Category: AWS Institute

Governments worldwide dedicate a significant portion of their IT budget to maintaining legacy technology systems. This can pose security and operational continuity challenges and governments seek to address this challenge. Amazon Web Services (AWS) public sector government transformation specialists researched what technology leaders in government and in the highly regulated private sector believe their main IT challenges are. This post summarizes the insights and suggests four approaches to consider.

Digital public infrastructure (DPI) describes the foundational digital capabilities nations provide to facilitate efficient and secure interactions within society, such as proving identity, paying for goods and services, proving an entitlement, or sharing data. DPI is a country’s digital backbone, rapidly enabling modern and responsive government, increasing inclusion and economic participation, and stimulating innovation across all sectors. This post provides several compelling examples of governments worldwide that are benefitting from DPI.

Government organizations face challenges that include tight budgets and rapidly evolving citizen demands. They can address these challenges when they collaborate and share resources to accelerate digital transformation. In the UK, 44 local government bodies—called councils—use an open approach to share expertise and pool resources to transform their web publishing platforms using LocalGov Drupal. The GOV.UK Digital Marketplace includes LocalGov Drupal on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This post explains how councils used collaboration and shared resources to develop this digital public infrastructure which has reduced the cost of building council websites by up to 80 percent and delivered better services.

Governments encourage public sector organizations, businesses, and citizens to embrace digital technologies and practices through a range of incentives. These incentives standardize processes and motivate behaviors that achieve the objectives of these initiatives in a way that can be sustained over time. This post, written by an Amazon Web Services (AWS) government transformation advisor, highlights 10 ways that governments use incentives to accelerate successful digital transformation. 

It should be simple to build digital platforms that offer people reliable, clear ways to access government services such as healthcare, business registration, and welfare payments. Cloud technology makes it possible for every service to be simple, reliable, scalable, adaptable, and secure. Public sector agencies need to be able to access the cloud, and they do so through public procurement processes. Procurement’s role in supporting modern, digital services for governments is the subject of a report from the Open Data Institute (ODI) and Open Contracting Partnership (OCP).

From check-in through departure to the airfield and then back through the baggage halls, technology can transform the experience of airport passengers, partners, and staff. The UK’s Manchester Airports Group (MAG), which runs Manchester, London Stansted, and East Midlands airports, invests in this transformation. Read this post to learn how MAG has created a technology and data strategy in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to integrate the elements of its complex ecosystems and deliver efficiencies.

The UK Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is one of the largest government departments in the UK, with more than 90,000 employees in more than 800 locations. It’s responsible for making $266 billion in payments each year. The DWP is carrying out a large-scale digital transformation to improve its services and the way it interacts with citizens. Read this blog post to discover three lessons that DWP learned about hiring, training, and retaining while reshaping its digital approach.

UK Biobank, the world’s most comprehensive source of health data used for research, needed a purpose-built data platform with compute and data-storage capabilities that provided analysis tools in a centralized environment and the flexibility to manage increasing quantities of data. This led to the establishment and launch of the secure, cloud-based UK Biobank Research Analysis Platform (RAP), which is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Read this post to learn more about UK Biobank’s journey to becoming a globally accessible dataset for health researchers.

The right cloud technology leads to more sustainable IT and business operations. As a foundation for innovation, the cloud supports the delivery of sustainable products, services, and business models, and gives organizations the opportunity to transform themselves with sustainability at the core of their operation. The scope of the cloud’s role in sustainability is highlighted in a recent series of AWS Institute masterclasses and summarized in this blog post.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is easy to use but it’s important not to confuse ease of use with effortless deployment. The value of generative AI is inextricably linked to the technology’s reliability and traceability. To achieve this reliability and traceability in any organization, it helps to focus on AI’s potential one use case at a time but also to plan for the bigger picture. Read this blog post for a tried-and-tested AI framework to consider.