Modernizing the Public Sector with Salesforce Cloud Solutions
Despite being one of the oldest institutions in the world — and perhaps because of its age — government processes are known for being manual, outdated, and slow. Why? Funding. Federal agencies spend 70% of their IT budgets simply maintaining outdated systems, and only 30% goes toward developing new systems. These new system projects are only successful 6.4% of the time, often because of the size, risk, privacy concerns, and budget scrutinization associated with public sector IT projects.
To mitigate the risk of shocking the system, or of failure, public sector projects should be approached with a strategic vision in place to take steps slowly over time. This will allow the gradual decrease of cost and increase of efficiency of that entity.
A government built in the cloud
By taking outdated, on-prem legacy systems and manual processes and putting them into a cloud solution like Salesforce, public sector agencies can use the assets, resources, and employees they currently have to make them go farther.
Salesforce has been used in many revolutionary government projects and has been seeing amazing results:
- The city of Washington, DC transformed the 311 platform from phone to social media to increase support efficiency
- Michigan Health Information Network uses Sales Cloud to track connections between healthcare providers to facilitate care-coordination for prescription medications
- Wyoming built an integrated application library, eliminating manual entry and improving employee efficiency and happiness
Redefining the government experience is where Salesforce excels; the ease of set up, the ease of continued maintenance, and the infinite customization opportunities allows any project to find a home on its platform. It’s a perfect fit for constituent outreach with integration into communities and self-service, and developing apps for departmental use cases make it customized to fit any need.
The most exciting use case for Salesforce is digitizing manual and paper processes — a win for both the applicant and the organization who has to review & take action on the application. On top of it all is a powerful analytics & reporting engine allowing visibility into trends happening real-time, tracking costs associated to programs, and KPIs associated to employee efficiency.
We the people, in order to form a mobile experience…
It all comes down to the human experience — as citizens, we want our voice to be heard, and we want to communicate on the platforms we use the most. Those platforms — cell phones, tablets, laptops — all have one thing in common: they’re mobile. Our experiences with real-time support and shopping from our phones lead us to expect this ease of use in every aspect of our life. We’re an on-the-go society who’s time is valuable.
We want to minimize our time filling out fields on a form that should be pre-filled like our name, address, and phone number. We want to be able to report graffiti in our neighborhood by taking a picture of it and having the geo-location feature on our phones utilized to notify city maintenance where to come clean it up. Easy, efficient, smart: that’s how public sector SHOULD work.
So while the public sector is ripe for experience and system upgrades, the cost, risk, and privacy concerns associated with it can be daunting. The key is demonstrating ROI and efficiency gains quickly, something at which the Salesforce Lightning Platform excels. Those trailblazer government entities leveraging Salesforce are setting the bar for others. Here’s hoping more of the public sector can see that value in modernization to accommodate the revolution of digital.
