enabling citizen-centric government - digital transformation · the 21st century economy is all...

Enabling Citizen-Centric Government: Using Advanced Computing Platforms to Support 21st Century Governance Models

A Frost & Sullivan White Paper

Brian Cotton Global Vice President Information and Communications Technologies

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contents

Ensuring Economic Health, Prosperity, Welfare and Security ................................................. 3

Why Advanced Computing Platforms Matter .......................................................................... 4

Improving Citizen and Business Outcomes ............................................................................... 4

Building Intelligent Transportation Systems .............................................................................. 5

Strengthening National Security ................................................................................................ 5

Managing Resources More Effectively ...................................................................................... 6

Improving Public Safety .............................................................................................................. 6

A Digital Infrastructure to Power a Modern, Digital Government.......................................... 6

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All rights reserved © 2014 Frost & Sullivan

Citizens and businesses around the world are demanding more from their governments. Set against these demands, pressures to lower taxes are constricting governments’ abilities to fund programs. Balancing these forces, governments in the 21st century are adapting by using collaboration and insight to create and deliver better service. Advanced computing platforms that are fast, agile and resilient play key roles in this process to produce concrete benefits that help governments meet the imperatives, driving them to implement 21st century governance models.

ENSURING ECONOMIC HEALTH, PROSPERITY, WELFARE AND SECURITY

Governments at all levels – from national to state and provincial to county and municipal–are being challenged by citizens and businesses to deliver higher levels of service and use public resources responsibly. To provide better service more efficiently, governments are transitioning from traditional silo-based organizational models to more collaborative, integrated service delivery models.1

Government leaders and their CIOs acknowledge that deploying these new models requires a new focus on transforming their information infrastructures to deliver insight to decision-makers. Jennifer Granholm, former governor of the state of Michigan, highlighted this when she stated that “the 21st century economy is all about speed, access, intelligence and efficiency… a 21st century government needs to be about the same things.”2 Getting there isn’t easy, but business intelligence and analytics tools embedded into decision-making can play a part in helping government CIOs meet service level and budgetary efficiency challenges. 3

The transformation to 21st century governance models based on insight is being guided according to five critical imperatives: (1) improve citizen and business outcomes, (2) build intelligent transportation systems, (3) strengthen national security, (4) manage resources more effectively and (5) improve public safety. The thrust of these imperatives is to concentrate on the needs of the stakeholder, whether that is a nation, state or province, city or individual citizens, and then use an integrated approach to meeting their needs.

In a 21st century model, the traditional silo-based approaches to governance give way to models that integrate key functions across departments and encourage collaboration between them. This enables government to quickly and efficiently develop, implement and manage services. This sort of integrated, citizen-centric government organizes information and data around stakeholders’ needs, improves service delivery with careful use of resources, and develops an integrated process management approach to optimize results and outcomes for citizens.

The 21st century economy is all about speed, access, intelligence and efficiency… a 21st century government needs to be about the same things.

Jennifer Granholm, former Governor of Michigan

The speed, access, intelligence and efficiency of a 21st century governance model are enabled by computing platforms that are fast, agile and resilient. Planning for and implementing these platforms into the information infrastructure of modern governance models carefully considers the characteristics and business benefits available from these platforms.

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WHY ADVANCED COMPUTING PLATFORMS MATTER

Sharing intelligence and insight is at the core of 21st century governance models that are stakeholder-centric and collaborative. Effective collaboration relies on speed, driven by real-time data access and analysis and capabilities that are optimized to specific functions of government–all running at a high level of efficiency. Moreover, governments across the world are increasingly implementing eGovernment systems as they modernize4 to help inject flexibility and scalability into their processes so they can expand or contract the reach of public services when needed.5

These types of information technology (IT) applications and operations supporting 21st century government place substantial workload demands on IT infrastructures. Traditional government IT systems are built to handle a single workload in a single agency, but they are unable to handle multiple, dynamic workload demands either effectively or efficiently, thus impeding a government agency’s ability to deliver on its imperatives.

Advanced computing platforms that are fast, agile and resilient matter to modern governance models because they enable governments to understand, anticipate and act in new ways that match the aspirations of the new models. These platforms give government the ability to:

• Organize massive amounts of data across domains, levels, agencies and jurisdictions, then share it and apply analytics to it to derive critical insight into operations and citizen needs;

• Access information and insight necessary to act in real-time, improving the level of service delivered;

• Provide computing resources to multiple agencies or trusted partners when they need them and then scale them back when they are not needed; and

• Maintain high service levels continuously, accommodating peak demand periods, such as near tax filing deadlines or in the event of natural disasters.

Speed, agility and resilience help governments realize concrete benefits related to improving the outcomes for their citizens. For instance, using these capabilities, governments can develop a single, accurate and comprehensive view of each citizen or business served. These capabilities can also help make the transition from paper to electronic records and improve governments’ management of their physical assets. Governments that are able to architect their models around advanced computing platforms that are fast, agile and resilient are equipping themselves for higher levels of performance. Advanced platforms, such as the IBM X6, are can give them these advantages.

Improving Citizen and Business Outcomes

Social and economic programs are facing substantial challenges in the 21st century. As many economies emerge from the recent recession and begin to grow, citizens and businesses expect that the government will provide some level of support to ensure that they can recover. Lower tax revenues mean less funding is available to these programs, however, and persistent fraud can siphon off the resources that legitimate applicants need.

A government using an insight-based model can address these challenges through developing more efficient solutions to improve citizen and business outcomes. Such a system would assess benefit eligibility, distribute the benefits and then track their impact so that the funds are used to support targeted individual needs. Once those needs are met, the resources can be shifted to other applicants to provide them assistance.

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Advanced computing platforms can form an integral part of this system. A platform that is fast enables case workers to apply powerful analytics to vast and varied amounts of data that is increasingly captured in real time. This gives them sharper insight to quickly determine eligibility and match the right services to citizen needs, as well as prevent fraud and waste of funds. This insight can be delivered at the point of contact between the case worker and the applicant, speeding the delivery of critical services. Predictive analytics can also be applied to measure the efficacy of the services delivered, which can help fine tune the programs. A platform that is agile can help agencies share insight to streamline the delivery of services and prevent duplication or fraud in the system. Agile platforms can also be used to support citizen self-service portals, increasing the efficiency of the system. And a resilient platform running service automation can maintain maximum system uptime, ensuring the delivery of critical services.

Building Intelligent Transportation Systems

Transportation is central to a society’s economic health and prosperity. From the hundreds of millions of daily commutes, to sophisticated logistics networks that move goods around the globe, cities, states and nations rely on their transportation systems like never before. Intelligent transportation systems powering transportation networks can give system operators and users insight to run these complicated systems efficiently and effectively. Insight can also increase the security of marine ports that have traditionally been subject to security vulnerabilities, as well as helping to optimize airport operations across a spectrum of airport types and passenger loads.

Because of the complexity of intelligent transportation systems, advanced computing platforms play critically important roles in them. Platforms that are fast are crucial to performing real-time traffic analyses, enabling automatic or manual adjustments to traffic routing to alleviate or prevent congestion. Predictive analytics can be used to proactively determine when physical assets such as roadways or vehicles need maintenance, and minimize service disruptions due to emergency repairs. Platforms that are agile can more easily accommodate new technology as transportation systems evolve. They are also able to handle the dynamic computing workloads in a system containing millions of sensors and actuators operating in harsh environments. Platforms that are resilient protect against system failures that can cause loss, injury or death, or, when systems do go down, they can enable fast recovery to minimize the damage caused by system outages.

Strengthening National Security

The nature of threats is today less clear than before, with the rise of global terrorist organizations, asymmetric warfare on multiple fronts and sophisticated enemies endangering citizens and critical national infrastructure. This is driving a need to strengthen national security. Security forces are responding by improving collaboration between agencies and allies, and are deploying their assets on a wide variety of mission types. Technology is being used to help forces gain information superiority in an era where insight can be a powerful defense, but in the wrong hands, a powerful menace that increases an enemy’s capabilities. Set against these external threats, many forces are under financial pressure to use scarce resources more efficiently to maintain capabilities and readiness. Agencies are therefore relying more heavily now than ever before on IT to help them maintain flexibility to deal with a continually evolving national security environment.

Security agencies can use advanced computing platforms to help them build and maintain an effective and flexible insight infrastructure needed to support their missions. The speed of these platforms can deliver powerful capabilities to run complex analytics on oceans of data to support threat assessments and enact response plans. They also can facilitate real-time collaboration across agencies and services to coordinate planning and

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operations. The agility of these platforms can dynamically move computing resources where they are needed and increase the efficiency of the systems to control IT costs. For mission-critical applications, the resiliency of these platforms can ensure that they are hardened against cyber warfare, as well as providing constant uptime and failsafe reliability.

Managing Resources More Effectively

Closely tied to the other four imperatives guiding 21st century governance models, all governments must strive to manage public resources more effectively, particularly in today’s atmosphere of fiscal responsibility. This applies not only to limited natural resources such as water and energy, but also to scarce financial resources for social programs, departmental budgets, and large-scale initiatives and infrastructure projects. Decreasing tax revenues force government executives to ruthlessly identify and reduce fraud, while at the same time increase operational efficiency.

Governments can use advanced computing platforms to execute these tasks in a modern, collaborative, insight-based governance system. With platforms that are fast, managers can gain quick insight into citizen needs to align specific, personalized services, avoiding misdirected or excessive services that waste money. With platforms that are agile, IT managers can share and dynamically allocate computing resources to the needs of different users, instead of building multiple, single-purpose systems that are expensive to deploy and maintain. With platforms that are resilient, costly system outages can be prevented. As well, resilience enables robust data management and automated backup processes that guard against damaging data restorations.

Improving Public Safety

Even as the technology advances of the 21st century enable a variety of tools and models to help governments better serve their citizens, they also create a number of hurdles to governments’ abilities to deliver services. This is particularly apparent for public safety agencies. The growing interconnectedness of society is having profound effects on citizens’ lives and they expect that public safety services, in turn, adapt to these changes. New types of crime are emerging as societies and businesses use mobile communications and data in new ways. The amount of data available to police forces is growing exponentially from social media and video cameras. Much of this new data is unstructured, forcing police to develop new ways to manage it.

Public safety agencies can make transitions to control new types of crime, effectively manage and use new types of data, and maintain high levels of service and relevance in citizens’ lives. Advanced computing platforms are a key part of their transition. Using platforms that are fast, police can quickly ingest and process high volumes of new data to help predict and prevent crime, as well as better identify and protect against cybercrime. The agility capabilities of these platforms can dynamically allocate resources to make information systems more efficient or to help address increased demands during spikes in activity, such as during large public events. The resilience of these platforms can be critical to maintain system availability during disasters, as well as provide constant protection against unauthorized intrusion or hacking.

A DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE TO POWER A MODERN, DIGITAL GOVERNMENT

The world is changing and our modes of government need to adapt to these changes. New insight-based, collaborative governance approaches rely on advanced information infrastructures that have specific requirements in 21st century models. Government CIOs need to balance infrastructure performance against efficiency; simplicity to support against the ability to grow and change; and resiliency, security and privacy against

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price performance and time to value. If they can achieve this delicate balance, then citizens and businesses can receive higher levels of service from all government agencies.

The demands on today’s government are substantial and governments using advanced computing platforms as the foundation supporting their modern governance models will keep pace with these demands. Fast, agile and resilient platforms such as the IBM X6 are designed for the workloads that underlie these models. Designed to integrate with legacy infrastructure, or form the foundation of a new one, advanced computing platforms can give governments the ability to deliver solutions with speed, agility, and resilience, and meet needs in today’s challenging environment.

This report was developed by Frost & Sullivan with IBM assistance and funding. This report may utilize information, including publicly available data, provided by various companies and sources, including IBM. The opinions are those of the report’s author, and do not necessarily represent IBM’s position.

1 Janowski, Tomasz and Ojo, Adegboyega. “Transforming Government through Knowledge Management and Communities of Practice.” United Nations University, Center for Electronic Governance. Presentation proceedings from the China E-Government Forum 2009, 16-17 April 2009. www.egov.iist.unu.edu. Retrieved 11 May 2012.

2 Von Drehle, David, “In the U.S., Crisis in the Statehouses,” Time Magazine, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1997457,00.html, (17 June 2010).

3 Levine, E.S. “Challenges for Public Sector Analytics.” Analytics Magazine, March/April 2012. www.analytics-magazine.org/march-april-2012/537-challenges-for-public-sector-analytics. Retrieved 09 May 2012.

4 United Nations Public Administration Programme, “United Nations E-Government Survey 2010,” http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/unpan038851.pdf.

5 ibid.

http://www.egov.iist.unu.edu

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0%2C9171%2C1997457%2C00.html

http://www.analytics-magazine.org/march-april-2012/537-challenges-for-public-sector-analytics

http://www.analytics-magazine.org/march-april-2012/537-challenges-for-public-sector-analytics

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