Leveraging the American Rescue Plan to meet the new ...

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the importance of scalable and resilient government services. Now, as

the nation begins to recover from the public health crisis, state and local officials are focusing on using cloud-based technologies to increase and strengthen the services they provide to constituents.

This Center for Digital Government’s (CDG) digital cities, counties, and states surveys from 2020 reflect this emphasis. Across the board, respondents ranked “expanding, simplifying, and/or improving access to services available to citizens and businesses” among their top leadership priorities for the coming year.

Modernizing government contact centers and leveraging data analytics will be fundamental to meet new demands around constituent services — and cloud will be an important strategy to achieve these goals. Respondents in the 2020 city, county, and state surveys ranked the cloud among their top technology priorities for the upcoming 12 to 18 months, indicating that jurisdictions across state and local government will accelerate their cloud adoption as they undertake service modernization projects.

The American Rescue Plan (ARP), the Biden Administration’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package approved March 2021, may help fund these improvements. The ARP includes $350 billion in fiscal relief to state and local government, including funding for information technology initiatives. But, at the same time, the prospect is daunting as IT departments must decide which projects to invest in. Here’s a look at how cloud-based contact center and analytics solutions support government’s move to improve, expand, and strengthen constituent services.

Contact centers: Scaling capacity and expanding capabilities State and local government (SLG) agencies can use cloud contact center technologies to scale capacity and meet spiking service demands, stand up new contact center services, improve constituent experience with chatbots and automation, and roll out other new applications to support highly strained environments. Cloud-based contact centers can help jurisdictions strengthen citizen engagement overall, or it can play a more industry-specific role such as helping transportation agencies answer toll-related calls or county election organizations cope with high volumes of voter

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A CENTER FOR DIGITAL GOVERNMENT ISSUE BRIEF

Leveraging the American Rescue Plan to meet the new citizen imperative How cloud-based contact centers and analytics deliver better experiences

inquiries. Since spring 2020, cloud contact center technology has been vital in helping agencies address unprecedented surges in unemployment insurance benefits claims.

Sample challengeWhen states implemented shutdown orders in response to COVID-19, they saw record increases in unemployment insurance (UI) claims. The volume of constituent inquiries crashed online systems and overwhelmed contact centers. In addition, states struggled to implement new temporary benefits programs, such as Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), and cope with significant changes to existing programs, such as Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) authorized under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

Although states have added infrastructure and other resources to meet their immediate needs, many would benefit from deeper improvements, including replacement of traditional contact centers, modernization of legacy unemployment insurance systems, and/or their migration to the cloud. Even today, SLG agencies are fielding calls from claimants struggling with long wait times, often for relatively routine questions.

SolutionAmazon Connect, a cloud-based contact center solution, gives agencies the ability scale call center resources quickly when needed and only pay for what they use.

They can increase staff to handle high call volumes without licensing additional seats and reduce when no longer needed. Amazon Connect enables contact center agents to work from anywhere, allows agencies to leverage intelligent chatbot services, and provides robust analytics on call data to help agencies improve performance and constituent experience.

Several states have implemented Amazon Connect to address contact center and interactive voice response issues. Read how in our case studies available here.

States also migrated legacy workloads to the cloud after their UI websites crashed or suffered performance issues when demand outstripped the ability of earlier applications and aging infrastructure to scale. Although many states patched their problems with new hardware and software, moving to an elastic, pay-as-you-go model in the cloud may improve both performance and budget.

Typical benefits:• Addresses limited scalability and flexibility of legacy

contact center systems • Relieves burden on agency IT staff of supporting

on-premises hardware and software • Enables contact center staff to work from anywhere,

improving employee productivity, availability, and retention• Offers constituents a more streamlined, omnichannel

contact center experience• Provides cost savings with a utility pricing model based

on minutes of usage versus seat licenses

Data analytics: Gaining new insights into service deliveryCloud technology also helps SLG professionals analyze large volumes of data collected daily and use it to inform decisions that improve constituent services. For instance, agencies can use the cloud to develop a comprehensive data warehouse and analytics stack to support research into transportation, congestion, crashes, and mobility trends. These solutions can also let agencies analyze sentiments, ideas, and experiences from their diverse communities to improve services and communication strategies. Nonprofit organizations can gain a clear line of sight into how people are moving through the homelessness system. And smart cities can use data produced by internet-connected devices to derive insights and improve residents’ quality of life.

Cloud technology facilitates the collection, secure storage, analysis, and dissemination of data to support service improvement.

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PRODUCED BY:

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The Center for Digital Government, a division of e.Republic, is a national research and advisory institute on information technology policies and best practices in state and local government. Through its diverse and dynamic programs and services, the Center provides public and private sector leaders with decision support, knowledge and opportunities to help them effectively incorporate new technologies in the 21st century. www.centerdigitalgov.com.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Worldwide Public Sector helps government, education, and nonprofit customers deploy cloud services to reduce costs, drive efficiencies, and increase innovation across the globe. With AWS, you only pay for what you use, with no up-front physical infrastructure expenses or long-term commitments. Public Sector organizations of all sizes use AWS to build applications, host websites, harness big data, store information, conduct research, improve online access for citizens, and more. AWS has dedicated teams focused on helping our customers pave the way for innovation and, ultimately, make the world a better place through technology. Visit aws.com/stateandlocal to learn more.

IMAGES PROVIDED BY SHUTTERSTOCK.COM 3 ©2021 e.Republic. All rights reserved.

Ultimately, cloud technology facilitates the collection, secure storage, analysis, and dissemination of data to support service improvement. It does this in an affordable and secure way that helps leaders meet their goals and ensure compliance with the appropriate regulations.

Sample challengeSince the onset of COVID-19, new technologies, the transition to a value-based care reimbursement model, and regulatory requirements that are evolving to meet changing patient needs have all transformed the healthcare landscape. Growing use of electronic health records and clinical data is increasing the need to bring together data, applications, and analytics in meaningful ways. Although providers are generating more electronic health and clinical data, traditional data interoperability solutions fall short and create barriers to moving this information across disparate sources. These legacy solutions are expensive, don’t scale, and are often prone to errors.

SolutionAmazon Web Services (AWS) offers an analytics and data lake solution that ingests, normalizes, and consolidates healthcare data into a single, workable format and environment. A data lake provides a powerful data architecture with a unified location to reduce silos across the healthcare ecosystem. Data can be connected from outside sources including payers, research centers, public health databases, human service agencies, and health systems. Read about this case study for deeper detail and note this solution decouples the analytics from the storage to allow flexibility in analytics use cases. This platform offers many opportunities to discover trends and correlations, helping stakeholders make data-driven policy, clinical, and business decisions.

Typical benefits:• Supports states, cities, and counties that are interested

in analyzing data to achieve policy or program goals, understand community health, gain insight into demographic trends, and track economic activity

• Helps agencies safely bring employees back to offices, enables targeted COVID-19 testing and procedures, and supports employee retention strategies

• Supports data-driven decisions around policies for returning students to classrooms and helps educators track new virus cases, evaluate education reforms,

analyze attendance trends, and understand how social determinants affect students

• Enables agencies to consolidate real-time data, modernize data structure, and move away from integration engines and manual data transformation that make it challenging to respond quickly to critical events

Thoughts to get you started:• As you are thinking about migration or modernization of

your system, identify the immediate pain points with your customers today. Using the cloud, you may be able to leverage a simple solution.

• Assess your current technology environment and determine the biggest challenges you are facing right now.

• Although short-term projects may have immediate impact, consider how technology investments will position your organization for the future.

• Explore how cloud technology can help you meet mandates, reduce costs, drive efficiencies, and accelerate innovation.

• Evaluate how much your state will receive from the ARP and other funding streams and align these funds with the cost of your top-priority IT needs.

• Prepare your case with sound justification to win leadership buy-in.

If you’d like to find out more about AWS data analytics or contact center solutions, visit our website or contact us.

This piece was developed and written by the Center for Digital Government Content Studio, with information and input from Amazon Web Services.

A data lake provides a powerful data architecture with a unified location to reduce silos across the healthcare ecosystem.