As local governments face increasing demands amid limited budget constraints, they must devise creative ways to improve and streamline services to their citizens and communities. Most public office holders are looking for ways to improve the efficiency of their resources and existing infrastructure to enable greater productivity.
According to Mckinsey, automation is a solution that can raise throughput, improve quality, increase reliability, and deliver high-performance gains. In the private sector, IT automation has delivered tremendous positives in addressing this challenge.
Interested in learning how IT automation can help reduce overhead and improve performance in local government? Read on to find out.
Local councils manage small teams and many struggle to efficiently manage and maintain their software assets and IT infrastructure. They often outsource these tasks to agencies, and even despite that, they need their IT teams to be responsive to serve ratepayers (customers) faster and improve their capabilities.
For several decades, state and local governments have lagged behind private sector entities in enabling digital transformation. Several still use legacy systems with security and management concerns. However, most of these came about because of their tight budgets and limited manpower.
According to a Spiceworks survey, 45% of IT decision-makers in local governments cite limited budget and high cost as a top challenge in their IT infrastructure. However, the question is, why do they face these challenges, and what can be done about them?
Many of these local and state governments struggle with complex IT infrastructure, technical debt, skill shortage, and budget limitations. IT automation is a solution to these problems. By leveraging modern IT infrastructure, local councils can increase productivity and enable greater efficiency.
McKinsey estimates that at least four out of five HR, finance, and application processes can be automated, reducing costs by at least 30 percent. With that in mind, it’s crucial for local governments–and the public sectors–to look for avenues to transform their IT infrastructure.
The benefits of enabling IT automation for local governments include:
The main aim of automation is to improve productivity. Many government bodies still leverage outdated IT infrastructures that require human involvement and management. This leads to high human resource overhead and technical debts that require substantial financial resources.
Local governments can enable greater productivity by automating IT infrastructure. This means they’ll do more with less, require less human resources, and lower management and maintenance costs.
Many local government offices still use legacy systems and outdated software. One problem with using legacy systems is that you’ll always be behind in adopting or implementing modern technical practices. This is even more true in this era of remote work and digital transformation, which is why it’s essential to have a future-proof IT infrastructure.
For local governments to remain agile in enabling modern practices, they need to implement digital enablement projects and transform their IT infrastructure. This means setting up their systems to enable automatic updates and securely managing their resources, automating IT processes, and in the process future-proofing their tech stack.
The public sector manages some of the most sensitive data of their citizens. These data need to be secure to prevent hackers from accessing them. This means enabling modern cybersecurity practices, ensuring compliance, monitoring server health, and setting up event-based alerts to notify you or take action when necessary.
By embracing IT automation, local governments can better secure their infrastructure, enable greater efficiency and be ready to address any issues. Additionally, they can set up user roles and authorizations to ensure that data is only accessible to the right personnel.
As mentioned above, several local councils face numerous technical challenges that their current infrastructure cannot handle. This may occur due to data loss or breaches, server downtime, or network overload. Still, many do not have solid recovery plans if this happens. In fact, some still use manual processes to backup and restore data.
With IT automation, local governments can automatically update, backup, and restore their systems. No longer would their recovery be tied to the whims of an individual– who might or might not back up when necessary– or to a system that is prone to damage.
Coupled with all these, local councils still need to manage their IT assets and resources–both hardware and software. When deploying new machines such as laptops, for instance, they still have to install and deploy software manually. This takes a lot of time and can be prone to mistakes or inefficiencies.
Local governments can enable IT automation to automatically deploy software to multiple systems simultaneously. Additionally, it can help maintain and update this software, apply patches when available, and notify you when there are any issues.
The solution to having several processes to handle is usually to hire more people, but that shouldn’t be the case. By automating several of these tasks, local government leaders and IT teams can improve their service delivery, reduce maintenance requirements, accelerate technology advancements, ultimately lower costs.
In addition, they can better direct funds and improve areas that can have a greater impact on elevating the lives of their citizens.
IT automation can quickly yield significant benefits for local governments. These modern technological practices play a crucial role in facilitating greater interaction, collaboration, and innovation.
Local governments can incorporate most IT automation solutions into existing IT infrastructure without incurring significant expenses. For local governments to get started with IT automation, they can leverage an IT automation solution like Attune.
Read more: The top 10 IT Automation Tools of 2022
Attune is an IT automation solution for automating, patching and managing your IT infrastructure. It can also help to accelerate IT procedures, deploy software updates, improve security, and drive digital transformation.
Are you interested in enabling IT automation? Contact Attune today.
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