Under pressure from the pandemic, staid bureaucracies are becoming rapid responders.

Under pressure from the pandemic, staid bureaucracies are becoming rapid responders.

Digital transformation is tough. And it’s especially tough for governments, large universities, and other public organizations.

They serve millions of people and face a gauntlet of bureaucratic, regulatory, and cultural obstacles. Not only do they need to envision how the world will be in a decade or more, they must also prove they’re on track every year to keep their programs funded.

Lately, more public sector organizations in the U.S. and abroad are rising to the challenge. One striking example is Arizona State University, the largest university in the U.S.

Closed campus, connected classrooms

During the COVID-19 outbreak, ASU was able to shift its 60,000 students to remote learning setups in a matter of days, thanks to a forced march to the cloud over the past two years.

ASU made 5,000 courses, from public speaking to nuclear engineering, available online. Between March 14 and 21, the number of daily classes and other meetings held on Zoom jumped from 603 to more than 10,000.

Pulling that off without a major hiccup was the result of a digital-technology transition that started a decade ago, says ASU Chief Information Officer Lev Gonick.

For years, the campus IT team had experimented with a variety of cloud strategies. When Gonick arrived in 2017, one of his first moves was to implement a single strategy to address all of the university’s IT needs. Since then, the team has moved hundreds of other applications to the cloud, including the learning management system for delivering classes electronically, and the student information system for tracking student’s grades, scholarship, and other data.

“Not a single major piece of that digital, remote-delivery system sits inside the campus. That gave us a pretty amazing ability to flip the switch to the cloud,” says Gonick, who notes that traffic on the old enterprise network fell to 25% of the norm as cloud-traffic spiked.

Public sector progress

A wide variety of government agencies are making similar progress in digitizing citizen services. Estonians do their taxes from a prepopulated form, rather than a blank one, and can vote and see their health records online. The governments of India, the EU, and the state of Utah are working on digital identity systems that make it easier for citizens to access public services with far fewer authentication headaches.

AI-powered chatbots help citizens get help with non-life-threatening health issues, while a virtual assistant named Roxy answers roughly 85% of the questions typically asked by callers to Australia’s Department of Human Services

The United States Digital Service, created after the disastrous launch of the healthcare.gov website in 2014, has helped several agencies rethink essential services and adopt modern software-development methodologies such as Agile and DevOps.

In light of this progress, the public sector has a long way to go. Even as many government agencies spend more than half of their budgets on obsolete legacy systems, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed glaring weaknesses.

Stilll, Gonick remains an optimist about the digital transformation of government, if only because governments are rapidly running out of other options. Once agencies realize the benefits of cloud-based platforms and more automated, integrated workflows, he says, they won’t go back. “We’ve burned the bridge on 99% of what we do,” he says. “Anything that’s in the cloud as a result of COVID is going to stay there.”