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Collaboration as a productivity enabler within government agencies

a group of people sitting at a table in front of a computer

Good collaboration between government agencies and departments is vital, whether it’s within the administrative office, or across social services, the unemployment department, or the judicial system. Technological advances have blurred the boundaries between borders and people in unprecedented ways. According to a recent study by the Economist Group, government is the only sector to prioritize apps that enable remote work and collaboration over the cloud. As a result, government processes and interactions with the public need to keep pace with the increasing expectations of people.

Are you curious about how agencies can drive collaboration and productivity with Microsoft Teams? Join us on December 8, 2021, at 7∶00 AM PT for an informative webinar titled “Empowering your productivity with Teams.” Here, you will learn how leveraging different solutions within Teams creates the ultimate productivity center.

Below I highlight three relevant areas that clearly demonstrate how collaboration, driven by digital transformation, can lead to efficient cross-agency collaboration:

Restoring the economy

As governments work to restore economies shaken by the global pandemic, three key areas come into focus:

  1. Digitizing government processes
  2. Executing and delivering economic stimulus packages
  3. Enabling a predictive government response

The Georgia Office of the State Treasurer (OST) did just that through focused investment in highly secure productivity tools that created a collaborative work environment. OST’s primary job is helping to ensure the state’s money is never idle. The agency receives revenue collections from various sources—including the Georgia Department of Revenue—then invests that revenue to generate earnings for the benefit of Georgia’s 10 million citizens. It also helps ensure that the state’s agencies have the cash needed to support the health, public safety, education, and welfare of all Georgians.

“With such high volumes of activity, high levels of complexity, and the astonishing amount of data we manage, we could not function without the most sophisticated technology,” says Lynne Riley, the Georgia state treasurer. “Because communication is so critical to our work, Teams is probably our most important technology.”

In addition to Microsoft Teams, OST adopted the powerful combination of Microsoft 365 Enterprise, Microsoft Surface Book devices, and Windows Virtual Desktop. These provided employees with secure, continuous, and seamless access that enabled collaboration across agencies and employees alike.

Coordinating care for vulnerable populations

Government support for vulnerable populations is especially challenging because the people who fall into this category often need immediate care. That is possible only with close partnership within agencies.

As an example, The Care Quality Commission (CQC) responsible for monitoring the quality of care providers across the country of England, was in the process of transforming paper-based processes to digital versions when COVID-19 hit. At that point, it became critically important to spin up new services and help the National Health Service and other health and social care providers in England cope with the crisis. CQC used Microsoft Dynamics 365 products to gather valuable data about COVID-19 challenges (that fed back into relevant agencies) and create a booking system for COVID-19 testing.

With Dynamics 365, CQC gave 1.6 million social care workers the opportunity to access drive-through COVID-19 testing. It adopted a truly data-driven approach to health provider inspections and made what had been a 10-day reporting process nearly instantaneous. In the words of Stuart Dunn, Interim Head of Hospital Inspection: “With Dynamics 365, we’ve built a much more mobile way of working. We can immediately upload key information to enable rapid decision-making to support providers and the public.”

Building an agile, efficient government

The way the City of Everett, Washington transformed processes and increased employee productivity provides a great example for how state and local governments can utilize digital tools to better serve their communities. As recently as 2015, Steven Hellyer, then incoming IT Director said “The city wasn’t equipped for the modern era. We weren’t that agile as an organization because we weren’t taking advantage of laptops and smartphones, e-business services, or cloud computing.” To fill that gap, Steve and his team worked closely with departments such as fire and police to bring about a digital transformation that now serves as a blueprint for other municipal governments.

The city deployed Microsoft Azure for storage needs, Microsoft Teams to streamline communication across agencies, and Power BI to support the adoption of analytics for decision-making. That helped city leaders drive greater agility within departments and placed the interests of the city’s residents at the core of the work. This culture of innovation helped minimize the disruption to daily operations at the onset of the COVID-19 health crisis. It also laid a solid platform for the City of Everett to continue to support the community’s growth.

Collaboration across all levels of government

As demonstrated above, collaboration between government agencies and departments is increasingly important. Additional use cases include promoting public safety and justice, detecting fraud, waste, abuse and corruption, and providing support to vulnerable populations with artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT).

To learn more about additional use cases on government collaboration, I invite you to read Empowering Cross-Agency Collaboration or visit our global website at Government Solutions.

I look forward to seeing you on December 8, 2021, at 7∶00 AM PT during the “Empowering your productivity with Teams” webinar.