You know how you expect all your technology to work smoothly? Think about how annoyed you get when your apps won’t update or your email won’t sync fast enough. “We expect applications to be available all the time and the experience to be perfect,” said Craig Chapman, Sales Manager and Customer Champion of ServiceNow.
These expectations are felt equally in government, as they are in the private sector. So many agencies and IT departments feel the pressure of keeping up with the latest trends and still delivering better and faster services. That comes with its own set of challenges, but also solutions.
In GovLoop’s recent online training, Transforming IT Operations to Deliver Efficient Business Services, we heard from Chapman and Trey Hodgkins, Senior Vice President, Public Sector, ITIC. They discussed challenges you have to overcome, how to improve your agency’s delivering services and how to plan for your future.
Overcome your challenges
Both speakers talked about how the public sector IT market is slowly changing and evolving. “Technology is central to every mission to the federal government,” said Hodgkins.
However, that forward momentum comes with challenges. To tackle those, our speakers offered a number of suggestions.
First, they said you need to look at what you’re offering and how you are doing it. From there, you can formulate a plan and see where you can make transitions in your IT operations. “Remain as efficient as possible and make transitions as commercial-like as possible,” said Hodgkins.
Culture, training, funding and security are some of the main concerns with changing IT operations. You want to work with your team to achieve the same goal and train them on new IT systems. After your team is up-to-date, you need to see where you can be more efficient but spend less money. Last but not least, remember to make sure you are maintaining security. “It is clear that the government is trying to achieve risk management and you should try to avoid risks,” said Hodgkins.
Deliver better services
After you face your challenges and know where you stand, you can start to deliver better services to citizens. First, identify which data you already have from internal technology solutions, to determine what is and is not properly serving citizens.
Chapman discussed outages and how automation will help you to deliver better services. “Automation can help the time to recovery and service intelligence examines how the outage happened,” he said. You will gain visibility, availability and agility when you change to an automated process. You want to find out where you are with visibility, availability and agility. . Once you do, you can move forward and keep improving your IT operations to delivery better services.
Plan your future
Agencies know that their IT operations are evolving everyday. Once you know what you want to improve and how you want to deliver your services faster and better, you can start to successfully serve citizens. By changing your IT operations, you will be able to create better solutions for each challenge you and your agency face such as training or funding and have better outcomes. Each decision you make along the way affects your future. You need to know what you want your outcome to be and want to succeed.
Prioritize what’s important for your agency and craft a plan around those priorities. Ask yourself what will continually improve optimization and efficiency for your services and how that aligns to the vision for your agency. These questions will help you form a plan for your future.
Overall, transforming IT operations can and will help you better deliver efficient business services. Once you tackle your challenges, bring better services to your citizens and plan for your future, you will be able to better fulfill your agency’s mission of public service.
