“We’re from the government and we’re here to help.” If that famous quote from a former President of the United States makes you cringe, read on!
Government and public services are important and necessary, and they can and should make a positive impact on the public who needs to use them. It follows that they should be efficient - easy, smooth, and automated - and produce satisfactory results for end users and employees alike. Let’s have a look at how BPM is making government services better today, and how it is establishing a foundation for future-ready government.
OK then - we’re BPM and we’re here to help!
Efficiency matters
“e-government,” the use of the Internet to provide public services to citizens, is ideal for streamlining and automating to improve the efficiency of administrative procedures, which means much less dependency on paper. While the true paperless process may still be a bit of a dream, nevertheless being able to complete and treat forms completely online is rapidly becoming the norm and even the expectation of the public interacting with government and other public agencies.
When paper is unavoidable, or processes are slowly being upgraded to fully on-line, scanning and digitizing offers the hybrid possibility of transferring hard copy to e-copy which can then sail through a fully online treatment process.
"The public sector has always been slower than the private one when adopting new technologies. This may have some advantages for the public sector since we can select and implement only the best of the practices that were ‘tested’ in the private sector."
- Integrating Business Process Management with Public Sector
Because government services are provided by agencies with both overlaps and silos, sharing data and other information about business processes results in waste, costs, errors and delays. Automating processes on a BPM platform makes interaction with government services easier and simplifies how public processes are executed.
When the entire, end-to-end process is online, both internal agency employees and the end user are able to obtain real-time information about the status of a request or a procedure, lifting those “we're here to help” procedures out of the darkness.
"A big advantage of BPM is that it is so easily customized to fit the specific business processes of individual organizations and can integrate various IT systems and sections of the organization easily and cost-effectively."
- Integrating Business Process Management with Public Sector
Save time and money
Every organization that is designed to serve the public has an eye to ways to save money to meet budget limits. Internal processes to create and approve yearly budgets are painful enough without adding inefficiencies. The DNA of BPM is all about streamlining and optimizing processes, like budget approval, to take the pain out of the process itself so stakeholders can focus on the essence of the information and decisions needed.
Online systems help eliminate those long lines at the windows of the DMV, the city hall, the courthouse. Application forms, documents and service are available 24 hours a day. Fewer agents are needed during specific hours at those windows, and can be more efficiently deployed working on requests online - even remotely. Deloitte notes in this Insights Report From The Deloitte Center For Government that around 1.3 billion hours can potentially be freed up through automation in government alone!
The area of finance comes with a plethora of regulations, rules, and restrictions that must be respected. Automating processes using a BPM platform allows the process team to build in corporate guardrails, assuring compliance and auditability on investment and financial decisions and transactions.
Improve reputation & service
That cringe-inducing “we’re here to help” reputation isn’t deserved when the services promised are actually delivered well. BPM-based automated processes are useful to avoid confusion, delays, frustration and unhappy customers by providing
- better communication
- delivering the right service at the right moment
- reduced processing times
- clear and easy-to-use self-service procedures
“Treating citizens like customers drives triple value impact.” As the Deloitte report puts it, Better customer experience - as with BPM, which supports customizable end-user experiences and customer journeys - can be effectively used to serve not just public customers but also employees and the regulated entities and businesses it interacts with.
Looking to the future in the public sector, we see the need to deliver new digital services for citizens, enable remote or hybrid workplace at scale, and sustain an effective supply chain with digital processes. To do this, organizations need to attract and keep talented employees.
Upskilling and optimizing the CIO teams
The application of BPM principles and technologies helps to align teams with citizen and agency priorities. The use of a process-based automation platform allows rapid delivery of better applications. It empowers the agile team to deliver and at the same time to develop future-proofed skill sets.
Automation will need a deep talent pool. Beyond the straightforward tasks of automating public-facing procedures, there is the increasing use of AI and analytics to support strategic and operational decisions, prediction, and scenario planning to put the organization more in control of its processes. IT needs ever-evolving digital skills and continuous learning to meet future challenges.
"A delivery approach based on agile and product-centric principles aligns teams with citizen and agency priorities, rapidly delivers and improves digital products, and empowers teams to make decisions — enabling the agility crucial to success with digital government."
- Accelerate Digital for Future-Ready Government, © 2021 Gartner, Inc.
Bonitasoft understands what business needs to be successful. We’ve built our BPM-based business process automation platform to accelerate business process application delivery for efficiency, continuous improvement, and innovation. Bonita’s flexibility and platform extensibility equips professional developers and DevOps teams with powerful tools to develop highly customized, fully integrated business applications faster.
Here are 3 ways to learn more:
- Build highly personalized, process-based applications today, for free, with our open source Bonita Community Edition.
- See how you can reinvent your business processes with BPM. Watch our on demand Bonita Platform Demo.
- Interested in full project lifecycle support and services from development to operations? Try unlocking the power of Bonita Enterprise Edition. Contact us to learn more.
This article was not created with the use of chatGPT or any other artificial language technology.
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