Over the next few weeks we’ll be taking a look at what we’re offering for each of our primary customer verticals at our upcoming global virtual event Experience4U. This week, we’re turning our attention to the Public Sector.

In keeping with our theme of A Better You, this track will focus on how organizations are embracing change in both their technology and their ways of working. And how they’re bringing their people along on the journey with them as a traditionally slow-moving sector responds to the disruption of COVID and its aftermath with radical, permanent changes to operations and service delivery.

This year’s Public Sector track at X4U consists of 4 sessions. We’re very pleased to be able to bring you a panel discussion with some of our partners and customers, an in-depth look at one customer’s story of complex public-sector transformation, an exclusive look at what the findings of our State of the Digital Nation research for public sector, and outside analyst perspective from Third Stage Consulting.

State of the Digital Nation – the Business Future Index and Maturity Model for the Public Sector

Our own Mark Gibbison will be joined in this session by Kelsey Parish of Vanson Bourne for a special session discussing the findings of our first annual State of the Digital Nation research survey, and what they mean for public sector organizations.

The public sector has always worked hard to provide a huge array of community and citizen services on a tight budget. During the COVID-19 crisis, organizations saw a huge surge in service need, forcing the sector to quickly adapt and find new ways to meet this new demand. Additional funding from government helped – but only organizations willing to accelerate their technology transformations truly managed to pull through.

As we return to our “new normal”, the public sector is in a better position than ever to embrace and further explore the new technologies it has adopted. And start to fully realize the benefits they can have – both on future operational efficiency, productivity, and cost savings, and on further innovation that will continue to provide benefits for many years to come.

Customer transformation story – excellence in the necessary and unsexy

After central government intervention, Northamptonshire County Council triggered a local government reform that saw the abolition of 8 local authorities in Northamptonshire. An operation that required much more flexibility and integration than their 16 legacy systems would allow – including a migration to the cloud, and a single source of truth that would allow the safe and legal creation of new boundaries, responsibilities, and data repositories for the new authorities on vesting day.

Our customer Peter Borley-Cox of West Northamptonshire Council will talk us through how Northamptonshire County Council created two brand new local authorities on time and in budget with the help of Unit4 – all alongside ERP Gold implementation for the Northamptonshire Children’s Trust.

Panel discussion – the art of collaboration

As the landscape of the sector continues to evolve, we’ll join Emma O’Brien of our partners at Embridge Consulting and Claire Taylor of our customers Cherwell District Council to discuss how collaboration between partners and technology vendors enables change and transformation in public sector back office.

As change management is never easy – especially when it has to happen as quickly as it is now – this session will focus heavily on managing not just transformation itself, but managing people through the transformation. Including helping your people prepare for implementation, uniting your partners, solution providers, and your own organization on a true collaborative footing, and managing teams, individuals, and stakeholders in a way that creates a clear path to a successful transformation project in which everyone feels invested and informed.

Digitizing the higher education, nonprofit, and public sectors: what are their unique needs and what too often goes wrong?

Public sector, higher education, and non-profit organizations have unique needs that need to be considered during their digital transformations. People, process, and technology strategies that work in the private sector are not necessarily applicable to the third sector, so it is important to navigate these nuances carefully.

Since digital transformations often fail to deliver the expected business value, public sector organizations need to go into their initiatives with eyes wide open. 

In this session we’ll be joined by Eric Kimberling (CEO, Third Stage Consulting) for a discussion with Mark Gibbison that will outline the things most unique and important to digital transformation initiatives in these sectors. It will also address the 7 things that most commonly lead to failure in transformation projects – as well as what organizations can do to avoid these common pitfalls.