Granicus fueling digital transformation in the public sector

The pandemic has accelerated digital innovations multi-fold. ‘Being Digital’ became essential for all industries and the public sector had a lot of catching up to do. While the public sector was making small advancements in the digital sphere, the public sector offered digital experiences to people that raised all the standards. Citizens today expect a more sophisticated, user-friendly digital service experience that is on par with those offered by private sectors. Granicus is a fully integrated, drag-and-drop platform that allows public administrations to quickly digitize, track, and enhance every step of their services without having to write bespoke codes. With multiple acquisitions over the past, Granicus is equipped to inform, engage, and serve their stakeholders with an outstanding comprehensive SaaS cloud platform that ties together digital communication, website, and mobile apps that are designed specifically to create intelligent governments. With the right technology and digital strategy,  Granicus continue to transform the legacy system with simplicity, intuitiveness, scalability, and service delivery by keeping the citizens at the centre of service. By offering the industry’s leading cloud-based solutions for communications, web content, meeting and management, and digital services to over 5,000 public sector organizations, Granicus helps turn government missions into these quantifiable realities.

In a brief chat with CXOToday, Ranga Shetty, General Manager, Granicus, India shares more insights on how Granicus is helping governments connect with their citizens better, the latest innovations at their R&D centre in Bengaluru, and his vision for the future.

1. Can you briefly explain what Granicus is as a whole?

Ans: Headquartered in Denver, Granicus is the first and largest provider of government technology to leverage a cutting-edge cloud platform to communicate with the people it serves. The platform includes interactions, feedback, records management, and service delivery to create a user-friendly digital experience that is powered by a cloud-first, data-driven, highly secure platform. Granicus has provided the leading cloud-based solutions in the market for features including communications, online content, meeting management, and digital services to more than 5,000 government organisations, enabling them to turn their missions into quantifiable realities. Granicus was established in 1999 with the intention of empowering government agencies through infrastructure, scalability, and security.

2. What are some of the digital transformation strategies Granicus uses?

Ans: Granicus’ dedication to innovation is the foundation of its success in the market. Our multi-tenant cloud solutions are revolutionising how citizens, corporations, and governments communicate. We have systems in extremely secure government-focused colocation data centres, on Azure from Microsoft, and AWS from Amazon. Massive volumes of data are generated by our systems, and we can give our users incredibly useful insights by using data science.

Examples include offering insights into vaccination hesitancy to assist US governments and towns in ensuring that their citizens receive the COVID19 vaccine. Finding businesses that are not in compliance with regulations is another application for machine learning. We plan to make significant investments in data science over the coming years. A strategic imperative is to promote data sharing and interoperability between our systems. We have created a publish-and-subscribe infrastructure that is immensely scalable, extremely fault-tolerant, and can handle millions of transactions per hour as data travels over our networks.

3. How does Granicus cater to transforming citizens and the experience of government workers?

Ans: Government services and other services in general have become more approachable, easy, and effective thanks in large part to technology. Granicus cater to transforming citizens and the experience of government workers by:

1. Streamlining Operations: Thanks to technology, users may effectively collaborate with one another over great distances, and since technical tools are so widely used, they can work almost anywhere. Automation of regular business operations frees up staff to focus on tasks requiring greater oversight or care.
2. Increasing efficiencies with approvals and submissions: Because more resources are available at the click of a mouse, technology frequently speeds up decision-making. It boosts productivity when it comes to submissions and approvals. Additionally, it takes less manual labour to finish a task. Automation is essential for getting rid of unnecessary steps and reducing manual work that could cause delays.
3. The power of platform: A tightly connected platform that generates incremental value through cross-family implementation, Granicus is more than just a collection of products:
4. Fulfils promise as a trusted single vendor-of-choice
5. Allows full adoption at the customer’s pace

• Covers every step of the customer’s digital journey

1. Provides a full set of APIs that ensures interoperability with existing systems – and future proofs the platform.
2. Interactive two-way channel: No matter the time or location, a two-way communication channel guarantees that the user is always connected to the service.

4. What are the main challenges in adopting a digital transformation in the public sector?

Ans: Governments are embracing digital transformation’s potential to deliver better services more affordably today. Digital technologies are disruptive by nature. They alter both how individuals use services and how businesses deliver them. It applies to the public sector just as much as the private sector, as we have shown. This poses two difficulties:

1. Public sector organisations need to embrace change and proactively expand their digital reach,
2. The technology must allow omni-channel workflows so that even non-digital users can take advantage of digitization.

5. Briefly explain the role of AI and ML in the Government and Public Sector.

Ans: The government and public sector generate vast quantities of data. If properly used this data can provide insights that can dramatically transform governance making it more efficient and citizen-friendly. For example, semantic analysis on feedback and surveys from residents can help authorities derive meaningful insights and draw conclusions on preference and needs of the public. Pattern analysis can help uncover violations of regulation that negatively affect communities or cause revenue leakage for government bodies. Predictive analytics can be very useful for modelling the impact of proposed policies before they are legislated. Thus you can see that AI/ML can have a transformative impact on governance.