RESILIENT COMMUNITIES, EFFICIENT GOVERNMENTS Transformative Tools for Today and Tomorrow
INDUSTRY PERSPEC TIVE
Resilient Communities, Efficient Government
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RESILIENT COMMUNITIES, EFFICIENT GOVERNMENTS INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE
RE SIL IENCE
(noun)
The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties.
N
atural disasters. Budget crises. Significant technological failures. In today’s interconnected world, a single disruptive event can have negative repercussions on a community long after the initial impact. This makes the imperative for a swift recovery a priority for state and local government. The ultimate goal is to make the community resilient to such events; it should be able to nimbly respond to even the toughest circumstances.
signed to improve service delivery and cost-effectiveness every other day of the year. In this way, planning and preparation becomes less about disaster recovery and more about delivering better services to the community, no matter the conditions. The discussion then becomes about agility, speed of delivery, and collaboration.
Unfortunately, planning for such events is not a pleasant activity for public sector professionals. The vastness of such an undertaking can be overwhelming, which often results in the decision to focus solely on the challenges of day-to-day operations.
»» Four fundamental tools for building community re-
BUT WHAT IF YOU COULD DO BOTH? WHAT IF YOU COULD USE TECHNOLOGY TO PREPARE FOR THE UNCOMMON WHILE ALSO IMPROVING THE ROUTINE? In this industry perspective, GovLoop and Hyland present techniques for preparing your organization for significant, disruptive events using tools that are de-
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Industry Perspective
In this report you will learn: siliency.
»» How to integrate these tools into a platform for maximized responsiveness.
»» The everyday application of these same tools by Arlington County, VA.
Throughout our research, we discovered that technology now allows us to increase organizational effectiveness during the best of times, while simultaneously preparing ourselves for instances when things go wrong. For organizations looking to change the way they do business, but are limited by budget restrictions, aging technology and processes – or are simply overwhelmed by the task – let this document serve at your starting point.
A RESILIENCY STARTING POINT: INFORMATION The concept of resilience, specifically in the context of our local communities, encompasses a great many topics and events (see Figure 1). The potential avenues for preparedness are similarly vast. This is where the paralysis often sets in: there are so many directions one can go, where do you start?
THREE FOCUS AREAS FOR THE PRESERVATION AND ACCESS TO INFORMATION If we begin with the notion that information is key, we can now begin to focus on a few areas to make our access to information more resilient. These focus areas are:
»» Redundancy »» Field Response »» Location Analysis
Figure 1
COMMUNITY RESILIENCY: THE ABILITY TO RECOVER FROM…
Economic hardship
Natural disaster or extreme weather conditions
Adverse events (Power outage, major criminal acts)
Terri Jones, Industry Marketing Manager for Government at Hyland, provided a useful starting point: information. Specifically, Jones advises departments to begin any resiliency planning by examining their ability to preserve and readily access information necessary for decision-making. “In a non-event situation, we tend to have access to that information,” said Jones. “We might have it on paper files, and it might be scattered across an array of different people. The challenge becomes that during an event, this traditional method of storage and organizational structure can get in the way.” The old way of doing business, which is often characterized by information silos, difficult to access ‘archived’ information and data, and paper processes simply isn’t effective in today’s environment. Public servants are expected to quickly deliver services and information 24 hours a day, regardless of the conditions.
REDUNDANCY When the knowledge base for an entire community is housed in one location, the ability to respond to an event can be severely restricted. This difficulty is compounded when documents are stored in paper format or an aging legacy system, in which data can’t be easily shared or duplicated. Therefore, agencies need a mechanism to easily and cost-effectively create redundancies for the organization’s institutional knowledge and data so that the community has access to information even when the first, second, or even third avenue has been closed.
FIELD RESPONSE The second focus area is the ability to respond in the field. “Unfortunately, in some of the more highly-publicized moments in event response, we’ve figured out that we can’t always respond in the field,” said Jones. This is either due to poor communication capabilities or an inability to access information when outside of the walls of the organization. One of the most critical pieces is having ability to adapt to situations we didn’t know about when we left for the field. This is vital to facilitating the kind of agile field response necessary for rapidly-changing circumstances.
LOCATION ANALYSIS The final piece relates to the understanding of the geographical landscape of the community. “So many of these events have implications for the broader area around the immediate zone where the event has taken place, whether
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this is an evacuation route, access to resources that are in danger or another impacted population,” said Jones. Being able to perform a location analysis is vital to preparation, response and recovery. Now that we’ve established our focus areas, we can explore technology that will facilitate the preservation and access to information.
FOUR STRATEGIES TO PRESERVE AND ACCESS INFORMATION Jones describes the tools facilitating the transformation of agencies into resilient custodians of community information as a layer cake of technology. Each tool builds upon the next, with the ultimate goal the integration of the tools to better prepare the government agency for an adverse event.
LAYER 1: DIGITIZATION The foundational step for resilient communities is to begin digitizing organizational documents. “It has to start with the documents, because that is only way to efficiently and cost effectively create copies that can be shared in both secure and open environments,” said Jones. “Digitization supports the idea of unfettered access to information.” This is vital to breaking down silos of information, thereby creating new streams of information flowing across the organization, which can be readily accessed by those who need it, when they need it.
LAYER 2: CLOUD REDUNDANCY Digitization is only marginally better than paper if it is housed in a localized server or even on an individual’s computer. Cloud computing, then, is the ideal complement to the enterprise-wide storage and distribution of data and documents. Cloud facilitates the access to information from virtually anywhere. It has the added benefit of providing redundancy so that if your central operations are impacted by an event in the immediate region, your data is stored somewhere else.
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Industry Perspective
LAYER 3: MOBILE TECHNOLOGIES Mobile technology is the next logical piece in the technology layer cake. An effective field response is powered by information. However, if responders are using paper, they aren’t as prepared to process new or unanticipated information. Digitization and cloud technologies allow field responders to access information in a device-flexible environment, either through laptops, tablets, or smartphones. “Most importantly, responders have access to information they may not have anticipated when they left for the field,” said Jones.
LAYER 4: GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS (GIS) The final layer is geospatial analysis. Access to digital information, in a redundant and cloud-based environment, which can also be processed in a deviceflexible format, lays the foundation for responsive geographic analysis in the field. The key is that so much of our information is geographically-based.
DIGITIZATION CLOUD REDUNDANCY MOBILE TECHNOLOGIES GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS (GIS)
For example, if a field agent is responding to an event, and she is able to display on her GIS mobile application key data about the surrounding environment, she will have greater situational awareness based on the geography and the data the organization has collected over time.
These four pieces come together to build an integrated platform for greater preservation and access to information. The platform facilitates greater situational awareness, communication and the ability to process new information on the fly. It also provides the foundation on which any resiliency plan should be formulated, since it places information, and our ability to use it when we need it most, at the center of everything we do.
TECHNOLOGY INNOVATIONS IN ARLINGTON COUNTY, VA RESILIENCY, YES - BUT ALSO EFFICIENCY
Perhaps the most exciting feature of this approach to resiliency is that it has the added benefit of transforming your organization’s day-to-day operations. Each and every one of the aforementioned tools has direct relevance to mission and support service delivery, cost effectiveness and organizational agility.
This approach includes deploying the following technological solutions:
Arlington County provides an illustrative case of a government agency that has made itself more resilient by adopting technologies that it employed for reasons that have very little to do with event preparedness.
»» Mobile Technology
The driving force behind the changes currently taking place in Arlington County offices is the openness to new technologies and approaches. “We want to take advantage of anything and everything we can to improve our efficiencies, as well as constituent-facing initiatives,” said Kristanne Littlefield, Applications and Architecture Division Chief at Arlington County.
»» Enterprise Content Management (ECM) »» Cloud Computing
»» Geographic Information Systems (GIS) ENTERPRISE CONTENT MANAGEMENT (ECM) According to Paul Carter, IT Manager at Arlington County, the primary drivers behind the digitization and enterprise management of county documents included the consolidation of disparate platforms, cost and budget savings consideration, and improved service delivery. “Our staff is still delivering the same services, but now in a much more efficient, timely and cost-effective manner,” said Carter.
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CLOUD COMPUTING Similarly, the drivers behind the adoption of cloud had a lot to do with maximizing the efficiency of the organization by focusing on mission critical services. “The motivation was discovering our core competencies, and then looking elsewhere where others may have a stronger competency,” said Littlefield. The county is currently operating its public-facing website through an open source platform and hosting it in a public cloud, which frees up staff to focus on tasks more closely tied to service delivery.
MOBILE TECHNOLOGY Arlington County’s mobile strategy came as a response to current trends in mobile use. But it also had the added benefit of maximizing the efficiency of county workers, many of whom operate in the field, are constantly on the go, or participate in telework programs. “In order for users to be able to work collaboratively and communicate, it’s important for us to be able to support a [device-flexible] approach to productivity,” said Littlefield.
GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS (GIS)
graphic data on county residents, economic data for local businesses, housing information, and school information – a number of which are available in map or other geography-based formats.
THE RESULT: AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO SERVICE DELIVERY Just as our resiliency platform rested on layers of integrated technological solutions, the county’s solutions are similarly integrated. For example, the county’s content was originally organized by department, which required a fair amount of organizational knowledge to locate relevant information. To respond, ECM, powered by cloud and mobile, has the potential to drive a subject-matter approach to content management, rather than one driven by organizational silos. The county discovered that accessibility to information was vitally important to its workers, so it is currently employing integrated solutions to meet that demand.
GIS is a major component of the county’s open data initiatives. The county’s GIS website includes demo-
STRATEGIES FOR TOMORROW DIGITIZATION REDUNDANCY FIELD RESPONSE LOCATION ANALYSIS 5
Industry Perspective
...AND TODAY ENTERPRISE CONTENT MANAGEMENT (ECM) CLOUD COMPUTING MOBILE TECHNOLOGIES GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS (GIS)
CONCLUSION: A NECESSITY AND AN OPPORTUNITY The need for community resiliency is greater than ever. For public sector professionals service delivery can’t stop in the event of a server crash or natural disaster. The task may seem overwhelming, but if you
focus on information preservation and access, you are putting yourself in a prime position to prepare and recover during times of adversity. The best part about this approach to resiliency planning is that the tools you’ll use will also help you be more efficient and effective in your day-to-day operations, which brings a new meaning to the term resilient.
ABOUT HYLAND
ABOUT GOVLOOP
OnBase, by Hyland is a proven enterprise content management solution for each level of government, helping each meet today’s challenges of smaller budgets and staffs while laying the foundation for simplified, efficient and mobile government information technology.
GovLoop’s mission is to “connect government to improve government.” We aim to inspire public sector professionals by serving as the knowledge network for government. GovLoop connects more than 100,000 members, fostering cross-government collaboration, solving common problems and advancing government careers. GovLoop is headquartered in Washington D.C. with a team of dedicated professionals who share a commitment to connect and improve government.
Faster, affordable government is possible with OnBase document management. Learn more at http://www.onbase.com/en/solutions/government
For more information about this report, please reach out to Adrian Pavia, Research Analyst, GovLoop, at adrian@govloop.com.
Resilient Communities, Efficient Government
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Industry Perspective