digital experiences. It will not tolerate any interruptions due to technology migrations.

Challenges detecting security breaches. Security breaches are only increasing, and they can result in serious consequences, including erosion of public trust. Visibility into security coverage gaps will help identify and resolve any vulnerabilities in advance.

In order to simultaneously tackle these priorities while overcoming common challenges, agencies can leverage a unified observability and security platform. The right technology helps teams accelerate and increase confidence in their digital transformation initiatives by providing key capabilities, such as real-time hybrid and multicloud visibility, intelligent automation, and real-time application security.

How a unified observability and security platform drives trust with digital experience

Overall, driving digital transformation is a critical initiative for government agencies to enhance constituents’ trust and drive a positive reputation. High expectations mean digital transactions must work flawlessly, every time, and issues such as poor performance or system downtime must be prevented altogether or quickly resolved.

Dynatrace offers end-to-end visibility, intelligent automation, and application security in one unified platform, so agencies can accelerate modernization efforts and realize successful outcomes. To learn more about public-sector cloud strategy, read the whitepaper.