Meeting the Business Challenges of Government
Written by: Laura Ipsen
In these times of global economic uncertainty, government leaders—from federal to municipal—are being forced to make tough choices. As leader of Microsoft’s Worldwide Public Sector, I’ve spoken with many government leaders around critical issues in education, healthcare, public safety, and the environment. Without a doubt, the most important aspect of my job is understanding the technology solutions our customers need to reinvent how they do business. No matter how large or small the entity or their party affiliation, there is a common theme to their goals: in these times of austerity and uncertainty, governments have a singular focus on not only doing more with less, but NEW with less so they can compete globally, grow jobs, and give their constituents an opportunity to succeed.
Governments today, much like the private sector, are dynamic—full of energy, moving faster, and constantly changing. Government leaders and elected officials have to balance growing constituent needs with reduced budgets and increased oversight. Futuristic governments are combining technology and creativity to deliver wide-ranging functionality, drive innovative processes, and do NEW with less. Microsoft is uniquely positioned to help public organizations transform into connected, agile, transparent organizations that enable the people who serve the public to realize their full potential.
For example, the Dehli Integrated Multi-Modal Transit System was struggling with manual processes, siloed systems and disparate applications that were “putting the brakes” on their ability to mobilize their 16 million citizens. Through Microsoft Dynamics AX, they re-engineered internal processes, consolidated data, and eliminated redundancies – making them faster, more efficient and able to deliver greater value to the many public transport projects across Delhi and the citizens who need them.
Microsoft delivers innovative, proactive business solutions that connect organizations to their people, their data, and their IT ecosystem. Our solutions enable organizations to deploy individual business scenarios or a fully integrated business suite, with the flexibility to meet tomorrow’s challenges. In particular, Microsoft Dynamics delivers innovative application scenarios today—solutions for the public sector that offer out-of-the-box visualization of tasks, business processes, and organizational performance measurements accessed via multiple devices using a familiar Microsoft interface.
To succeed in today’s diverse environments, governments must address these new realities, which are also the design principles fueling the Microsoft approach to our innovative business solutions. We’re doing our job well when we carefully listen to our public sector customers, truly understand their needs, and build solutions that work for them. We’ve tried to capture these solutions in a concept we call “Dynamic Government,” and we seek to support local, regional, and national governments at every step on their transformative path. I look forward to this ongoing conversation and most of all, hearing about your challenges and collaborating with you to solve them.
Post originally written for Forbes.com: http://www.forbes.com/sites/microsoftdynamics/2013/01/23/meeting-the-business-challenges-of-government/
