Guest contributor |
Citizen welfare is becoming an increasingly important area of focus and local governance has a pivotal role to play. Local councils serve communities through the provision of education, healthcare, social care, housing and more. However, councils that work with legacy systems, limited resources and poor data protection are struggling to meet the growing need to help more citizens.
To address these challenges, councils need to develop clear and coherent digital strategies that align with their objectives, as well as establish robust and agile governance frameworks to comply with the relevant laws and regulations. Infosys can work with councils and help them understand, define and execute on their digital vision for citizen services with a robust governance framework, user-centric design, and security and compliance leveraging Microsoft cloud solutions. Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Azure can help create digital platforms that empower both government employees with effective collaboration, tracking, reporting as well as citizen with online access, self service and personalisation of public services. This can improve customer satisfaction, reduce costs, and increase efficiency.
Deepening customer communication and engagement are important points for councils and they need solutions that personalise and enhance their interactions with customers and stakeholders. For example, a public council can use Dynamics 365 Customer Service to provide omnichannel support, resolve issues faster, and increase customer loyalty.
A large government council in London, UK, which regulates housing policies services for over 8,000 council tenants and 4,000 leaseholders, invested in a digital programme to build a platform that covers housing repair, tenancy management, homelessness application and property acquisitions. Working with multiple unstructured systems, the council struggled to resolve facility issues quickly. This resulted in lost revenue. However, having deployed Dynamics 365, the Dynamics mobile application and Power Platform across its employees and customer portals, it has reduced its call handling time by 15 per cent and the number of calls and letters by 50 per cent, thanks to self-service enablement. This allowed the council to serve the customer better and focus on those in need.
Building a digital culture that promotes the technology awareness, adoption and use among staff and citizens will support the development of digital skills, including new features, such as data searching with Microsoft Copilot.
Microsoft also has solutions that can secure government data and resources. Organisations can use Azure Security Center, Microsoft Defender and Azure Sentinel to protect their data and resources from cyberthreats while complying with regulations. Insight into the entire security state, threat prevention, detection and response capabilities, along with intelligent security analytics, helps to protect data.
The above strategies enable public sector organisations to create positive outcomes for the citizens they serve. Through Microsoft-powered technology, public councils can become more agile, responsive, and resilient, and meet the changing needs and expectations of their stakeholders and customers in this digital age. This all helps to enhance the public value and trust of an organisation and contributes to the wellbeing, prosperity and development of the society.
Vinoth Subramanian Haldorai is practice engagement director of Europe for Microsoft Practice at Infosys
This article was originally published in the Winter 2023 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.