Contactless Government Is Booming: 10 Ways to Keep the Momentum Going

This article was originally written by Mark Toner for Governing.com.

With the resilience of COVID 19, “contactless” government services are gaining momentum with the provision of a range of digital and “no-touch” public services from contactless transit systems to remote visits by social workers, and chatbots at call centers. As governments continue rolling out more services to facilitate interaction with their constituents, they need to focus on 10 areas to maintain the momentum;

1. Leadership Commitment: Governments need to make digital delivery a priority and invest political capital into it.
2. Thinking beyond digital delivery: Governments need to think of ways to reduce friction points for services that can’t be delivered digitally.
3. Developing digital identities: Governments need to enable the use of unified digital identities that allow citizens to use a single login to access services across all departments and services.
4. Refining Remote Work: Governments need to redesign systems and processes, such as performance management, supervision, teaming, to fit with the remote work model.
5. Rethinking public meetings: Governments need to refine meeting laws and embrace remote meetings.
6. Addressing the digital divide: Governments need to make an effort to connect citizens to ensure their participation in the economy and society.
7. Maintaining options: Governments need to adopt a long-terms strategy to ensure citizens have a variety of options besides digital services.
8. Privacy and security: Governments need to think about how to ensure privacy laws are being followed as they implement next-generation contactless technology, such as the facial recognition systems.
9. Budgeting priorities: Government need to ensure that contactless services remain safe from budgeting cuts.
10. Look ahead to “no-touch” government: Governments need to move from “from doing digital to being digital”.  They need to shift to proactive service delivery by providing services automatically without requiring constituents to apply for services such as birth certificates.

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