Abstract
The many enterprise applications of government require a substantial level of collaboration. The impact of one decision on other aspects of the business requires analysis, including statistical (predictive) analytics, sentiment analytics, and cultural and skills analytics.Further, the shift from purely cost-centered decision making to that of “whole-of-government 1 is palpable. Accordingly, extensive electronic and mobile collaboration is required, even though such collaboration is counterintuitive to the mindset of prioritising according to departmental policies. In addition, the challenges governments face range from the time taken to approve an initiative, considering the complexity of processes, to its organisational structure and ever-changing technology in this age.
TopChallenges Faced By Local Governments
Local governments must work within geographic boundaries, sharing responsibility with other levels of government. The constitution of the country or its legislative power enables local governments to provide some services. The structure and responsibilities may differ, but for the purpose of this book, the key objective of local government is to provide nominated services to its constituents based on a pre-defined method of revenue collection. Local governments are moving to provide services using digital technology, driven by the increasing cost of developing and implementing services using current solution development methodologies. Moreover, citizens demand better services that use digital platforms in 24x7 formats. This concept, referred to as Smart Government, stipulates services intelligently designed to make use of technological advantages. This includes recent technologies, such as Big Data, the Cloud, and “Internet of Things (IoT)”. IoT is defined as collaboration of information sharing between traditional information technology systems and smart devices such as mobile phones, operation equipment’s with capacity to collect and analyse information (Alaybeyi, Tully, Jones,(2016). The expectation of Smart Government poses the difficult problem to the local government of meeting increasing demand for “Smart Services” within limited budgets, as shown in Figure 1. The government needs a radical overhaul and redesign of its services, so that it can do more with fewer funds available, and meet public needs efficiently and effectively.
Figure 1.
Challenges faced by government and impact