Amid tech labor shortage, outsourcing digital services could provide relief

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated tech and digitization globally, forever changing the way local governments conduct daily business, along with the expectations of constituents. Over the last two years, smart city plans have increased in popularity; services like tax bill payments and licensing have mostly shifted into the digital realm; and town offices evolved into comprehensive portals designed to help constituents both in-person and online.

Behind the transformation is a backbone of government information technology and computer professionals that are increasingly in short supply.

“Hiring, training and retaining IT staff is one of the biggest challenges facing local government,” said Brenda DeGregory, vice president of service delivery at Accela, a cloud-based software company, in a statement. Between the retirement of baby boomers, rapidly emerging new technologies and lucrative salaries offered in the private sector, local governments are facing a hiring crisis.

Over the next decade, information technology occupations across the board are expected to grow by at least 13 percent, with demand largely stemming “from greater emphasis on cloud computing, the collection and storage of big data, and information security,” according to data from the Bureau for Labor Statistics. Meanwhile, the tech labor pool is shrinking. While tech job postings nearly doubled last year, based on an analysis by the analytics firm Datapeople, the average number of applications contracted by 25 percent.

Compiling the problem, while labor is increasingly in short supply, demand for digital services is booming.

For one, there’s an unprecedented amount of federal funding flowing to local governments, and many will probably invest in IT infrastructure. Given the recent high profile cyber attacks against public infrastructure, many local governments are taking proactive steps to shore up their digital defenses.

A recent report from CompTIA Public Technology Institute, a research firm, called the “State of City and County IT National Survey,” reports that bolstering cybersecurity is a high priority among administrators. And in the year ahead, the majority of administrators said they expect their budgets to increase, leading to a greater need for IT talent in the public sector.

Second, there’s increasing demand among constituents for online services.

“With more residents preferring online, ‘consumer-like’ services, agencies do not have the option to pause or cut back on critical IT efforts,” according to the statement from Accela. As government organizations continue to evolve, “Increased resident demand for digital services is driving agencies to seek outside expertise, enabling them to align available agency resources with strategic priorities and reduce the time staff spends on redundant or tedious administration duties and system maintenance.”

To shore up the talent shortfall, companies like Accela offering subscription-based help from afar through remote IT services, providing “an extension to in-house IT teams—freeing up agency leaders from basic administration and optimization so they can focus on the transformative initiatives that will deliver the best services and experiences for resident,” DeGregory said. A new service offered by Accela, for example, called Managed Application Services, supplements in-house IT teams with day-to-day system administration including testing fixes, user account administration and permission management, creating reports, scripting, troubleshooting and configuring new features, among other things. It’s designed to work with Accela’s other platform offerings, which include planning services, and service request management.

In DuPage County, Ill., which is currently using the service, the remote help has helped to free up in-house professionals “from monotonous administration” to focus on “more strategic projects,” said Anthony McPherson, the county’s chief information officer.