Three pillars of digital transformation

Public service is more proactive in digital transformation than people think and typically uses three key pillars for change writes Peter Rose, CIO of TEKenable.

The advent of Covid accelerated the need for digital transformation across the public and private sectors where there was already a fast pace of change. We have worked with the HSE delivering contact tracing and the PPE ordering system (amongst others) but even before Covid, TEKenable worked with Dublin City Council to deliver Voter.ie, providing online registration to vote, with An Post to deliver Ad Mailer, a digital transformation of postal advertising campaigns and Mayo County Council to streamline recruitment, all based on the three pillars below.

Pillar One: Self-service

If you are still requiring paper forms, you are accepting the responsibility and cost of correcting the inevitable errors and omissions. Providing online self-service capabilities to your patients/staff is a “no-brainer”. It ensures data quality at point of entry eliminating the chase processes that are required to deal with errors on paper forms and enables the end user to engage at their convenience. We refer to this approach to data quality as: “Clean the river, not the lake.”

Pillar Two: Customer engagement

CRM is a bit old hat now; customer engagement is the new gun in town. Create an omni-channel communications hub including bots and personalisation, centralising customer data, integrate it with a workflow layer that spans siloed IT systems and crosses departmental boundaries, and you will deliver an optimum experience. Customer-facing staff will have full visibility of the customer and managers a full view of the processes and any bottle necks.

Pillar Three: Back-office process automation

The Self-Service pillar removes some non-value adding processes from the back office, but it is not the full story. Building on the customer engagement layer, back-office processes can now also span the artificial boundaries created by legacy IT systems and departmental structures. This delivers cost savings and improved patient experience through efficiency. By adding artificial intelligence and robotic process automation we can also remove the mundane work and reduce error rates leaving your staff free to deliver the real value-added services, those that need a human touch. Our experience has been that staff who are impacted by this type of change experience an increase in job satisfaction, patient satisfaction increases, and complaints go down.

Low code platforms enable digital transformation

With major change programmes commencing in many government departments, local authorities, and the public sector in general there is a key differentiator between success and failure, the IT tools used to deliver that change.

We use low code platforms such as Microsoft’s Power Platform in conjunction with the power of the Azure cloud to tackle in-depth and complex challenges, making application development much more efficient, flexible, and responsive to change.

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform from TEKenable can deliver Self-Service with Customer Engagement, can support back-office Process Automation and apply Advanced AI and RPA to improve efficiency with much of this not needing to be built, it is out of the box.

Talk to us if you are interested in seeing what can be done when you have the right tools!

Peter Rose
TEKenable Ltd – Harmony Court, Harmony Row, Dublin 2
peter.rose@tekenable.com
+353 87 271 2660
www.tekenable.ie