Large and small municipalities alike face a multitude of challenges when seeking to improve digital public service delivery in a timely and budget-conscious way.
Two core issues frequently arise as the main culprits that plague public service digitization efforts: disconnected services and overly numerous points of access.
To illustrate how these issues can hold municipalities back, let’s examine an example scenario.
This is the story of Kurt, a clerk in a small municipality in Ontario, whose challenges are representative of the challenges of many municipalities across North America.
Setting the Scene
Kurt is a clerk in a small municipality in Ontario tasked with improving his municipality’s digital strategy.
Given his relatively small municipal budget, he will be looking for consolidated solutions that are cost-effective, flexible, and have predictable costs over time.
The municipal council has highlighted two main issues they would like Kurt to tackle.
First, the council is displeased because the significant investments already made to offer new digital services to its citizens have not yet seen adoption rates.
Second, following a cyberattack on a neighbouring municipality that exposed a significant amount of personal data, many citizens have expressed concerns about the security of the information they choose to share with their municipality.
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Increasing Adoption Rates for New Services
When looking into factors that influence citizen adoption rates of new digital services, Kurt learns that his municipality has unfortunately fallen into a common trap. Their digital services are disconnected, which results in a confusing user experience for citizens.
In practice, Kurt observes that there are many points of access for municipal services, many of which live on disconnected websites and are difficult to find if someone doesn’t know where to look.
For example, although the summer reading club is organized by the library, registration is only available on a separate website. Kurt is particularly frustrated to find that although the library website advertises the summer reading club, it does not link to the club sign-up website.
Confident that he has discovered one reason why his municipality’s constituents have not been adopting municipal digital services at the expected rate, Kurt decides to investigate which options are available to his municipality to consolidate its digital strategy.
CitizenOne’s Services Catalog Accelerator (SCA) has features that can streamline the citizen experience. In fact, the SCA would allow Kurt’s municipality to take a Whole-of-government approach, where they can offer all their services in a simple, searchable page featuring a secure dashboard.
Furthermore, the SCA would allow Kurt’s municipality to display and connect many related services in logical groups, with all the information citizens need to access the services.
Kurt envisions a consolidated catalog dedicated to library-related services, which would allow citizens to easily view all the library’s programs and seamlessly redirect them to the appropriate websites.
Kurt knows that by giving citizens a consolidated view where they can easily find and search for all municipal services in one place, they will be more likely to make use of the programs and services the municipality has worked so hard on.
The SCA offers enticing solutions for the challenges Kurt’s municipality is facing, but Kurt wants to make sure that implementing new solutions will not put additional strain on the municipality’s resources.
Kurt decides to do some research about how the SCA integrates with existing solutions. He wants to ensure that the solution he proposes to the municipal council can seamlessly integrate with their existing digital resources.
Kurt is pleased to learn that the SCA can link to existing content management systems (CMS) on popular platforms such as Drupal and WordPress, as well as more custom front-end web applications. This means that his municipality will not need to abandon any of its existing digital assets.
Kurt is confident that the SCA will benefit his municipality as well as its citizens and looks forward to presenting it to the municipal council.
Reassuring Concerned Citizens
The aftermath of the cyberattack on the neighbouring municipality brought the importance of digital security into focus for many municipalities in Kurt’s area.
During his research, Kurt realizes that the multiple points of access to municipal services – and their many related username and password combinations – multiply the opportunities for cyberattacks.
Citizens have also reported a lack of transparency on how the municipality uses their information on each site. They are therefore wary of providing authentication information and discouraged from signing up to use new services
In addition, not all of the municipality’s digital services have robust authentication processes, which could enable hackers to gain access to more secure, private information by first accessing usernames and passwords from less secure sites.
Taken together, these issues have severely eroded citizens’ trust in municipal digital services.
Kurt knows that to rebuild trust in digital municipal services, he needs a solution that addresses all three of the security-related concerns citizens have raised.
CitizenOne' SCA creates a single point of access, reducing the cyberattack surface. This access point simplifies access to services while ensuring robust authentication with features such as MFA out-of-the-box and adaptive authentication.
Furthermore, CitizenOne’s claim and credential-based access control approach permits different services to require different authentication credentials within its ecosystem. This allows easy access to some services while maintaining a higher bar for stronger authentication methods should services require it.
The combination of a consolidated dashboard design and customizable service cards allows each department to outline its terms of service clearly and concisely, giving users an intuitive snapshot of what information they are sharing and how it will be used.
This secure, transparent, and consent-driven approach would reassure the citizens of Kurt’s municipality in their use of online services. Citizens' peace of mind would be assured regarding the security of their data, ultimately rebuilding their trust in their municipality’s digital services.
A Consolidated Solution for Consolidating Services
Like many governments, Kurt’s municipality can address two of its largest pain points with a single solution. With the SCA as a core component, CitizenOne was designed to be a flexible, customizable tool for municipalities of any size to seamlessly integrate into their overall digital strategy.
Its inherent security features, consent-based approach to data privacy, interoperability, and intuitive UX help deliver a consolidated, secure and optimized user experience for better citizen engagement.
Find out more about CitizenOne’s Services Catalog Accelerator and how it can improve your municipality’s digital services.