Once small and cohesive, today’s cities, including those in the UK, have become large and complex entities. In fact, London, despite being the smallest region in terms of area, occupying 1,600 square kilometres (sq km), less than 1% of the total area of the UK, has a population of over 8 million. This is a larger population today than all but the top four countries at the turn of the last century. So, with this being the case, how can governments maintain meaningful engagement with citizens, businesses, employees and other agencies?
The truth is that it’s not a simple question to answer. Today, technology and social change offer a new way for governments to meet the challenges of citizen engagement. This is because growing volumes of citizens are demanding new ways to engage. At the same time the pace of technology change is staggering. Citizens are leading the charge with greater demands to be served through multiple communications touch points – whether that is online, via the phone or through social media. The key for Government to be able to connect with and engage citizens lies in its ability to provide a seamless communications experience.
The hallmark of an engaged city
What are the hallmarks of an Engaged City? At its core the Engaged City exhibits pervasive collaboration. Citizens and governments now collaborate 24x7, from any location, via any channel (land lines, mobile, email and social media).
Perhaps it is two interdependent central government departments on a voice conference call. Or a civil servant engaging with citizens via video conferencing. In the Engaged City a citizen might send a complaint over Twitter or share a comment about a tax related issue, for example, with the HMRC via Facebook. The key is engagement takes the form of rich collaboration using multiple communication channels. The Engaged City is also an agile city. These same advances empower governments to implement new services more quickly and deploy them more easily than ever before.
The Government’s Digital Inclusion Strategy sets out ten actions that government and partners from the public, private and voluntary sectors will take to reduce digital exclusion – all of which hinge on collaboration. The strategy is for individuals and organisations involved in helping people develop their digital capabilities. This includes government departments and local councils.
In the Engaged City both users and government officials also enjoy increased control over their destinies. Gone are the layers of complicated processes, replaced by a spirit of open and transparent cooperation that leads to co-designed services and, always-on, self-service portals.
The enabling of open, fluid communication can completely transform relationship between a city and its citizens. By leveraging new communication channels, government can deliver an empowering and satisfying way for citizens to engage.
Blue print for building an engaged city
At its core, the Engaged City is about fostering engagement between local government authorities and its citizens, employees and local businesses. Fostering engagement means stripping away barriers to communications and enabling people to engage how, when and where they choose. There are, listed below, a few of the basic steps decision makers in government can take to enable the kind of engagement that builds the Engaged City.
Enable engaged citizens
In times past, citizens engaged with city governments by attending meetings, visiting town hall or making a phone call. Whilst these are still valid means of communication, times have changed. Today many citizens, especially of the younger, millennial generation, have embraced Facebook, Twitter and Smartphones as their preferred communications method. Civil servants need to enable digital engagement at the heart of their public services delivery to allow citizens to interact with government as they prefer.
Untether employees
The days of employees sitting behind a desk forty hours a week are dwindling. Today’s civil servants are highly mobile and striving to find new ways to work from the field, from home or from wherever they need to be to serve their citizens best. By embracing virtual, collaborative communication systems, civil service decision makers can empower their staff to be productive regardless of location by harnessing all devices (desktop, laptop and mobile) for voice, video and collaboration.
Foster seamless communication and collaboration across agencies
The key to faster, more productive workflows is communication and collaboration. But how? Face-to-face meetings are expensive and difficult to schedule, yet phone calls are limiting. The answer lies in enabling agencies to communicate quickly with voice, video and web collaboration – including social channels. This allows the benefits normally reserved for face-to-face meetings with the speed and efficiency of phone calls.
What it takes to make it work
Having a blue print in hand to build an Engaged City is the first critical step to success. But to make it work for citizens, civil servants and government as a whole, the technology these cities are built on needs to adhere to three key principles.
Engagement
Excellent citizen service necessitates that government agencies are able to resolve an inquiry at the first point of contact – whether it is to book an appointment, pay a bill, check progress of an application – or any other inquiry. A centralised contact centre infrastructure can therefore help government handle inquiries better – responding to peaks and troughs regardless of the physical location of employees – especially through seasonal peak periods. Whilst government agencies should strive to encourage self-service as much as possible, they need to recognise that human intervention must be possible when needed.
Productivity
Communications is critical for central government as they seek to improve productivity and efficiency of their workforce – to manage operational costs and increase speed of public services delivery and service effectiveness. Engagement with the Public Services Network, to help select the best and most relative technology, alongside the implementation of new technology can provide civil servants with real-time access to experts. Having the right collaborative communications systems in place is, in fact, critical in the maintenance and improvement of productivity, whilst mitigating risk and lowering costs, as many civil servants are finding new ways to work that take them away from their desks.
Resilience
Whatever collaborative communication technology is implemented to drive Engaged Cities forward, civil servant decision makers need to ensure that these systems can provide rapid, reliable and sustainable inter-agency communications during an emergency event. This becomes critical especially when a number of government organisations need to be notified quickly and work as a team during a critical situation. Oversight groups may need to collaborate with key personnel from various government agencies, local city officials, fire departments and private ambulance operators—to name a few.
As cities continue to grow and citizens increasingly dictate the way in which they want to be communicated, government organisations will have to invest in collaborative communications tools necessary to engage communities. The future of engaged communities and citizens lie in Engaged Cities.
To find out more about Unify and how it is creating a blue print for highly engaged cities, visit http://www.unify.com/uk/engaged-cities or call us on 0800 158 5236.