Improving digital public services in a timely and budget-conscious way is a multifaceted challenge for large and small municipalities alike.

However, there are two core issues that often plague digital public services and cause them to lag behind the private sector: disconnected services and overly numerous points of access. 

To illustrate how these issues can hold municipalities back and how solving them can benefit municipalities and their constituents, let’s examine an example scenario.

This is the story of Kurt, a municipal clerk in a small municipality in Ontario, whose challenges are representative of the challenges of many municipalities across North America.  

Setting the Scene

Kurt is a municipal clerk in a small municipality in Ontario. He was tasked with improving his municipality’s digital strategy.

Since his municipality is relatively small he will be looking for consolidated solutions that are cost-effective, flexible, and have predictable costs over time.  

The municipal council has highlighted two main issues they would like Kurt to tackle.

First, the council is displeased because although the municipality has made significant investments to offer new digital services to its citizens, these services have not been as widely adopted as they had hoped.

Second, following a cyberattack on a neighbouring municipality that exposed a significant amount of citizens’ personal data, many citizens have expressed concerns about the security of the information they choose to share with their municipality.   

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Kurt’s Quest to Support Young Readers 

When looking into factors that influence citizen adoption of new digital services, Kurt learns that his municipality has unfortunately fallen into a common trap. Their digital services are disconnected, which results in a confusing user experience for citizens. 

In practice, Kurt observes that there are many points of access for municipal services, many of which live on disconnected websites and are difficult to find if someone doesn’t know where to look.

For example, although the summer reading club is organized by the library, registration is only available on a separate website. Kurt is particularly frustrated to find that although the library website advertises the summer reading club, it does not link to the club sign-up website.   

Confident that he has discovered one reason why his municipality’s constituents have not been adopting municipal digital services at the expected rate, Kurt decides to investigate which options are available to his municipality to consolidate its digital strategy.

He discovers that certain solutions have features, such as CitizenOne’s Services Catalog Accelerator (SCA), that can streamline the citizen experience. In fact, the SCA would allow Kurt’s municipality to take a Whole-of-government approach, where they can offer all their services in a simple, searchable page featuring a secure dashboard. 

Furthermore, the SCA would allow Kurt’s municipality to display and connect to many related services in logical groups as well as put all the information citizens will have to provide to access the services.

Kurt imagines providing a consolidated catalog dedicated to library-related services, which would allow citizens to easily view all the library’s programs and seamlessly redirect them to the appropriate websites to learn more about and sign up for new services.   

Kurt knows that by giving citizens a consolidated view where they can find and search for all municipal services in one place, they will be more likely to make use of the programs and services the municipality has worked so hard on.

The SCA offers enticing solutions for the challenges Kurt’s municipality is facing, but Kurt wants to make sure that implementing new solutions will not put additional strain on the municipality’s resources.  

Kurt decides to do some research about how the SCA integrates with existing solutions. He wants to ensure that the solution he proposes to the municipal council can seamlessly integrate with their existing digital resources.

Kurt is pleased to learn that the SCA can link to existing content management systems (CMS) on popular platforms such as Drupal and WordPress, as well as more custom front-end web applications. This means that his municipality will not need to abandon any of its existing digital assets.

Kurt is confident that the SCA will benefit his municipality as well as its citizens and looks forward to presenting it to the municipal council.  

Reassuring Concerned Citizens

The aftermath of the cyberattack on the neighbouring municipality brought the importance of secure digital municipal services into focus for many municipalities in Kurt’s area.

During his research, Kurt realizes that the many points of access to municipal services – and many related username and password combinations – multiply the opportunities for cyberattacks.

Citizens have also reported that they don’t understand how the municipality will use their information on each site. They are therefore wary of providing authentication information and discouraged from signing up to use new services.  

In addition, not all of the municipality’s digital services have robust authentication processes, which could enable hackers to gain access to more secure, more private information by first accessing usernames and passwords from less secure sites.

Taken together, these issues have severely eroded citizens’ trust in municipal digital services.

Kurt knows that to rebuild trust in digital municipal services, he needs a solution that addresses all three of the security-related concerns citizens have raised.  

With CitizenOne, he could address them all at once. The SCA creates a single point of access, reducing the cyberattack surface. This access point simplifies access to services while ensuring robust authentication with features such as MFA out-of-the-box and adaptive authentication.  

Furthermore, CitizenOne’s claim and credential-based access control approach also allows different services to require different authentication credentials within its ecosystem to allow easy access to some services while maintaining a higher bar for authentication for services that require it.   

The combination of a consolidated dashboard design and customizable service cards allows each service to outline its terms of service clearly and concisely as well as give users an intuitive snapshot of what information they are sharing and how it will be used.

This secure, transparent, and consent-driven approach would reassure the citizens of Kurt’s municipality to use online services while ensuring that they have peace of mind when it comes to the security of their data, ultimately building their trust in their municipality’s digital services. 

A Consolidated Solution for Consolidating Services

Like many municipalities, Kurt’s municipality can address two of its largest pain points with a single solution. With the SCA as a core component, CitizenOne was designed to be a flexible, customizable tool for municipalities of any size to integrate into their overall digital strategy.

Its inherent security features, consent-based approach to data privacy, interoperability, and intuitive UX can help you smoothly consolidate your digital strategy.  

Find out more about CitizenOne’s Services Catalog Accelerator and how it can improve your municipality’s digital services.