Securing Silos: The Case for an Omnichannel Approach to Digital Government

Customer Experience    | June 5, 2019

What if government worked like a business? What if a bureaucrat in one department could communicate seamlessly and securely with a politician in another?  What if departments could work collaboratively on procuring contracts?

When a government embraces a digital first strategy, effective secure communications serve an important function for their system to operate in a streamlined fashion. From frontline citizen-facing tasks, like sending a prescription or a temporary driver’s license, to more complex internal tasks, such as the procurement of a new multi-million-dollar research vessel, the need for flexible, frictionless and secure lines of communication exist at almost every level.

1) Omnichannel is about collaboration

In marketing, an omnichannel approach to sales implies a seamless shopping experience regardless of where a customer is located or what a customer is looking at. For government, an omnichannel experience implies a barrierless collaborative environment between all departments, all ministries and all levels within. In other words: a digital government, which aims to streamline all services, should be striving for an omnichannel environment.

2) Encryption needs to be part of the conversation

From the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to regional privacy laws in the US, like California’s AB375, privacy continues to be a major driver of policy surrounding all-things-digital. So when it comes to streamlining communications between ministries, the public, third-party vendors, lobby groups or other external organizations, messages containing sensitive personal data need to be secured with airtight encryption to help mitigate the risk of headline-grabbing data breaches.

3) Encryption should enable a digital government – not hinder it

In the private sector, encryption is becoming a competitive differentiator – with customers preferring organizations who value their personal data. This aspect of a customer-first mantra should be no different for digital government. In addition to offering a frictionless encryption experience, both for internal and external users, an effective encryption tool needs to be flexible enough to suit every government use case – from complex government procurement orders to something as simple as a doctor sending a prescription to a patient.

Check out how these enterprise-level organizations are leveraging our Echoworx Email Encryption platform.

4) Good encryption should pay for itself

Since they are bankrolled by the very people they serve, governments need to justify every dollar (and penny) spent. So adopting a robust flexible encryption solution with all the trimmings is usually not top-of-mind in terms of how to allocate their budgets. But, although an effective encryption platform can be expensive, the cost-mitigating benefits should outweigh the overhead.

Take Echoworx’s encryption platform, for example. According to a recent Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study conducted by Forrester Research, implementers of Echoworx can experience a payback period of less than seven months – in addition to both a return-on-investment (ROI) of 155 per cent and upwards of $2.7M in cost-mitigating benefits.

See the full TEI study by Forrester Research here.

Digital is better. Period.

While initial worries might include questions regarding accessibility for those members of the public not comfortable with digital correspondence, or perhaps more abstract questions regarding security, at the end of the day, citizens of any digital government soon appreciate the benefits of encrypted communications over snail mail. The ease of access offered by the instantaneous nature of digital messages, paired with an excellent user experience and secured by airtight algorithms is hard to argue against.

See if Echoworx is right for your government.

By Michael Roberts, VP Technology, Echoworx