Collaboration Solutions Power Next-Generation Citizen Experiences

Last month, Cisco announced new research that I find particularly exciting in my role of helping customers maximize value from their investments in collaboration, video, and mobility. “Internet of Everything: A $4.6 Trillion Public-Sector Opportunity,” the latest research and economic analysis by Cisco Consulting Services, calculates the value that the Internet of Everything (IoE) will create in the public sector worldwide from 2013 through 2022. According to Cisco, IoE will enable a global total of $19 trillion in Value at Stake over the coming decade — $4.6 trillion in public-sector value combined with the $14.4 trillion in private-sector value identified in related research last year.

IoE brings together people, process, data, and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before. The civilian sector will drive $3.1 trillion of IoE’s value in the public sector, through increased revenue, reduced costs, and improvements to employee productivity and citizen experience. The remaining $1.5 trillion of IoE public sector Value at Stake will result from more effective military operations.

What excites me about this report is that 69 percent of the civilian public sector Value at Stake is powered by people-centric connections that can be enhanced by collaboration, video, and mobility technologies.

To estimate IoE’s Value at Stake for the public sector, Cisco Consulting looked at 40 use cases in city, state, and national governments, and performed a bottom-up analysis of the potential value of each use case over the next decade. Here are just a few examples:

• Telework offers $125 billion in Value at Stake created by increased worker productivity.
• Connected learning creates $258 billion worldwide by going beyond online classes to incorporate immersive, interactive video.
• Mobile collaboration generates $951 billion in Value at Stake from improved productivity and better decision-making processes in an increasingly mobile workforce.
• Travel avoidance enabled by remote collaboration technologies can save $245 billion in costs over 10 years.
• Using immersive video for court appearances can save $1 billion in offender transportation and security costs.
• Public hospitals can create $11 billion in value by using connected video for inpatient monitoring.

These use cases are not just hypothetical. In fact, many public-sector entities have been using collaboration, video, and mobility solutions for years to meet rising citizen expectations in an era of limited budgets. For example:

• As a pioneer in the “Smart + Connected Communities” movement, the city of Barcelona is using collaboration, video, and mobility technology to build many innovations to improve quality of life and city services. A smart parking app makes it easy for drivers to find available parking using their mobile devices, reducing traffic congestion and saving time and fuel. And smart bus stops let riders see in real time when the next bus will come, and where their connecting bus is. They can also look up shops and services along the route.
• The community of Guldborgsund, Denmark has introduced high-quality, interactive video conferencing to provide citizens with convenient access to government services through “digital booths” in three local centers. This has enabled the municipality to reduce costs by consolidating some of its remote offices while continuing to provide citizens with convenient, face-to-face access to information and services.
• The National Informatics Centre of the government of India needed a way to connect its highly mobile workforce to central networked resources, regardless of where employees were located, or which devices they were using. By creating a secure, unified wireless architecture that supports the devices employees prefer, the organization drove an immediate increase in collaboration and ease of working, which, in turn, improved employee productivity.
• After the 2008 earthquake in China’s Sichuan Province, Cisco worked with the Chinese government to make healthcare more accessible in hard-to-reach parts of the province. Networked video technology now enables doctors at provincial hospitals to provide training and guidance to practitioners at village clinics. This enables doctors to continually improve their skills, while also supporting local treatment of patients rather than making them travel to distant cities. The result is better, more accessible healthcare at a lower cost.

These examples are only the beginning. As the Internet of Everything continues to grow, the value of connections among people, process, data, and things will grow exponentially as creative governments discover new ways to collaborate, work more effectively, and connect with the people they serve.

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