Client Portals for integrated service delivery

Are you a community service provider? You need to know about Mobile Cloud Self-Service Client Portals for integrated service delivery.

Many government organisations and large businesses are embracing the need for strong self-service and mobile solutions to better engage with customers and clients. The front office has gone digital, which has required a rethink of the way people connect, transact and engage with institutions, governments and companies, and how the customers and organisations gain value from this engagement.

It’s a big job for an organisation to do this and requires a radical shift in infrastructure to support and fund these new ways of engaging. Organisations have had to become integrated, flexible, streamlined and agile.

Four major trends are forcing this change:

1. Globalisation – the worldwide movement towards economic integration
2. Data explosion – the sheer volume of data that organisations have to process
3. Mobility – the population’s constant connection via social media and networks
4. Demographic shifts – changing birth rates and people on the move.

People are empowered as never before due to mobile devices and social media. Millions of tweets are now sent via Twitter each day, while 30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook each month. Wikipedia alone hosts an incredible 17 million articles.

Across the globe, mobile devices are now the consumer’s preferred channel for accessing the internet and conducting commerce. Businesses must have cloud-enabled business processes to ensure integrated service delivery. But many Australian community service providers are without a digital strategy that includes a strong mobile experience. They are the ones at risk of being left behind.

Going mobile: M-Commerce, L-Commerce, E-Commerce

Three drivers are creating an opportunity for social technology to create real value:

1. Pressure to build and share expertise to build safer communities
2. Increasingly influential and vocal citizens
3. Growing demand for 24/7 and mobile connectedness.

Mobility is the catalyst for social business, where employees, consumers and customers engage to improve the experience of an organisation. Mobile integration brings greater consumer usage and satisfaction. But this mobility also creates challenges for organisations hoping to use the power of mobile devices. That’s because, unlike many traditional websites, mobile apps provide greater immediacy of engagement, they run on unstable networks, and they are hard to make compelling and easy to use.

Content has to be pulled from multiple sources, but choreographing information from various repositories and applications is challenging. Managing business-to-consumer apps can also create difficulties around governance, distribution, version management, and AppStore Terms of Service. Security is also different, as there are greater risks of exposing applications and data on small, light and always-on portable devices, and there are greater authentication challenges associated with content mashups. But because apps are always on, they provide opportunities to deliver greater value.

To enable the promise of mobile, organisations will need to create cloud-based collaboration platforms.

Meeting the challenge

If your community organisation is to move towards the cloud, there are a few stages to get there:

1. Consolidating physical infrastructure
2. Virtualising servers and applications for increased automation
3. Standardising operations
4. Automating of repeatable tasks
5. Leveraging shared infrastructure
6. Cloud-based provisioning for standardised workloads.

The greatest challenges faced by organisations moving to the cloud are related to governance. IT governance is even more critical in a cloud environment where privacy must be protected and accountability assured. The cloud demands IT takes on a service orientation. But cloud computing can support greater levels of trust, transparency and horizontal accountability, while facilitating standardisation of operations and support resources, demanding new skill sets.

All organisations can learn from the experience of government departments and large businesses that have adopted an open platform that integrates service delivery. Community groups who wish to follow suit and effectively manage this transformational change have to adopt cultural changes in their organisation to ensure collaboration, transparency and fluidity. The experience they offer has to be integrated, meaning it can be accessed anytime, anywhere and on any device. They have to adopt new leadership techniques that lead to social trust, and they have to ensure good governance. Adopting cloud-based collaboration platforms for service delivery, engaging in organisational transformation, optimising service delivery and leveraging big data takes work, but the benefits to the consumer and organisation are great.

So where to from here?

INTRODUCING FlowPoint: A Cloud-Based Portal for Customer Engagement and Self-service

Please call a Datanova Digital Business Solution Architect on 1300 552 166 and book your complimentary Webinar or alternatively send an email to Datanova. You can book a webinar straight from our booking form here and we will get back to you shortly.