Navigating Seismic Change in the Public Sector

How can governments keep up with the accelerated pace of change? 

According to a new industry report from Accenture and Workday, “Navigating Seismic Change in the Public Sector,” many government leaders see digital transformation as essential to their ability to respond, pivot, and recover from change and instability.

Digital transformation and other innovations, however, don’t always happen quickly within state and local government agencies. But with challenges related to the global pandemic, climate change, political polarization, economic uncertainty, technological advancement, and demographic shifts, governments must transform to maintain their vital role. 

As government leaders strive to meet the needs of both their employees and their increasingly digitally savvy constituents, they need to update legacy systems, policies, and practices that prevent them from keeping up with a rapidly changing world. 

The pandemic brought this reality into sharp focus. “The public sector’s core mission is to serve constituents during times of need—and COVID-19 only intensified it,” says Ryan Gaetz, Accenture’s Workday global public service lead. “Public service organizations are recognizing some legacy systems are unable to meet the core mission. That’s a pretty clear sign that change is urgently needed.”

The report takes a closer look at how finance, human resources (HR), and technology leaders in the public sector can rise to the occasion by driving changes that will prepare their agencies to thrive in the future—with the benefit of delivering modern services, increasing transparency, and boosting citizen engagement.

Change Through a Finance Lens

To lead through change, government CFOs want to understand how disruption can impact business models, assess risk, and use financial and operational analytics to determine where to invest and innovate. Modernizing an organization’s tools to enable planning, execution, and analysis in a single cloud-based system is critical to providing the visibility necessary to draw insights and make accurate predictions.

In Denver, for example, data was siloed across a complicated integration of 23 legacy servers and five core systems. When the city embraced Workday, a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, it was able to create a single source of truth that allows finance leaders to view accounting, budgets, grants, HR, and payroll data in one place. 

Change Through an HR Lens

To improve worker engagement and create a higher-performing culture, public sector organizations need a talent management system that accelerates hiring and onboarding, identifies and fills skills gaps, highlights total rewards and development opportunities, and provides employee self-service to help individuals plan and achieve their professional goals.

In Pierce County, Washington, for example, replacing paper processes with employee self-service saved the county government $100,000 annually while freeing the HR team to focus on more strategic initiatives. Not only that, but Workday’s easy-to-use interface produced high adoption rates as most employees regularly login and use the system to complete job-related tasks, according to the city.

Change Through an IT Lens

Just as public sector CFO and CHRO roles are evolving, so are the industry’s IT demands. Rather than simply keeping the lights on and the systems running smoothly, innovative IT leaders help their peers understand how to effectively use technology to address business needs and deliver strategic insight.

During COVID-19, as much of the country shifted to remote work, a new test for ERP presented itself. Cities needed to equip their workforces with mobile apps that allowed workers to access self-service capabilities from anywhere. For example, when the city of Vancouver, Washington, adopted Workday’s cloud-native ERP, the city manager and fire chief accessed the mobile app on the first day to begin approving time off, viewing payslips, creating expense reports, and managing their team.

To learn more about how many successful governments of the future are building innovative ecosystems today, and what leaders can do to manage change and set themselves apart, read “Navigating Seismic Change in the Public Sector.”