Just over a month ago, I shared some thoughts on the essential role that government will play in supporting our society and citizens through the COVID-19 pandemic. In that short period of time, the rate and pace of change has been astounding—in many ways, faster than anticipated. Like many of you, I have been humbled by the immensity of the challenges we are facing, but at the same, time enormously proud to see governments and citizens worldwide step up to slow and limit the spread of infection, protect the health of our communities, and care for those who have been affected by the crisis—whether physically, mentally or economically.
In my first blog, I shared a framework for how government response would break down into three stages: immediate response, recover and rebuild, and optimize for the new normal.
We anticipated that the immediate response phase would be focused on gaining situational awareness and taking decisive action to enable remote working, remote learning, and cognitive assistance to overburdened call centers. We saw that play out in real time—government agencies worldwide have moved swiftly to deploy analytics tools to measure and predict the spread of the virus, marshal resources to support the healthcare system, provide economic assistance, and apply new models of work. Many of our government partners have been at the forefront of this:
- Government agencies in Europe and the US have deployed virtual assistants to support social services call centers
- One large US city distributed 300,000 tablets with educational and security software and free cellular data connections so that public school students could tap into their school's remote learning program
- One large U.S. state moved components of its unemployment agency’s systems to the cloud in order to maintain performance
- Many health agencies are using the IBM Rapid Supply Connect offering to manage an ecosystem of new suppliers of medical equipment and personal protective equipment (PPE).
Faster than we initially anticipated, many governments have already begun to shift into the second phase, recover and rebuild. Although healthcare systems social services agencies continue to face enormous strain as they combat the outbreaks in their communities, governments moved quickly to provide financial and human resources, and for the most part these agencies have not been overwhelmed. While many countries established shelter in place and/or severe economic restrictions and citizen self-isolation, they are beginning to assess how to ease lockdowns, reinvigorate economic activity and get people back to work. At the same time, they are taking measures to quickly identify and mitigate areas of resurgence, and to rebuild the trust and confidence of the citizenry. As we move into this new phase, two main areas of focus have emerged:
Enhanced testing and contact tracing. Governments are moving to greatly accelerate both virus and antibody testing, and to develop industrial-scale contact tracing. They are building the ability to:
- Engage citizens at a community and personal level by standing up virtual call centers and cognitive assistants
- Hire and train contract tracers to support
- Manage and trace COVID-19-positive individuals through next-generation case management
- Serve the health-related and social needs of our most vulnerable during quarantine;
- Manage care and provide services for individuals and families affected by COVID-19
- Protect patient privacy and data as they track and trace to further limit the spread.
Unemployment assistance and return to the workplace support: As governments move to ease restrictions and restart the economy, they face the dual challenges of providing direct financial assistance to those who have found themselves unexpectedly unemployed, while at the same time standing up return to the workplace programs to help them get back to work.
While most government agencies are leveraging their existing processes and technology platforms to provide direct financial assistance, many systems have been quickly over-burdened. One US state, for instance, saw a 900 percent increase in unemployment claims in a 14-day period. Understanding that they cannot simply switch IT horses in the middle of the race, they are looking for ways to enable greater efficiency, flexibility, and agility in their systems and processes. And they are looking at how to break the workflows down into discrete building blocks, as well as assessing what can easily be moved to the cloud and what must remain in their current IT environment. We are consistently seeing an explosion in the move to hybrid cloud models that allow agencies to take advantage of cloud resources in concert with their existing infrastructure and move workloads seamlessly between the two.
One critical piece of the return to the workplace is understanding which parts of the economy are beginning to rehire, and helping unemployed people find roles that match their skills and experience in a dramatically changed environment. Entire industries and career paths have changed right before our eyes. Many people will find that the jobs they most recently filled will not come back, at least in the short term. Governments seek to develop the ability to help citizens assess their core competencies, and either match them to suitable roles, or provide guidance on the training they need to move back into the workforce.
Another critical aspect of the return to the workplace efforts, of course, is supporting worker and workplace safety. Government organizations around the world have had different experiences in responding to the pandemic. Some have employee populations that quickly adapted to work from home, while others were forced to shut down operations in whole or in part. As leaders consider re-opening office buildings and businesses, many are looking to do so in waves, enacting social distancing measures in the workplace, while at the same time keeping an eye on the potential for resurgence. Hyperlocal disease monitoring is critical at this stage to ease or tighten restrictions based on the latest information.
We have reached the end of the immediate response to COVID-19 and are now swiftly moving into the recover and rebuild phase. This is good news, though not without new challenges. IBM is deeply involved with government agencies around the world as they build capability to carry society through this phase. Addressing the challenge requires the flexibility of hybrid cloud, and the agility of new intelligent workflows—all supported with new cognitive intelligence and analytics—and I am proud that the work we are doing every day is bringing these capabilities to bear.
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