Today, governments across the world are under immense pressure to deliver services faster and better, while communicating effectively with citizens and businesses across a wide variety of new channels. While they are undertaking many new initiatives at a policy level, the implementation still remains a challenge. This creates a feeling of dissatisfaction and unfulfilled promises among the citizens who have voted for their preferred candidates. Also, it leads to wastage of allocated funds and high resource costs for the governments in power, already prone to criticism from the opposition.
So what does it take to ensure that all your planned initiatives get delivered and their impact is felt at grassroots?
While government agencies go on creating the right governance and institutional mechanisms along with the core infrastructure and policies for a number of e-Governance Projects, an equal impetus should be given to their multi-level monitoring and execution efficiency.
In doing so, public sector & government agencies face a constant dilemma – The need to deliver high-quality and well-monitored services to citizens and businesses while working with limited budgets and resources. Governments cannot keep setting up new departments and deploying resources at every step to track these processes.
Many of the high impact initiatives such as online applications for registrations, e-filing of returns, building approvals, waste management in municipalities, certificate issuance, etc. need to be monitored & controlled, rolled out quickly and modified with time for delivering new & better services to citizens. This calls for an effective Business Process Management (BPM) system to manage the delivery of these citizen centric services to the rightful consumers.
While there are many ways to define BPM solution, it is at its core a holistic management approach focused on aligning all aspects of a business with the wants and needs of clients. It promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology.
What the progressive Government organizations are trying to achieve for citizen-centric services is not possible without concrete process governance and a backing from a robust Business Process Management (BPM) software framework. Through such leverage from BPM, government organizations can efficiently and effectively improve their operational performance, manage risk, reduce cost, and create value across the process lifecycle. A BPM based Citizen-centric e-Governance implementation allows you to do the following:
- End-to-end process monitoring and tracking with improved visibility into turnaround times and project SLAs
- Resource Optimization with the ability to allocate staff efficiently by anticipating absenteeism, employee attrition, training gaps and volume-driven peaks
- Quick Rollout of new citizen services
- Time optimization and money savings via fully automated processes driven by pre-defined policies
- Regulatory compliance and improved government services to citizens by making it easier to modify processes as requirements change
- Effective Change Management to support Government Process Re-engineering (GPR) initiatives
- Reduced Risk through effective scenario modelling that determines the impact of policy and/or procedural changes on underlying processes and systems
Transparency, efficiency, and enhanced coordination offered by a BPM fall right in line with the broader goals of e-government; thus, a BPM system is a natural choice for a government pursuing an integrated e-government strategy. It allows parallel execution of multiple processes integrated with each other, by becoming the back bone of the entire system.
Winning the trust of citizens and businesses is not easy and requires a long term consistent approach. A scalable BPM platform provides the flexible Process Management backbone to a smart e-Governance framework. A process-centric mindset with a broad BPM based e-governance strategy is a good starting point.
