Public Sector Industry Viewpoints

The public sector is facing a series of profound challenges—many of which are unprecedented in human history.

Our global population is booming. At the same time, people are migrating into cities. Meanwhile, climate change is accelerating, and its effects are being felt across the globe—from rising sea levels to drought, famine, and natural disasters.

In the last 50 years, the global population grew more than it had in the previous four million years. By 2030, 60 percent of all people will live in cities.¹

Citizens will look to their governments for a response. The public sector needs to drive economic development and build smart, safe, and sustainable cites of the future. In doing so, government leaders need to a plan to address the below challenges.

• Citizen expectations: Meet citizen needs comparable to the private sector with multichannel access and faster response times.
• Urbanization: Develop and modernize infrastructure that covers transportation, public safety, water, and utilities.
• Changing demographics: Attract tech-savvy millennials with flexible and remote work environments, and retrain seasoned employees to bridge the skill gap.
• Sustainability and resilience: Modernize with physical and IT infrastructure to better track, manage, and remedy environmental threats.

But the public sector’s remit is even broader. It has a duty to respond to these challenges, manage shared interests, and protect the people, places, and institutions that maintain and improve citizens’ daily lives. This is especially vital during national emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which have the potential to adversely impact long-term service delivery, citizen engagement, and how employees work over the long term. Above all else, demand for exceptional, digital-first citizen services is forcing the public sector to modernize or fall behind, with a global, smartphone-enabled populace seeking new ways to interact with governments.

In this ebook, we will explore how urbanization and population growth are increasing pressure on the public sector, and how the emergence of smart cities and smart governments can better address urbanization and public safety, connecting public sector with the citizens and businesses that they serve. We'll discuss how cloud technology is helping the public sector stay on top of data security threats, future-proof legacy systems, and help leaders make better, faster decisions with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

¹ How Many People Will Be Living in Cities in the Future?

Urbanization and Population Growth

As of March 2020, the world's population had reached 7.8 billion people. By the turn of the century, the World Health Organization estimates that this number will grow to 11 billion.²

To absorb this population growth, cities need to offer digital, consumer-friendly user experiences without compromising security or increasing resources and costs. Building smart, connected cities with emerging technologies, such as AI, Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain, can help public sector support growing populations by modernizing essential functions, including smart lighting systems, waste management, and emergency notifications. Finding solutions that simplify and measure mobility to improve the transportation of people and goods while maintaining roads and supporting resources is also imperative.

Numerous modern cities are choked with traffic and strangled by pollution with many citizens living in cramped, unsafe, and uncomfortable conditions. How can cities possibly cope with a 12 percent average increase in urban populations without changing the way that they provide and allocate services? The answer exists. Many experts point out that cities are not necessarily running out of space and resources, but it is imperative that they use what they have more efficiently.

State agencies in Europe are already making efficiency advancements. For example, in Spain, Empresa Municipal de Transportes de Madrid reduced bus stop times by 50 percent and cash transactions by 30 percent by implementing a contactless payment system developed by Oracle.

The goal of smart cities and smart governments is to deliver exactly this kind of efficiency—enabling sustainable growth, increasing resilience in the face of climate change and natural disasters, and streamlining infrastructure to cope with an ever-growing population.

² Growing at a Slower Pace, World Population Is Expected to Reach 9.7 Billion in 2050 and Could Peak at Nearly 11 Billion Around 2100
³ How Many People Can Our Planet Really Support?

Smart, Connected Government

Smart cities that are overseen by smart governments are the future of the public sector. A raft of new technologies—including the IoT, AI, blockchain, and machine learning—allow us to re-imagine what our towns and cities might look like, and re-invent how people live. In fact, more than 90 percent of cities are gathering data from a total of 30 million IoT devices. From governments, citizens, and streets to transportation, power, and sanitation, every process and object can be connected with data captured and analyzed. Using the insights these connected systems provide, smart governments will have unprecedented power to solve complex, civic challenges.

The insights gleaned through data analysis can help governments formulate recommendations to better manage a variety of issues, such as traffic jams, human and IT resource shortages, and natural disaster threats, allowing them to respond in a more-efficient manner.

And great opportunity lies with citizens themselves. A fundamental concept of smart cities is creating a single front door through which citizens and businesses can quickly and smoothly use services, complete tasks, or resolve issues. AI-enabled routing of requests to the right department ensures faster service and provides efficiency for the city so they can spend more time handling complex cases.

Smart government is ultimately about thinking differently and using the insights provided by disparate, yet connected, data systems to make intelligent, informed decisions that better serve constituents.

Job creation.

Job creation is a key goal and a top priority for practically every government official, as jobs create the revenue governments need to deliver citizen and business services. Thriving job markets help make cities, towns, and nations attractive places to live. Smart-city projects are engines for job creation.

Future-proofing IT and securing data will help fuel job creation. The infrastructure needed to support a growing population will require thousands of new professionals, offering the public sector a level playing field to compete for top talent with private businesses. Governments can also leverage technologies to facilitate remote access to improve productivity and better serve their citizens.

According to ESI ThoughtLab, a global economic consultancy organization, smart investments trigger a virtuous cycle of economic growth by generating capital for new, smart-city investments and attracting businesses, residents, tourists, and talent. They found on average that the catalytic impacts associated with becoming a smarter city have the potential to increase gross domestic product per capita by as much as 21 percent and population growth by 13 percent over the next five years.⁴

Detroit is a great example of how smart-city initiatives can regenerate an area. The Motor City has passed through a period of retrenchment and is now thriving thanks to efficient, effective public transportation links, repurposed and re-invigorated public spaces, such as urban farms that provide city residents with fresh produce, and a citywide spirit of innovation. A city that once relied on the motor industry for employment is enjoying a new era of job creation—using analytics and financial and information technology to create online business processes that provide structure and transparency.

Competition.

While overcrowding may bring its own challenges, an influx of residents, tourists, and businesses also drives revenue to urban centers. For that reason, nations, states, and cities must compete with one another for new arrivals. Attracting visitors and citizens is about becoming a desirable place to live, work, and play. And in today's world, that means adopting both business-friendly processes and exceptional citizen experiences. With an eye on improving citizen engagement with new technologies, the city of Albuquerque in the United States integrated Oracle Cloud CX with Amazon Alexa to better engage its citizens—improving response times and reducing call volume by up to 50 percent.

By becoming a smart city and embracing advanced technologies, such as AI, machine learning, IoT, and blockchain, locations can enhance citizens' quality of life—streamlining interaction between individuals and public sector services, encouraging a vibrant private sector and enhancing civic infrastructure.

The demand for talent.

Governments aren't just competing for new arrivals. There is a growing sense of urgency across the public sector with many current government employees now approaching retirement age. 45% of federal workers are age 50 or older.⁵

With many government employees approaching retirement age, public agencies find themselves lacking the necessary digital skills to implement modern citizen experiences. As a result, the public sector must find talented replacements quickly if valuable institutional experience is to be retained, or work fast to reskill existing staff. New digital technologies and knowledge-management capabilities provide an opportunity to quickly and cost-effectively reskill the workforce, and make the public sector an attractive place for younger workers. By moving to Oracle HCM Cloud, the city of Memphis shortened its hiring and onboarding process for emergency workers while consolidating employee data in a single system.

Modern technology is just part of the answer in creating a more candidate-centric recruitment process that combines on-target messaging delivered through multiple channels to win today’s battle for talent.

Resilient and responsive government.

The public sector is challenged to function efficiently during times of natural disasters or extreme circumstances, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. It is during these times, digital constituent engagement, remote work, and resilience become more important than ever.

Governments are responsible for keeping citizens current and informed at all times, which includes providing an effective way to support frequent communication and share knowledge. Real-time, personalized advice and direction across web, chat, and mobile channels helps constituents understand what support and benefits are available to them during times of distress. Sophisticated applicant data verification helps to determine eligibility, calculate payments, and eliminate fraud and error.

Rising to this challenge requires new, cloud-based collaboration tools that enable prioritization, assignment, tracking, and execution of different work streams. With the right technology and processes in place, governments can ensure continuity of service even in the most difficult of circumstances.

⁴ ESI ThoughtLab: Smarter Cities 2025—Building a Sustainable Business and Financing Plan
⁵ New Data Shows Aging Federal Workforce, Especially in IT

Social Services

Governments provide a range of important social services for the needy, including food, housing, medical, employment, and job training. Constituents depend on these services but have historically found them difficult to understand and navigate due to complex rules and underlying bureaucracy.

Driven in part by global emergencies and natural disasters, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, governments are now rapidly moving to a less-transactional, more-inclusive model to deliver social services—building ongoing relationships with citizens rather than simply responding to service requests. To accomplish this, governments are focusing on the below three key areas.

• Digital response – Providing education and outreach to ensure citizens know their options and offering highly personalized self-service to avoid call-center bottlenecks
• Continuity solutions – Empowering government employees for remote work and digital services
• Agile recovery – Deploying case-management systems to manage constituent services holistically while striving to predict future services that constituents would require

The city of Los Angeles in California used Oracle CX to quickly deliver financial assistance to low-income residents impacted by COVID-19. The solution, hosted on Oracle’s secure government cloud, leveraged digital channels to communicate with eligible applicants and secure online accounts to guide citizens through the verification processes. As a result, the city of Los Angeles helped more than 100,000 individuals by dispersing tens of millions of dollars.

Climate change and natural disasters.

Unfortunately, the public sector now faces unprecedented climatic challenges. Rapid, man-made climate change is having a profound effect on global weather systems, and these sudden changes have led to increasingly prevalent natural disasters—as evidenced by recent, highly destructive hurricanes.

The worst impacts of climate change will be permanent by 2030. Global temperatures may reach an irreversible tipping point in 10 years.⁶

From droughts to floods and hurricanes to blizzards, the effects of climate change threaten the public, infrastructure, and property. The world's cities must develop the ability to respond to these threats and recover at greater speeds—particularly coastal cities, where rising sea levels pose additional risk. Buenos Aires in Argentina is one such city. Sitting on the confluence of the Atlantic Ocean and the Rio de la Plata—the world's widest river—Buenos Aires regularly floods, and this situation will only worsen as global sea levels rise.

"Buenos Aires is installing a vast network of sensors across its underground storm drainage system. The sensors record water levels and rainfall amounts and relay the information in real time back to city officials—creating an effective flood early-warning system."⁸

By adopting proactive intelligence, Buenos Aires is now in a position to anticipate and respond to flooding, helping to maintain public safety. Around the world, urban centers must adopt similar approaches in the face of climate change and natural disasters. Smart, early-warning systems and connected emergency responders can help us better understand the threat posed by natural disasters and become proactive rather than reactive—removing citizens from harm's way and mitigating the impact of a disaster.

In the unlikely event that a natural disaster or national emergency does take place, it is important for governments to have clear and effective continuity of operations plans. Such efforts go well beyond creating a system for workers to telecommute and facilitate public agencies in modernizing existing infrastructure and personnel systems to better engage citizens at a time when they desperately need government assistance. This entails rethinking current processes with focus on how technology can help improve response and recovery.

Sustainability.

Resilience is not just a case of enduring cataclysm or responding to disaster. In today's world, resilience means sustainability. Smart cities address waste management, air quality, and energy use and confront the causes of environmental impacts and climate change.

Utilities, such as energy, water, and transportation, must be capable of handling expanding population and business growth while continuing to find ways to modernize systems that are beyond their functional life. They must also have the flexibility to contend with challenges in regulations, environmental conditions, and changes in technology.

There is also a moral and regulatory imperative to adopt more-sustainable practices across the public sector. The Paris Agreement on Climate Change, signed in April 2016, saw 195 nations commit to minimizing the scope and effect of climate change—and enhancing resilience to it. For that reason, new civic infrastructure must be environmentally sustainable as well as effectively future-proof.

In Argentina, the city of Buenos Aires saved US$40 million in cost annually by moving from a paper-based process to Oracle Field Service Cloud to manage their public works projects.⁹

An ESI ThoughtLab study on hyperconnected cities found that cities would be well served if they expedited and expanded their adoption of smart waste collection and environmental technologies. The report found that for cities that do, the average ROI could be as high as 6.8 percent.¹⁰ By investing in agile operations, governments can create smart, modern infrastructure that is ready for the future—and deliver significant value back to the city.

Governance and security.

New technologies bring the need for additional oversight, particularly for the public sector. Cloud adoption has led to a strong focus on how citizen data is stored, leveraged, and shared. From US programs, such as Cloud First and FedRAMP, to the EU Global Data Protection Regulation, global compliance regulations have helped foster increased trust between the cloud provider community and government agencies.

The public sector must deploy data management best practices to comply with regulatory standards and provide necessary transparency to both businesses and citizens. This includes providing an easy-to-use system of record to help agencies streamline and simplify processes while safeguarding private citizen data from cybercriminals. From a compliance perspective, Oracle Generation 2 Cloud Infrastructure has achieved the necessary certifications for key security standards and compliance mandates in the United States, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

CARE, a global nonprofit operating in more than 100 countries, uses financial management software running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to meet complex grant and compliance requirements from global donors. CARE estimates that running its software on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will help save US$250,000 annually—freeing up budget for essential items, such as food, medicine, and other critical aid.¹¹

⁶ UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
⁷ NASA Earth Observatory: The Impact of Climate Change on Natural Disasters
⁸ Forbes: AI and Other New Technologies Make Smart Cities Even Smarter
⁹ Buenos Aires Improves Safety with Oracle Service Cloud
¹⁰ ESI ThoughtLab: Building a Hyperconnected City
¹¹ Oracle Cloud Helps CARE Streamline Operations

Cloud Is the Destination

Cloud is essential to the smart city. To embed AI, IoT, machine learning, and analytics in public sector processes—and to deliver exceptional citizen experiences—a scalable, flexible, secure cloud platform is required.

Cloud adoption coupled with emerging technologies, such as AI, blockchain, chatbots, and machine learning, can help by enabling fast, intuitive, self-service government. Likewise, IoT and big data are producing valuable insights for those with the power to act on them. Governments need to take a holistic approach to implementing cloud technologies with a focus on the following:

• Data management—from being ‘hard’ and structured to ‘soft’ and unstructured—that provides the opportunity to digitize asset management, operations, and reporting through IoT
• Back-office strengths across finance, human resources, performance management, storage, and analysis that generate automated intelligence and insights to optimize operations
• Front-office expertise in customer experience, end-to-end solutions, such as citizen services, case management, licensing, and permitting, that leverage IoT, AI, and machine learning
• Data security—with powerful, preventive and detective security controls—that safeguards the vast volumes of highly valuable data generated and collected by cities
• Data-driven innovations that harness the creative solutions city leaders are looking to deliver in building an ecosystem that accommodates citizens, employees, the business community, and city visitors

With existing systems that are often decades old, governments at national, state, and local levels are keen to modernize and future-proof their technological infrastructure. Aging IT infrastructure is not only susceptible to cyberattacks and often incapable of delivering the performance and functionality the public sector requires, it's also difficult and expensive to maintain. Many workers with the skills to update, repair, and maintain legacy IT systems are now reaching retirement age. Modernization is an unavoidable imperative.

Colegio de Bachilleres, a secondary school administrated by the Mexican Federal Government, turned to Oracle to address rising costs and security vulnerabilities with student records. With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the school saved more than US$200,000 in annual expenses while providing secure and real-time access to tens of thousands of school records.¹²

Why cloud migration?

Becoming resilient.

Public sector services must remain active in the event of any incident—be it a case of natural disaster, cyberterrorist attack, or any other unforeseen occurrence. On-premise hardware can be seen as a weak link with physical infrastructure susceptible to damage in the event of any major incident. Cloud delivers the durability and recoverability cities need to bring essential services back online in the event of disaster.

The city of Atlanta learned firsthand about on-premise IT vulnerability. Atlanta’s Deputy CFO John Gaffney said, “Three months into our hybrid cloud implementation, we realized moving entirely to the cloud would provide more benefits and less risk for the city of Atlanta as well as the water department and Atlanta International Airport, since they also used the Oracle E-Business Suite applications for finance, procurement, and HR."

IoT sensors are used to detect emerging natural disasters and help governments respond with greater precision and timeliness—as seen with Buenos Aires' groundbreaking flood defense system. Machine learning, meanwhile, is capable of mining data insights to predict when and if an event might occur.

Future-proofing and cost efficiency.

The complexity of legacy public sector IT systems can make modernization a major challenge. However, by moving to cloud, governments can significantly reduce the cost and administrative burden of maintaining legacy hardware and adopt future-proof IT that can scale with their needs.

For the public sector, back-office agility will enable front-end innovation, helping to deliver exceptional citizen experiences. In addition, machine learning presents an opportunity for fast, affordable, continuous IT improvement—identifying performance inefficiencies and addressing them without the need for human intervention.

Achieving more with less.

Governments and public sector organizations must increasingly achieve more with less. Digital transformation through cloud adoption helps to deliver cheaper, more-efficient ways to serve the public and keep services running smoothly. Often, the very processes that save the public sector money also deliver new and improved citizen experiences. For example, a chatbot capable of answering queries about refuse collection, recycling, or public transportation would give citizens the answers they need quickly and intuitively while saving government employees valuable time. Automating these mundane, repetitive tasks can save a lot of money and improve workforce efficiency.

Investing in smart technology pays off. According to an ESI ThoughtLab study, the average return on investment for hyperconnected initiatives ranges from three-to-four percent.¹³ As cities become more interlinked, their ROI grows; however, cities just starting out realize a lower return than those further along.

Meeting citizen expectations.

To attract businesses, tourists, and residents, destinations need to modernize and provide great citizen experiences. To do this, governments at state, county, and local levels must embrace digital technologies.

The city of Las Vegas is delivering digital citizen services using Oracle Mobile Application Framework. Citizens and visitors now have a simple, compelling way to interact with the city using their mobile devices while city employees experience enhanced productivity and reduced call-center costs.

Intuitive, reliable, cloud-enabled, self-service apps will help make public sector interactions quick and easy while automation will ensure that the needs and concerns of citizens and businesses are addressed as rapidly as possible. Automation also provides the transparency needed to foster trust and accountability between the private sector and governments. For individuals, integrating a new generation of connected citizens with existing processes will allow for personalized engagement and near real-time insights—helping to make countries, states, and cities safe, enjoyable places to live and visit.

The public sector needs to re-invent the way that it provides access to citizens as well as expedite the review process to ensure it operates within adopted rules and regulations. Cloud gives the public sector the opportunity to reduce the cost of engagement and deliver enhanced constituent experiences. Modern customer experience solutions with AI and chatbots can help public sector improve service delivery with omnichannel, citizen-centric experiences that are available around the clock.

Leveraging predictive intelligence.

IoT sensors create huge quantities of data. The ability to analyze this data effectively is of enormous value to the public sector. The insights gleaned through data analysis will help governments predict things, such as traffic jams, human and IT resource shortages, and natural disaster threats, and anticipate or respond to them in a timely, efficient manner. AI and machine learning can also be used to achieve continuous improvements and automation of daily citizen services.

The time has come for the public sector to embrace the flexibility, scalability, and security of cloud. The benefits are clear: Cloud helps public sector organizations prepare for an uncertain future, become more resilient and cost-efficient, and deliver exceptional citizen and business experiences to compete with other geographies.

With the right cloud strategy in place, public sector organizations can face the challenges of tomorrow with confidence.

Securing citizen data.

At a national level, governments need to follow strict guidelines before implementing new technologies. Having uniform standards with proven and effective security controls is key to ensuring citizen data is protected. Citizens need to have confidence that all measures are being taken to safeguard their data against prevalent cyberthreats.

If security is not part of the entire planning process, innovation comes at a cost. If technology is not well secured, breaches are very expensive. In a 100-city survey conducted by ESI ThoughtLab, the cost of failing to address cybersecurity was enormous. The mean annual cybersecurity loss for cities across the world was US$3.2 million.¹³

¹² Colegio de Bachilleres Boosts System Performance with IaaS and PaaS
¹³ ESI ThoughtLab: Building a Hyperconnected City

News and Updates

Here is a list of curated assets and use cases on the latest trends in smart cities, cloud adoption tips, and the role of AI and other emerging technologies in public sector.

Get ready for the hyperconnected city.

Whatever happened to the smart city? It is alive and well but morphing into the hyperconnected city powered by data analytics, AI, IoT, and other advanced technologies. Learn why data is the rocket fuel for smarter cities.

Read article

Get started with smart technologies.

Cities are already smart but continuously innovating is an on-going challenge. While starting points may vary, the objective is the same: Use advanced technologies to create a vibrant, urban ecosystem that improves day-to-day living and attracts new visitors and businesses. Read more about how cities are embarking on the innovation journey and what kinds of tangible and intangible benefits they are receiving.

Read article

See how blockchain can be a major engine of change.

Increasingly, transparency and trust are a major concern to governments and private-sector entities. Blockchain can be an efficient and reliable solution, particularly so for industries where ethical sourcing and extracting of raw materials is required.

Read article

Get industry insights for a modern, citizen-centric government powered by cloud.

Check out the Oracle public sector blog for more news and views on cloud, digital transformation, and future trends from Oracle's industry experts.

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Customer Stories

A superior candidate experience.

UK-based Brent Council had a problem: Its existing recruitment solution was growing quickly outdated. The old solution offered no integration with the council's HR system—resulting in limited reporting and a poor candidate experience.

Upon adopting Oracle HCM Cloud, Brent Council reduced the average time to recruit by two days and streamlined the application process to enhance the candidate experience.

"With Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud, we have improved our entire recruitment and onboarding processes for hiring managers, the recruitment team, and candidates. We have streamlined our procedures, improved reporting, and reduced costs and time to hire." Vik Kapoor, Payroll, Pensions, Recruitment, and Management Information Manager, Brent Council

Read article

A paperless solution to public sector problems.

The sidewalks of Buenos Aires have been deteriorating. In fact, 40 to 50 percent are in poor condition. The infrastructure programs of public utility companies were causing significant damage, and the Environmental Ministry had no real-time tools with which to track when and where these companies were breaking the sidewalks during construction. Also, they were managing worker repair orders manually with spreadsheets, which was costly and inefficient. Buenos Aires turned to Oracle Field Service Cloud.

"We have been able to monitor and control in real time our inspectors, eliminating paper and spreadsheets with a mobile solution. This will make the city safer. As a result of the implementation of Oracle Field Service Cloud, we've reduced the time of planning from days to minutes, and we’re saving approximately US$40 million dollars annually." Alejandro Naon, Managing Director, Public Space Inspection, City of Buenos Aires

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A digital family advice service powered by Oracle.

West Sussex County Council, Western Sussex Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust have a new system to help parents get the information they need. Powered by Oracle, Family Assist is a digital service providing professional advice for new mothers, fathers, and their families throughout pregnancy and childhood.

"Family Assist enables families to sign up for the service at point of pregnancy and get the information that's pertinent at each stage of pregnancy. By raising a question through Family Assist, it enables parents, first of all, to self-serve the information themselves, and if not, then a healthcare professional will be on the end of that inquiry to answer that concern." Kelly Pierce, Consultant Midwife

"Using Family Assist to message a midwife, you get your answer straight away—literally into the palm of your hand." Ed Cosgrove, Parent

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An investment in next-generation citizen experiences.

Providing citizens with the best-possible experience is a top priority for the city of Albuquerque in New Mexico. The city is using Oracle Service Cloud integrated with Amazon’s Alexa to do just that. The conversational interface gives citizens a convenient way to report graffiti, a pothole in need of filling, a streetlight outage, an abandoned vehicle, and many other issues regarding their city. Intelligent routing of requests to the right department ensures the solution is simple for residents and cost-effective for the city to maintain.

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