Digital transformation has the potential to deliver government services more effectively, transparently, and cost-effectively. Interest in new technology is high, and best practices are rapidly emerging. However, agencies need to be sure that they put management checks and tools in place, so they meet the wide range of federal, state, and local compliance requirements. A software license management solution provides that capability.
Historically, the delivery of government services was based on manually intensive, often paper-based, legacy solutions. For instance, the US Internal Revenue Service tax applications rely on 60-year-old technology. With advances seen in the consumer market, pressure on government agencies has been building to remove the friction found in their processes.
Such demands intensified when the pandemic struck, and virtual interactions replaced traditional face-to-face exchanges. Frankly, many governments were not prepared to meet the new expectations. In fact, government readiness to adopt remote work and collaboration was below average: 55% of government agencies were all set versus 62% of other organizations.
But the pandemic helped to bring about changes in budgeting priorities. Digital solutions moved up the funding ladder. In fact, 8 out of 10 government agencies say their investments in said technology increased since the pandemic’s onset.
As a result, many have been investing in collaboration solutions, like Microsoft Teams. Consequently, the global team collaboration software market was valued at $10.48 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.0% from 2021 to 2028.
While these agencies have been making progress breaking down traditional barriers, the changes come with a potential downside: increased risk. Government technology groups need to put checks in place to ensure that they comply with a growing range of technology regulations designed to safeguard information and the use of information technology.
In addition, the Covid pandemic thrust the government into a central role in collecting public health information. Federal, state, and local regulations have been changing, and that information needs to be safeguarded as well.
The government faces challenges in meeting these new requirements. The computing environment becomes more complex seemingly every day. Collaboration no longer means getting together in an office conference room. Employees can be anywhere, and increasingly work from home.
As a result, the traditional security checks that agencies put into place to ensure that only authorized individuals access confidential company and citizen data and that such information is shared securely often are insufficient.
Finally, the government sector faces a skills gap in adopting new technology. Many government officials cite skills and talent gaps as a barrier to digital transformation today: 28% versus a survey average of 20%. The skills shortage tied with security/privacy for first place as the government’s biggest barrier, and officials expect it to remain the biggest barrier in three years.
Given the rapidly changing citizen landscape, the increasingly complex system design, and the lack of expertise, agencies need help to embrace new technology and still safeguard confidential information. To tame this beast, managers must understand the current state and usage of their M365 software licenses. CoreView offers help in this area. By deploying it, they gain new capabilities.
CoreView collects license usage information and presents managers with reports and dashboards, so they easily understand their license usage. They quickly answer questions, like How many licenses do we have? How are they being used? Are they the right licenses to do the job?
Agencies know how many licenses they have when they make an initial purchase, but over time, their usage pattern changes, and licenses become unassigned, inactive, or oversized. With CoreView, they periodically conduct a health check and ensure that their users’ needs, and the agency licensing agreements and use are in sync.
The tool enables executives to assign ownership of a set number of licenses to each department. License pools effectively delegate the responsibility for license distribution and recovery to the managers and allow them to limit the number of licenses that a business unit distributes. When they reach their full assignment of licenses, they won’t be able to take licenses from the general, corporate tenant. Instead, they must purchase additional licenses from central IT, or more importantly, recycle inactive licenses from old user accounts under their license pool.
The computing landscape has been morphing at hyper speed. The government had been slow to adopt digital technologies but changed its funding priorities because of the pandemic. Now, they need to automate and gain more control over their software use, and CoreView provides that capability. With it, their transition from legacy to digital technology becomes smoother and safer.