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Engagement Management Systems: Converting the IoT into Government Action

Earlier this month, I attended the Digital Transformation Executive Dinner presented by IDC in London. During that event, IDC’s Lionel Lamy, Associate Vice President, European Services, mentioned a startling statistic during his presentation, titled “IoT -Your Customers’ Next Generation Business Model.”

Lamy stated that the 2014 market size for the Internet of Things (IoT) was a staggering $78.9 billion in Europe alone. Lamy also shared the IDC forecast, which showed a compound annual growth rate of almost 30 percent from 2013 through 2018.iStock_000007380870_Large

And, according to the latest IDC forecast1, a significant portion of IoT market is in the public sector space—something I noticed that Citizen 2015 also picked up on. For the uninitiated, IoT can be described as a set of tech-enabled and self-aware devices relaying status to either the owning organization or other devices on the network for the “greater good” (although this was the plan for Skynet in the Terminator film series, and we all know how that worked out).

With all this estimated spend, what are these devices doing today in the public sector? The answer would appear to be deployment into a multitude of fairly mundane “monitoring” roles—monitoring river levels to trigger flood alerts; tagging offenders for curfews; etc. But it would seem from the IDC growth estimates that IoT usage has barely scraped the surface of the potential for better citizen and patient service within government and public health.

I can see a key enabler for this growth being open services, where the services offered by an organization are published to the Web in a consumable form and allow any third-party device to drive public sector processes. Within the Verint world of engagement management, this happens through the automated creation of case work on the CRM system, which in turn automatically generates a job on an integrated back-office system. The result is an intersection of customer services and the mid-office, resulting in massively greater efficiency.

Verint’s David Moody previously blogged about the importance of open services. And, we have seen innovative early uses of such interfaces, such as third-sector Web reporting solutions (e.g., FixMyStreet) reporting issues without the disruptive use of email.

Perhaps the most IoT-like example comes from the city of Boston’s “Street Bump” app. This innovative use of technology monitors citizens’ journeys around the city, intelligently detecting and reporting potholes through jolts received by the iPhone and dynamically reporting them to the city’s Verint engagement management system. The first version of this app faced some criticism for false reporting, but the subsequent releases—funded by crowdsourcing, no less—fixed most of those issues.

Since then, we have seen interest in the IoT-enabling of other devices, such as the city of Houston suppliers who investigated allowing traffic signals to self-report failures, and social housing clients proposing water heaters that proactively self-report service calls and failures.

IDC growth estimates indicate a wave is about to break onto public sector shores. Verint’s engagement management solutions are well-positioned to act as a “brokerage” to convert this IoT traffic into government action. For the U.K. market in particular, where a new Conservative government will be looking for even greater austerity savings, this is the sort of innovation that will likely help trigger new transformation initiatives.

1 IDC, “Worldwide and Regional Internet of Things 2014–2020 Forecast Update by Technology Split,” Doc # 252330, November 2014

The post Engagement Management Systems: Converting the IoT into Government Action appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

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