With the global pandemic now slowly distancing in our rear-view mirror, organizations and individuals are rightly contemplating the impact already realized and considering the potential of future events on our experiences in public locations and their ability to recover and more importantly efficiently manage any future challenges.

That realization and reflection is especially true in our Public Services, the institutions and agencies that make our world revolve – health, government, and legal systems.

Much of our interaction with these critical features of society pre-covid had become normalized, with the reflection that they were under funded, and experiences those consuming and delivering were incredibly frustrated with.

Heavily exposed by the pandemic and struggling to come to terms with almost two years of backlog, temporary bridging, and attempting normal, our Intelligent Automation Center of Excellence imagined how could we solve for the challenges today, and mitigate the reoccurrence in the future?

We asked ourselves:
1. What would we do differently in public spaces?
2. How can we help improve both the consumer and deliverer experiences?
3. What impact would these changes have in our society?
4. Could we make these experiences resilient for future events?
5. Can we blur the lines between the traditional physical locations and a digital experience?

When we think about public experiences, these often run on highly manual processing, systems and eco systems that are ageing, in organizations running services where it is hard to find the investment to modernize. These circumstances leave both the organization and its consumers left with frustration, countless hours of waste, waiting in line at the bank, courthouse, healthcare spaces. People managing complex critical processes, job satisfaction and retention challenges, all of which propagate from the individual into the wider society and its economy.

The Avanade Intelligent Automation Center of Excellence took all of this and envisioned a public experience with the delight of a smartphone store.

Using the Power Platform Suite to demonstrate what a user’s experience at the Department of Motor Vehicles could be like. Focusing on the experience of both parties in the process experience, working with efficient and flexible solutions that can integrate and alleviate large investment for improvement, and imagining a process and system less dependent on the physical location.

On our journey, which took weeks to develop, we discovered we made additional human impacts, by encouraging inclusivity through breaking down language options, removing accessibility challenges through talk to text and translation services, virtualizing the process eliminating bias, improving the experience of all service users, and created a more welcoming workplace experience for the public sector employees.

Automating public experiences is extremely powerful, especially in recent years where the pandemic created huge backlogs, created pressure on the public sector to cut operating costs, created a need to optimize the space with limited human resources.

Automating these spaces meet the challenges of scaling up and scaling down, create a new attractive workplace for talent, enable people to serve through future challenges and help them do more with their resources.

To find out more, contact us.