There is a global movement for the government to digitize most of the services they used to manually offer to the citizens ;this initiative is being extended to all sectors of the public services. Software development is the key solution of such a strategic move that needs a long term commitment.
Based on our experience in software development we adopt the agile approach to software development as the most effective and productive. It’s designed to result in limited documentation, but higher levels of productivity.
In this article we will discuss the main challenges when developing large-scale software for public sectors that are influenced by technology and would like to digitize their operations.
- Wide range of user base:
All hands working on these systems should give all citizens usable software to help the government to attract the public to choose to act on the digital version of portals instead of the bureaucratic mechanism and the traditional approach. It depends on the percentage of the population that has access to the internet and technology, which determines the required actions that the business team should add to their analysis before reaching the execution stage. In addition to the huge number of users of these systems and the extremely different levels of technical expertise and technological familiarity. Nowadays, people expect their government services, like renewing a driving license online or paying bills, should be delivered as the same experience as they receive from online shopping and online banking.
- Sectors integration
All departments and sectors should organize their activities harmoniously. They are somehow connected to each other. No sector has an explicit obligation. They all work for the government. There’s always dependency. The financial service sector is connected to many entities, like public transit, public education and health care. There is a flow of huge data that is moving across these entities. It’s challenging to securely and accurately transfer this information with no errors or corruption although each sector or department might run its own process using different technology.
- Digital skills gap
The affair of the digital skills gap is a global challenge even in the world’s most technologically advanced countries. The absence of digital skills amongst existing workers in the organization is a serious problem that affects the whole experience of the provided service which leads to the necessity of building up a solution of highly skilled people and Identify experiences that help workers understand the functionality of the digital business which helps you bridge this gap and avoid making a misplaced effort on upskilling and educating the workers the nature of operations digitalization.
Those entities that effectively and instantaneously train their human capital to be competent in relevant digital skills can better utilize the automated services to improve the experience of the services they provide.
- Security and privacy
The massive size of the gov sector means that projects are associated with an enormous number of users in addition to their personal information, which is gradually increasing.This information is super sensitive and must be highly protected under any circumstances. Working on such projects requires accountable companies with a good history of creating governmental systems that serve huge numbers of users and being able to provide reliable security at any level, like network security and system integrity. It should also be able to identify threats and respond fast against attacks.
- Regulations
Government regulation is the use of the authority of control for the purpose of restricting some non-allowed actions. These regulations should be applied regardless of whether they are based on rules of law or bureaucracy. Sometimes, regulators and gov representatives often have no experience constructing complicated software that is open-source, particularly that would take a lot of support and securing the system, in addition to lifting up the cost of building this software.
