The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred innovation and collaboration across several sectors, including healthcare, food service, and technology. For example, innovators from all walks of life across the globe have begun creating new kinds of ventilators and even a hands-free door pull made from a 3-D printer to help combat the spread of the virus. This innovation is crucially important and requires the private and public sectors to work together to ensure that it is accessible to those who need it most.
The pandemic has shined a light on the importance of digital transformation. While our federal government has been open to innovation and collaboration with digital transformation at the core of many initiatives, some smaller agencies are now forced to take a look at moving to the cloud and offering access to services for workers and constituents from anywhere.
Therefore, those in public sector sales should keep modernization top-of-mind when talking to agencies, fielding questions, and working toward aligning their technology investment roadmap to agency goals and the overall administrative agenda. Value-added resellers (VARs) should ask whether customers are harnessing the full power and potential of technology, data, and innovation to advance those goals, regardless of whether that agency focuses on education, homeland security, or another area of our government.
In the age of a pandemic, we are seeing agencies that are leapfrogging the incremental changes of investing in technology that will transform systems into a digital age. Within weeks, agencies of all sizes needed to move employees online to work remotely. Constituent services, from renewal of licenses to land contracts to unemployment services, needed to be made available online.
Health agencies needed to set up remote clinics, testing and intake areas, while enabling many employees to work remotely and making patient data accessible, but secure. Open-sourcing, collaboration, and partnering – taking advantage of today’s technology and data innovation ecosystem — are methods that the government is using to speed up innovation.
This speed to innovation is required in today’s environment, and VARs today can help customers achieve it. The need is there. The technology is available. We are now in a perfect storm where public sector customers need to embrace digital transformation. In many cases this means moving more quickly and securely to the cloud, enabling work from anywhere with collaboration solutions, and ensuring business continuity.
Technology, data, and collaboration between organizations today are spurring new innovation and advancing digital transformation at a speed faster than ever before. This will rely on investments in 21st century infrastructure, such as broadband or electronic health records, a move to the cloud, and will include leveraging innovation to meet national priorities. It likely will include the public and private sectors working together with the American people to advance a major priority of the country, such as combating COVID-19.
