Recently, I had an excellent opportunity to share my thoughts about innovation and its importance for our nation’s government agencies. Articulating the value of innovation, fostering a culture of innovation, aligning innovation to the mission, defining, and measuring success, and distributing innovation. Today, many government IT leaders are investing in finding a way to weave innovation into the fabric of their agencies.
As much as innovation is about strategy, it also involves trying new things. It comes with the possibility of both great success and unaccounted failures. The stakes are high across all levels of government. One misstep can keep crucial products and services from constituents.
This blog gives a few snippets on how government leaders can fold in innovation and see it from people, process, and technology perspectives. How can we bring these three things together to help optimize and create efficiencies?
Journey before destination
Agency leaders need to articulate how their agency can utilize technology to improve government operations for incremental improvements and transformative changes? Are there new approaches that agencies can adapt to provide insights, support data-driven decisions, and apply new tools such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and cognitive computing? How can innovation be used to spark progress on the goals and priorities? How can agencies ensure that their innovations pan out?
The solution is focusing on the journey instead of the destination. For example, take artificial intelligence, which features machines mimicking human traits like learning. To use AI effectively, agencies must consider the path to such innovation and the objectives they want to achieve.
Let’s examine an example of adopting AI with three ways agencies can easily fold fresh Innovation into their workflows.
Consider the customer experience
Agencies exist to serve constituents, and the customer experience (CX) that they provide matters. Poor experiences can undermine trust and confidence in government and result in higher service delivery costs for agencies. So, agencies must reflect on how changes might improve the CX when innovating.
A frequent pain-point for citizens is their experience when interacting with the government. Cloud-based AI chatbots can answer basic questions about topics like completing taxes. Meanwhile, subsequent interactions between constituents and agencies’ human employees can focus on complex subjects like this year’s unique tax deductions.
Cloud-based AI presents real opportunities for how agencies can use technology to make a better experience for the citizen.
Evaluate the impact on employees
Agencies’ innovations affect the employees as much as their constituents. So, when exploring major shifts like AI, agencies must examine the potential impact on their workforces.
Remember AI chatbots? These apps can help manage tasks like resetting passwords and scheduling time-off, saving people’s energy and time. After all, AI never rests and can assist workers day or night.
An introspection on agencies’ operational processes to optimize and streamline can help define the need for innovation. Agencies must ask what prevents the organization and employees from getting work done.
Determine the data needs
Data is a precious commodity that can fuel innovations, ranging from AI to analytics that predict future trends in any scenario, whether housing cost at the state and county level or ground analysis on the war front at the defense level. Agencies are encountering more data from more sources than ever before. Understanding all this information can challenge agencies, federal, state, or local. What drives efficiency through data is understanding how to extract information from it. When too many data silos exist, agencies don’t have a complete picture to predict outcomes.
Oracle can help agencies collect, analyze, store, and understand their data. In turn, the insights from this information can ensure that agencies are innovating in ways that benefit their customers and workers. How can they take advantage of technology like AI and the cloud where you can store vast amounts of data? Agency IT leaders need to address these essential questions. Oracle Government Cloud can help agencies discover, adapt, and implement at scale with agility and flexibility.
Conclusion
Every use case is different. The only way to know if Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is right for you is to try it. You can select either the Oracle Cloud Free Tier or a 30-day free trial, which includes US$300 in credit to get you started with a range of services, including compute, storage, and networking.