COVID-19 has fundamentally shifted the way many government agencies work. The way agencies serve their customers and the technology government employees use to do their jobs has changed in a matter of months.
This shift was evident during the keynote presentation at GovLoop’s virtual summit: “All Roads Lead to Empowered Citizens: The Power of Innovative Tech.” There, Paul Pick-Aluas, Senior Director of Strategy, Global Public Sector, Salesforce noted a return to work for many government agencies goes hand in hand with modernization and digitization efforts.
The reason is simple: As governments shutter their physical doors, they are still responsible for fulfilling customer needs and providing public health information even in the midst of the pandemic.
To help agencies create a unified experience and meet customers’ increased digital needs, Salesforce created work.com. The platform solution is designed to help businesses reopen the workplace as quickly as possible, while simultaneously keeping employees, customers, partners, and communities safe and informed during the COVID-19 crisis and beyond.
Work.com helps agencies in four key areas:
- Protect and empower staff
- Reprioritize public resources
- Redefine service delivery
- Accelerate digitization
Pick-Aluas explained the benefits of the platform like this, “re-opening your workplace is a journey and work.com is your GPS.” Work.com provides agencies with expert advice and trusted data from the COVID-19 data hub to guide faster and safer decision-making, help schedule volunteer workers, scale up staffing of public health officials and COVID-19 contact tracers and more.
While budgets at many federal, state and local governments are being stretched to capacity, there are some funds available through the CARES Act that could help agencies transform digitally to meet the needs of their customers. Pick-Aluas notes that work.com allows users to track those funds and align them to areas most in need of resources.
One work.com user, Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo, described her experience like this, “We are partnering with Salesforce to make our contact tracing process more efficient, more scalable, more reliable. Raimondo added that “efficient, reliable contact tracing is essential for getting everybody back to work.”
Like Rhode Island, many governments have been able to quickly and efficiently implement the work.com platform seamlessly into their systems because it layers on top of existing legacy infrastructure. Pick-Aluas explained, “Normally, we would like to digitize from end-to-end, however with the quickness necessitated by COVID-19 response we have been able to innovate and layer this new technology and capability onto of existing systems that governments have.”
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