Tech ‘isn’t the hard part’ in digital experience, local leaders say

As state and local governments look to modernize and digitize their delivery of services residents rely on each day, leaders said last week the technology side of things is the easier part.

Instead, they said, ensuring robust communications with residents about what is changing, what works and what doesn’t, is crucial and far more likely to go awry. They also warned that keeping elected officials in the loop, especially as they may bear the brunt of public criticism, is critical to ensure modernization projects are successful.

“Our biggest [lesson] is that technology really isn't the hard part,” Marcus Townsend, a solutions architect for Fayetteville, North Carolina, said during a session at the Granicus Government Experience Virtual Summit last week. “Citizens are going to find a path to communicate with us, and we're all giving them multiple ways to reach out to us, whether it be email, a 311 call center, a mobile app, [a] chatbot.”

Many state and local agencies have embraced artificial intelligence to help them modernize, and they have already seen success.

Christopher Ramos, director of IT for Ocala, Florida, said the city has deployed AI so it can engage with residents around the clock and provide information and communications about city services, bill payments, permits, rentals and more. He said it’s been a “big change” but has already been “answering questions left and right every single day for a few months now, and it's been very interesting.”

Communicating change, though, is among the biggest components of digitization and modernization, especially when it comes to major social programs like public benefits, or even a city’s 311 system that helps residents report non-emergency issues. Adding AI into the mix can induce various anxieties about job losses or an overreliance on technology that can make government services feel less human.

It’s imperative, then, that local governments do everything they can to keep their residents in the loop.

“[We’re] making sure that, from a communications perspective overall, that we're prioritizing meeting people where they're at,” said Jon Zaghloul, director of communications for Aurora, Illinois. “When it comes to a digital engagement perspective, when it comes to a lot of the things that we did here in Aurora, we made sure that we implemented things that would hopefully be easy to understand for our residents. There was never, for example, an e-newsletter that came from the city every week. People were wondering, what kind of news is going on in the City of Aurora? Previously, it was like, well, if you're not on Facebook, good luck.”

Zaghloul also said communication with residents has been key in improving user experience. Aurora recently redid its website and digital infrastructure, having heard complaints about how tricky its previous website was to navigate and to carry out even basic tasks. The city carried out a navigation study that included resident feedback to help guide how a redesign should look, Zaghloul said, and the user experience has improved markedly.

“It may sound underrated, but actually trying to invest in that portion of things could make things a lot easier for residents to interact with government organizations and be sure that they know what they're getting into when they need something from a digital perspective,” he said.

Ramos said it was a similar story in Ocala, where AI can make it easier for residents to quickly find answers, although he noted that engagement is important to see where the gaps are.

“The whole goal of this project is not only to just give us a facelift to the website and updated content, it's also utilizing all these tools that are on the back end to make the new system and processes function in a better fashion,” he said.

Communicating properly should also extend to engaging with elected officials, speakers said, as they are more likely to hear from residents if things go wrong. Townsend said Fayetteville has benefited from having effective lines of communication between lawmakers and what he called the “worker bees” at the staff level. That can then help specialists explain to more generalist lawmakers what is happening.

“[Citizens will] complain a little bit to us, but they do a lot of their complaining to elected officials,” Townsend said. “[We're] having to catch from them and have that communication flow from our elected officials. Citizens feel like they need to hold someone accountable for a failure, they're reaching out to elected officials and we're having to get that sometimes second- and third-hand to actually try to really determine where the issue is. Working on that workflow and increasing that communication even at that level to the worker bees has been really helpful with us.”