4 Key Public Sector Themes for 2022 With Meredith Trimble

Tyler Podcast Episode 48, Transcript

Our Tyler Technologies podcast explores a wide range of complex, timely, and important issues facing communities and the public sector. Expect approachable tech talk mixed with insights from subject matter experts and a bit of fun. Host and content marketing director Jeff Harrell – and other guest hosts – highlights the people, places, and technology making a difference. Give us listen today and subscribe.

Episode Summary

As we move deeper into 2022, we want to share the key themes in the public sector we'll be talking about. From our Tyler Tech Resource Center on Tylertech.com, to our Tyler Tech Podcast, these are themes impacting the public sector. To uncover these, the Tyler Tech Editorial Manager Meredith Trimble joins the podcast. She reveals each one, and goes into depth with relevant examples to illustrate why these are so important today.

Transcript

Meredith Trimble: So in this theme, driving cost, savings and operational efficiencies are key ways that we're going to see public sector agencies address this reality this year.

Jeff Harrell: From Tyler Technologies, it's the Tyler Tech podcast, where we talk about issues facing communities today and highlight the people, places, and technology, making a difference. My name is Jeff Harrell, I'm the director of content marketing, and I'm glad that you joined me. Well, we are now moving into late February, and so today we wanted to bring you the four key public sector themes that we are tracking for 2022. We create a lot of content on our resource center from our Tyler blog and our Tyler Tech podcast, as well as lots of thought leadership pieces and materials.

Jeff Harrell: So we wanted to bring you today, the four major key themes that we are tracking in the public sector. And to do that, we are bringing in our editorial manager, Meredith Trimble. You have heard from Meredith before on this podcast, but she runs the Tyler Tech blog as well as contributes for lots of other third party publications like ELGL. So today we're going to talk about the four key themes in the public sector for 2022. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Meredith Trimble. Well, Meredith welcome back to the Tyler Tech podcast.

Meredith Trimble: Thank you so much.

Jeff Harrell: Excited to have you back because we're at the beginning of 2022 and we're off on a new year, we're actually already in February, believe it or not, but today we're going to talk about four key public sector themes for 2022. And these are important because we'll be talking about these things throughout the year through a lot of the content that we create around this podcast and around our blog, on the Tyler Tech resource center and other ways. So super excited to find out what these four themes are. So let's just start from the top. What's the first major key theme for the public sector for 2022?

Meredith Trimble: Thank you, Jeff. So the first major theme is building resiliency, and I should say that we're not pulling these themes out of thin air, we've spent a lot of time at the beginning of the year, listening to public sector professionals and hearing what their challenges and concerns and goals are for the year. And so, through that, listening and being alongside of them, we've seen these recurring themes emerge already.

Building Resiliency

Jeff Harrell: So talk to us a little bit about that. So building resiliency, what exactly do we mean by that?

Meredith Trimble: Well, building resiliency has been center stage now probably from late 2020 and the onset of the crisis that demanded government respond quickly to those unexpected and changing circumstances in ways that we never could have predicted. So this is a theme that's been going on for a while, but I think what we're thinking now is, so how do you build a resilient government? Right? That's what everyone wants to know right now, because we're still in a complex and involving environment, but we now know that there are benefits to being prepared for the next unexpected crisis, whatever that may be.

Jeff Harrell: And I know governments were focused on in our resilient even before the pandemic came along. But do you feel like because of the pandemic that resiliency either showed itself or accelerated in the public sector?

Meredith Trimble: Those public sector organizations that had built in resiliency already in a variety of ways or who had a certain degree of preparedness, were more successful in navigating the immediate onset of the pandemic? So I think everybody collectively is thinking now, "We want to be able to fulfill our missions in any difficult time without missing a beat." And so, it's important still now, but it's also important when we start to look ahead to the future.

Jeff Harrell: Any specific examples that you can cite around building resiliency that we've discovered over the last, I guess, few months?

Meredith Trimble: Sure. I think when we think about the question, how do you build a resilient government? The short answer really is to utilize modern agile technology platforms. And those are ones that allow for quick scalability and flexibility. And we've seen a lot of examples of this. A modern ERP platform, for example, seamless integration of systems and workflows can help governments fulfill their missions in difficult times. I think if we can take a look at the City of Auburn, Maine, it closed its city hall building due to COVID 19 as did many other jurisdictions, but staff there were still able to perform payroll tasks, for example, because their ERP solution had already eliminated all of those paper based operations. It made remote workflows possible. So, what we have is employees submitting time sheets online, supervisors being able to approve them anytime from anywhere.

Meredith Trimble: And having that in place was a huge relief when they found themselves like many others unexpectedly working remotely. So that's an example that we've already seen a very achievable resiliency. I think it's probably also important to point out that, as dependence on digital systems grows, that's definitely where we're heading in the future, government operations are becoming increasingly vulnerable to things beyond the pandemic that would be disruptive. So, hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, ransomware, all of these types of things are challenging the ability of governments and school districts too, to provide the services that they provide to their communities. I have a good example on one of those non pandemic challenges that reiterates the need for resiliency. A few years back, the City of Newton, Kansas, experienced an internal system crash, and each of the city's five critical servers along with their backup units too, I believe failed without warning. So in an instant, all of their information was lost. To any public sector staff member that's just about anyone's worst nightmare, but luckily they had a disaster recovery system in place that provided them with a work environment for continuity of service while their servers were down, and it also helped them restore all of their lost data. So that story has a happy ending because of that preparation and resiliency.

Jeff Harrell: And we like to say here at Tyler that, even when the pandemic hit, governments didn't close, and they didn't close because they are so resilient. So I love the fact that we started off these four key themes with building resiliency. I think that makes total sense. Meredith, based on that, what role does cloud play in building this resiliency?

Meredith Trimble: Well, I think on this topic, everybody has to be thinking about opportunities the cloud affords, and Jeff you've had really great in depth episodes about the cloud on this podcast. So I don't think we need to elaborate too much here, but your listeners know that cloud-based solutions enhance security and provide more diverse disaster recovery. So cloud-based technology solutions, they're super responsive, they're not bottlenecked by inflexible or aging hardware, and they give all users remote access and even mobile access to that critical data and systems in any circumstance. So, I suppose what we're talking about here is future proofing, the public sector. Implementing digital tools, having access to information from anywhere at any time, and that's where the cloud comes in, and instituting a solid internal data culture, those are all real ways any size agency can future proof their operations. And I think we'll be seeing a lot of stories emerge this year around those points.

Citizen Experience

Jeff Harrell: Love it. Building resiliency, the first key theme in the public sector. Well, what's key thing number two, Meredith?

Meredith Trimble: Number two is citizen experience. And this one is just huge coming out of the pandemic where it wasn't just nice to have information and services available to residents online. It was an absolute necessity. So making interactions with government easier and more accessible, it really gets to both engagement and equity, which is another thing that I think we'll be hearing a lot about in 2022. One of the things at Tyler we've taken a really in depth look at is how governments have to think about engaging all major generations that make up a community. And your listeners might recognize some of this, but for example, nearly two thirds of boomers and Gen X, and I put myself in that latter category, find or receive information about government services on a website. And that actually holds true for me, but more than half of millennials and Gen Z prefer to find that information on social media.

Meredith Trimble: So what's interesting there is that, counterintuitively millennials and Gen Z actually receive a lot more information from government, and they receive it more frequently than Gen X, way more so than boomers, because of their higher usage of those real time, digital communication channels. So in 2022, I think we're going to see a lot of movement more into those digital communication channels and giving more opportunities for residents to engage with their governments through self-service. And I should call out that there are some great podcast episodes around our research on that that delve into each generation in turn.

Raising the Bar

Jeff Harrell: Yeah, I would say the first four actually of this podcast, were all about taking each of those four major generations that make up the major part of the workforce today. So check those out, episodes number 1, 2, 3, and four. Meredith, I wonder, because in our personal lives, we hear about the easy button and there's an app for that, and so I wonder if the bar has been raised from other areas of our life, we have those same expectations that we have dealing with things in our personal life that we now have when we're dealing with government. Do you think that's true?

Meredith Trimble: I think that's absolutely true. And citizen experience is so much about self-service, and what I mean by that is those public facing engagement tools that improve the citizen experience. When people interact with government, they want to do it on their phones, online, at any time of day, from wherever they might be. And so, those types of interactions can be filing a permit or paying a traffic ticket online, or a utility bill online, or submitting a report on a pothole and following the status of that report, even applying for a marriage license or attending a virtual court hearing and so on and so on.

Meredith Trimble: Anyway, even through many major life events, anytime a resident interacts with government, if that can be done easily online remotely, I think that's where people want to be. I think one of my favorite examples of where this is going on and going well is in Mississippi, they have an online scheduling tool, which I just love. It allows the public to schedule in person phone or virtual appointments with agencies like the department of public safety, and on the agency side, it's fantastic because it gives the agencies a way to communicate with the public through automated text and email reminders. It automatically collects digitally all the information forms and even payments ahead of visits, and that saves everybody just so much time and hassle.

Jeff Harrell: There's a lot of great examples there of citizen experience that I would reference people back to episode 43, you mentioned virtual court. We actually did an episode. I think it's called are virtual courts here to stay? And you can hear a little bit about how virtual court is really like you just said, it enabled the citizen experience people that maybe need to show up to court, can't take a day off of work, don't have transportation, gives them that access and that ease of experience that they wouldn't normally have. So, that's episode number 43, are virtual courts here to stay?

Meredith Trimble: Right. And another judicial example beyond virtual hearings takes place in the Oregon judicial department, self-represented litigants there, or even just members of the public who aren't involved in a case can fill out forms correctly on their own because the Oregon judicial department has this web-based platform that simplifies documents into plain language questions, which is just such a great example of citizen service.

Doing More With Less

Jeff Harrell: Love it. So building resiliency was number one. Number two is citizen experience. What is number three? What's our key theme number three?

Meredith Trimble: Number three is doing more with less. So, this actually is a big tent, but the public sector landscape is uncertain, to say the least, public health, social and political situations on the ground are evolving in different ways in different locations across the country and people aren't too confident about new funding sources coming in. So in this theme, driving cost, savings, and operational efficiencies are key ways that we're going to see public sector agencies address this reality this year. And I think one of the first things we need to talk about here is personnel resources. A few years back at Tyler, we were talking about the public sector skills gap, and that was occurring due to the silver tsunami and retiring baby boomers. But now the great resignation is affecting the public sector just as it is the private sector. So that loss of institutional knowledge is becoming an even bigger issue, actually Route Fifty and American City & County, both just ran really detailed articles about this trend. And they reported that over half of state and local workers are considering leaving their jobs.

Jeff Harrell: Good. Great.

Meredith Trimble: Yes. And they're going as far as to say the public sector is facing a workforce crisis. So part of 2022 will be answering how to effectively address this. And to be honest, the answer is pretty much the same as it was when we were just trying to address the retirees, agencies should use data to empower the people who are there.

Jeff Harrell: Meredith, what do you mean by that?

Meredith Trimble: I think if we want to break it down a little, an operational change for this new reality can be as simple as using technology to free up people's time. So leveraging technology provides practical strategies for leveling up and training both new and senior employees, and it makes data consumable and actionable in ways that free up all kinds of resources. At Tyler, we've often used the three legged stool example, which is really the ability of government organizations to effectively use data to weather exactly these types of challenges rests on a three-legged stool. And the first leg is the data itself, which is always going to be there. The second leg is the technology that's in place for staff to access and use and communicate around. And the third leg is that employee skills leg. So if the data's there and the technology is there, but people can't bridge the gap between the two, the organization might be in a little bit of trouble. So the idea is to capitalize on data's potential and the efficiencies that that can bring.

Jeff Harrell: Oh, that's great. Meredith, any specific examples of that?

Meredith Trimble: Sure. If we want to move from the theoretical to the practical, we can take a look at agencies that are using that tech leg and the skills leg and turning to mobile tools to gain efficiency. The Springfield Police Department in Illinois, for example, uses time so much more efficiently with things like electronic citations and crash and stop data tools. Peoria County, Illinois is another great example, that story's on our resource center. They digitized historical records creating so many efficiencies that today the office that wants staffed 10 employees to manage those recordings now only needs four. And those available personnel were not fired, they were redirected to other areas of strategic importance. There's also a really neat federal space story. We're hearing from agencies that legacy tech systems and federal agencies are eating up full-time equivalents in a way that just is not sustainable. One large federal agency was using nine FTEs just to maintain a legacy system. But when they finally moved to technology that provided automatically those integrations and automated workflows and enabled data sharing, all of those FTEs were reallocated to work. That just made more sense in terms of bettering performance and moving the agency forward.

Jeff Harrell: Meredith, we were in Mesquite, Texas, one time in the permit office. I remember being in a back room and they said, "This room used to be filled completely with blueprints and paper, but since they digitized their permit department, that now is a click of a button." So instead of having to comb through multiple layers of paper, they were able to, because it was electronic and digitize, click of a button, saving them so much time. I love the fact that we're not talking about replacing people, we're talking about becoming more efficient, so you can leverage that time into more valuable activities.

Meredith Trimble: Right. And even when you're thinking in that example, you had probably bankers boxes and file cabinets full of paper and scanning and indexing those records online, also eliminates the need for all that paper and all that storage, and the costs associated with that. So I think you actually just brought up another good point, which is this is not just savings in terms of staff time, but there are real dollar savings here when we talk about these digital efficiencies. Recently, New Castle County, Delaware actually moved to a cloud ERP solution and just eliminating hardware costs and ongoing maintenance and operations costs even no longer having to outsource asset reporting has saved them easily, a $100,000 annually.

Cybersecurity

Jeff Harrell: Love it. Great example. Well, that's great Meredith. So that leads us to our fourth and final key theme for 2022. What would that be?

Meredith Trimble: The fourth and final theme will come as a surprise to nobody, it is cyber security. Security threats to government systems, as we know, increase every year. The favored tools of cyber criminals will continue to focus on things like social engineering and hacking and malware. And in 2022, it's actually estimated that organizations will fall victim to a ransomware attack as often as every 11 seconds. So we've got that in the background, and at the same time, agencies are tasked with ensuring the protection of public information, hugely important against security incidents, while feeling all this pressure to meet evermore demands and add more capabilities. So in 2022, I expect agencies to spend more time on building advanced cybersecurity cultures within their organizations. That includes things like threat readiness, threat detection, managed response. All of those are factors that will help protect organizations in the environment that we're in.

Jeff Harrell: Yeah, cybersecurity is such a big one, Meredith, and I would refer people back to the episode just two weeks ago, episode number 47. We did a podcast on the 2022 cybersecurity themes, much like we're doing with the key themes for the public sector, we talked about some of the things that are happening in the cybersecurity space in 2022, which is ever changing and ever moving. So check out that episode, that's episode number 47.

Meredith Trimble: And speaking of resources, maturing your cybersecurity program takes time. And sometimes it's really difficult to know where to start. And so, one other thing that we have is an online tool that will help leaders identify gaps in their current cybersecurity practices and provide recommendations for maturing their programs. It's on our resource center, and it's called evaluate your cybersecurity readiness. And it's just an online, it's an online tool for people to use to do some self assessment.

Jeff Harrell: Well, Meredith this has been great. We've talked about the four key themes for 2022 and we create content around these key themes, but what's another great resource that they could go to to find out more?

Meredith Trimble: I'm really excited to hear how Tyler's clients creatively tackle all of these themes throughout the year. So, I hope your listeners also subscribe to our resource center because that's where they can read about the good things their peers are doing in these themes throughout the year. They can get curated content right to their inboxes from our resource center. And I'm positive that that content will contain all of these themes.

Jeff Harrell: And to find that resource center, just go to Tylertech.com at the top of the page, just click on resources and the drop down, take you to the resource center. You can search by keyword, you can filter by lots of different ways to really find that key piece of information that you're really looking for.

Meredith Trimble: Right. And I think too, before we close, if you look at these themes together, you'll notice that each one ladders up to digital transformation in some way, it's all about strategically creating that modern integrated digital infrastructure, not only to face immediate challenges, but to also make sure we're ready for whatever it is that comes next. So there's a commonality here in these themes that really stands out relative to what's weighing on the minds of public sector leaders.

Jeff Harrell: Well, Meredith thank you so much. These are four key themes for 2022 in the public sector. We'll be talking about these all year. I know you'll be talking about these all year too, as well, Meredith. Thanks so much for this insight and information and thanks again for joining the Tyler Tech podcast.

Meredith Trimble: Thank you very much.

Jeff Harrell: Well, I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. Meredith, really has her finger on the pulse on what's happening in the public sector. She writes for our Tyler blog, but she's also a former elected official. And so, really understands the public sector really, really well. I got a lot of good insight from her and we're excited to talk about those four key themes throughout 2022. Well, thanks so much for joining me. We drop a new podcast episode every other Monday, so make sure you subscribe to the Tyler Tech podcast. Until next time, this is Jeff Harrell, director of content marketing for Tyler Technologies, we'll talk to you soon.