Vertical Industry Communications: State and Local GovernmentVertical Industry Communications: State and Local Government

In this, the seventh and final in our series on vertical industry communications, we review communications technology requirements and applications for state and local government (simply “local government” in this post). As has been the case throughout the series, this post uses the term “unified communications,” or UC, to describe the evolution of communications technologies, though we see the term morphing into “business communications,” or BC.

For earlier articles in the series, see:

Local Government Highlights

Local government is a significant part of our lives. We depend on local governments for public safety and first responder services such as fire, police, and emergency medical response. They provide us with governance including laws, courts, and even parking tickets (wink). They provide us with parks, recreation activities, arenas, convention centers, libraries, health care, restaurant inspections, and other community services. They govern real estate development with planning, permits, and safety inspections. They provide us with infrastructure, including roads, street signs, lighting, and in some cases water and power utilities. Maybe there’s a public hospital or airport you use, too. And, public education is funded and operated by local school districts. Whew! That’s a lot!

Local government employs a lot of people to do all this for us. In total, state and local governments employ about 13% of the U.S. workforce, according to 2018 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. About one-quarter of these are in state governments, three-quarters in local governments. Also, about half of these employees are in educational functions, but this post will exclude education since those communication requirements are so specific to the roles (see the prior post on UC in higher education).

Local government has so many diverse functions that I’ve organized this post around the types of communications rather than the functional areas or departments. Thus, we’ll review how each of these usage profiles is applied in typical local government organizations. It’s key to realize that the one-size-fits-all rule definitely doesn’t apply in a local government.

Usage Profiles in Local Government

Collaboration Usage Profile: Leadership, Law-making, Planning, Communication, and Creative Teams -- Yes, there is collaboration in local government. As with any organization, the leadership layer is in ongoing collaborative dialog about the current and future state of the organization. Also, the law-makers, i.e. the elected officials and their staffs, are a collaborative environment, as they assemble and shape the needs of the community into the laws, budgets, and other governance. Planning is collaborative as you would expect for IT, Infrastructure, building plans, etc. And there will be a creative communications or marketing function that needs to collaborate just like an ad agency in the private sector.

Typical solutions are found here, whether the “teams” types of solutions provided from the IP PBX, meeting, and office software vendors or the workflow-based collaboration tools from the project-oriented software companies such as Slack or Atlassian.

Field Usage Profile: Elected Officials, Parks and Recreation, Social Services, Health and Building Inspectors -- These public servants spend most of their days out of the office, but need to keep in touch with the inside teams. Thus, they’ll rely on a city-provided mobile device. In many cases, they’ll have access from that mobile device to an app or a website that provides information, schedules, and linkage to the internal teams. Note that this list doesn’t include the groups listed in the production usage profile below.

Best practices here are to have communications links built into the mobile apps or Web pages, so that the field personnel can find the support they need with one click on a “presence available” internal team member. If a process app or Web page isn’t available, then at least provide text-based (SMS, email, etc.) functions and click to call from the government directory so that the field personnel aren’t having to keep their own directories or dial manually.

Contact Center Usage Profile: Essentially all citizen-facing departments (e.g., utilities, community services, transportation, help desks, etc.) and the special case of the public safety (police, fire, EMR, hospital, etc.) -- The contact center function is necessary wherever citizens may call. The purpose is the same as in any contact center: to provide prompt responses to the customers (citizens) at the lowest reasonable cost and with self-service options. With the growing use of smartphones, Web pages, and Amazon Alexa-type voice-activated home appliances, it may be possible to increase the levels of self-service dramatically, yet citizens will still want an exit to live help during scheduled hours of service.

In most cases a local government will require a large number of small contact centers, sometimes even simple hunt groups with voicemail options. However, contact center capabilities are becoming much more affordable and practical, especially with contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) options from cloud providers, so the best practice is to use full-functioned contact center software for front-end self-service, management of service levels, and appropriate and cost-effective staffing.

Retail Usage Profile: (See the production usage profile below) -- Some places in local government, such as libraries and other counter-based services, are similar to retail operations. However, they’re more closely aligned with the production usage profile below.

Information Processing Usage Profile: Finance, IT, Organization Services, Tax Assessor, Courts, Development Services, some Community Services -- Many local government departments require significant information processing and information management that is process-oriented rather than collaborative (see above). This work can be focused on the operation of the government organization itself, such as finance, IT, legal, and similar services. Also, this work can enable or support governmental operations and services, such as the information processing work in IT, the planning department, health services, courts, and similar functions. These personnel will be working both with structured information collected from the governmental software applications (health statistics, court records, property records, tax records, network monitoring, etc.) and with less structured information processed using general-purpose office software applications such as spreadsheets or text documents. These roles mostly involve desk-based work that can be done in city offices or from remote work locations.

The default communications tools for information processing roles are email and the desk telephone. UC enhances these tools in several important ways, such as instant messaging (IM) for quick communications or status checks; presence functions to assist when reaching out to contacts for clarifications, support, advice or approvals; click to call or IM from the government directory or email contacts; softphones integrated into government records for easy outreach to citizens, suppliers, or other agencies; and unified messaging so that voice messages are part of the email desktop view. All these functions are available in essentially any current IP PBX platform. They’re also available in team collaboration applications, though the teams functions aren’t demanded in these information processing roles.

Production Usage Profile: Most Departments - Public Safety, Community Services -- Here is where most of the work of local government gets done -- in the production and delivery of the services of government. First responders, health and social services, libraries, parks, arenas, utilities, infrastructure, and much more are all based on the process of service delivery. These roles follow specific guidelines and rules. Sometimes these are set by laws or ordinances. Sometimes they’re best practices for optimum safety or protection of citizens, but always producing services.

Communications in this usage profile have two categories:

The important function in each of these categories is to integrate communications into production applications so as to minimize effort, reduce errors, and be able to log the activity for proof and review of the service production.

Administration and Management Usage Profile: Elected Officials, Functional Leadership, and Staff -- These last two usage profiles may be the least common for local governments. Also, note that the management usage profile may also be part of the collaboration and the field usage profiles.

Management and administration have some complex and well-developed communications styles, including shared-line appearances, coverage groups, park/pickup functions, and similar features that usually require a multiline desk phone. A few local governments have fully embraced the UC softphone approach, but most still require the traditional communications, supplemented by linkages to the leadership’s mobile devices. However, this isn’t a reason to keep the PBX or IP PBX for the entire local government. That traditional communications platform can be downsized or can be replaced by an advanced cloud PBX service.

Foundational Usage Profile: All Departments and Roles -- Finally, we come to this last usage profile, which addresses the common communications tools (see previous post, Vertical Industry Communications: Exploring Foundational Services). The point is that users from all usage profiles will need access to these foundational communication functions, whether for meetings, training, or back-office communications when they aren’t in the field or when the communications functions of their role-based usage profiles don’t include these foundational communications tools. It’s much better to think of these as a foundational set than to try to deliver these as part of every other communications service in the local government.

Summary

In summary, local government comprises diverse communications requirements, but each is a subset of communications tools, not an all-in-one set of tools that complicates usage and support. Analyzing, planning, and deploying local government communications based on roles and functions within usage profiles will almost certainly optimize the experiences and the results for the employees and the citizens. Best of success, if you’re providing local government communications services -- we’ll all enjoy it!

BCStrategies is an industry resource for enterprises, vendors, system integrators, and anyone interested in the growing business communications arena. A supplier of objective information on business communications, BCStrategies is supported by an alliance of leading communication industry advisors, analysts, and consultants who have worked in the various segments of the dynamic business communications market.