Municipal Digital Transformation: Avoid These 4 Traps

By Louis-Philippe Tremblay
Digital Transformation Communicator, Portage CyberTech

Whether you're in the midst of a digital transformation or just getting started, keep these four potential traps in mind. Avoiding them will make your transition much smoother.

Underestimating Workload and Education

Appointing a project manager or hiring a consultant exclusively dedicated to your transformation can save you thousands of dollars and a lot of frustration. Yes, the project manager needs to be tech-savvy, but it's the people skills and education that will make the difference.

Identifying the impacted work cycles, training staff and creating educational documentation are tasks that can be difficult to delegate to an employee who already has many tasks and responsibilities. In addition to this, managing expectations and human stress is the key to successful change management - It takes time and energy. 

Forgetting a Risk Management Plan

Even though regulatory technology tools are very secure and major incidents are very rare, security breaches are still possible. Therefore, having a solid risk management plan is very important. 

To be prepared for this situation, it is best to create a plan that will take into account both the correction of the breach as well as the way individuals affected will be informed of the leak. Transparency is paramount when it comes to a security violation. 

Most importantly, do not skimp on employee training. The vast majority of the time, security breaches are caused by employees who are not well informed about the risks and tactics of online fraud. 

Project the Short-Term ROI

Yes, a digital shift requires short-term investments, but in the medium to long term, many unnecessary hours of work will be saved. In addition, by giving citizens access, for example, to a platform where they can directly consult their tax account information, we empower them and avoid the repetitive handling of information and costly mailings.

According to Deloitte, a digital service will cost $0.45 per transaction as opposed to an average of $18 for a similar in-person service. Imagine the possible gains over several years!

Choosing One Solution to Solve One Problem

Let's face it, the pace of adoption forced by the pandemic has somewhat justified this reflex and it is often a frequent problem in institutions as well as the private sector.

However, the more solutions and providers there are, the more usernames and passwords there are, and the more platforms need to be connected to each other. For users, this is a daily frustration.

Generally, the core of a municipal services platform is created from a framework of four key solutions. When combined together in a unified environment, the user-experience is much more intuitive, simpler to use, safer and more convenient. 

The ideal combination to create this experience is: 

• A CMS platform that allows you to manage web content by drag and drop, create forms and also manage roles and permissions
• An online services platform that manage identities, privacy and allows citizens to access services from several departments
• A CRM to manage contact history with citizens and suppliers
• A trusted electronic signature platform to create legally reliable documents

At Portage CyberTech, we offer these privacy-by-design solutions and support the implementation of them based on our clients’ needs. We have been involved in the digital transformation of governments for over 30 years.