Q&A: Cash-starved, plugged-in cities will do more with less
Government agencies will be hard-pressed to ramp up hiring to deal with the coronavirus crisis and its aftermath. But they can find plenty of digital support.
Apps such as those made by New Havenbased SeeClickFix, which has a platform that manages municipal interactions with citizens and internal workflows, have become important for some embattled public departments.
SeeClickFix founder and CEO Ben Berkowitz talks about the way the pandemic will affect his company and other tech firms working with government agencies..
How is the pandemic affecting the ways government agencies use technology?
Berkowitz: It’s accelerating the transformation to mobile and digital transactions between citizens and government. SeeClickFix has been used in places to directly respond to COVID-19. In places like Burlington [Vt.], they now have request categories that they have spun up very quickly in SeeClick Fix to allow people to ask questions about unemployment, child care, homelessness and other social services needs that are increased as a result of the pandemic.
How will SeeClickFix’s products help to support social distancing with public services?
Berkowitz: If you look at a place like Burlington, they’re using [SeeClickFix] as a regional communications hub to take all the general service requests they take from citizens remotely. And they, of course, want that process to be socially distanced, meaning the citizen doesn’t have to come into City Hall.
What will be the connection between technology and government employment levels in the post-pandemic era?
Berkowitz: At this point, there’s not going to be [more] stimulus funding for local and state governments, so you’re ending up with a ton of furloughs and layoffs. There’s going to be an increasing need to do more with less in local government. One of the ways you do that is you enable software that allows for increasingly efficient processes that may reduce the need for as many people.