Wipro: Shape of Public Service in a Continued Pandemic World
Last 5 quarters of the Pandemic have been devastating on public health, economy and availability of Public Services across the world. Frequent lockdowns have exposed the dependency on physical presence. While the Businesses have responded quickly and taken measures to reduce this dependency, Govt Services have largely been lagging in this and have resorted to Appointment based Services, Video Conferences. In this Post-Covid world, question is not if there will be a new virus but when. In this reality, public services executives need to quickly come up with a solution on how the governments across the world should continue to serve its Citizen effectively, Safely and timely.
Public Service – Move from Siloed Monoliths to Connected Micro Services
There has been a steady move towards digitalization of services across Govt Departments. The pace, while not optimal, has been driven by the Individual departments with Initiatives to improve service delivery. There have been very little centralized efforts to provide common services which cut across the different departments/ functions etc, but largely, different departments are acting on their initiatives. This results in a lot of siloed innovations but ends up with varied experiences for citizens. So, How do we allow these Innovation pockets to continue while centralizing the core experience of the Govt – Citizen services, making them proactive, Anytime, Anywhere and truly paperless to take advantage of what today’s Digital Technologies offer.
A few Design patterns/principles may show a way forward:
Microservices based Architecture – In lot of ways, Traditional Govt Departments are like Siloed applications- Privacy, Security, Integration concerns keep them that way. Data created is owned by the Applications (Departments) and any integration happens through Events published. Individual Microservices based applications keep the freedom to innovate, share only the data that they can and should, to enable the Overall Application functionality.
Don’t Repeat yourself (DRY) – DRY is one of the oldest software design patterns focused on improving design and reusability. Same principle applied to Govt Services would mean “Don’t ask the same information again”. Govt department are the creators and owners of most of the information required by them for services to be offered to Citizen and there is no reason to continue to ask for data, it already has. Some examples of this data can be identity Data, a driver License, a Passport etc. This Data can be shared with other departments through the events published keeping the Privacy related concerns satisfied.
Inversion of Control/ Dependency Injection – Another one of the core design principle is dependency injection, where instead of caller requesting for a service, Service provider automatically provides the service to the caller when needed. In the context of Govt services, this translates to providing Proactive services based on life events taking place. Instead of Citizen requesting a Service, Govt departments, proactively reach out to citizen to provide the appropriate Services when eligible.
These are few of the many design principles that can be applied. Need of the hour is to take a fresh look at the shape and form of Govt Services, a collaborative approach between Govt Departments and Private Services providers. Technology to enable this is already available, it is up to us to craft it to innovative use.
This article was written by Nitesh Jain, VP & Cluster Head UK & Ireland, Wipro and his colleague Subrat Gaur, CTO Travel & Public Services, Wipro.
Nitesh Jain, VP & Cluster Head UK & Ireland: Biography:
Nitesh is responsible for P&L, growth, strategy and overall performance of Retail, CPG, Mfg, Tech, Travel, Public Sector and Media business portfolio.
With more than 23 years of experience in leading different areas of technology led transformations. Nitesh has been leading the practices and business portfolios in the areas of Retail, Consumer Goods, Analytics, BI, Trade promotions, Foreign exchange trading solutions and corporate performance management practice at Wipro and other organizations. He has been Actively engaged in field of strategy, M&A, Consulting, business analytics, performance management, data warehousing, implementing strategic analytical solutions for Retail, CPG, Manfacturing, Healthcare, Medical devices and Banking/Financial Services domain. Read more...
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