How can future network technologies like the internet of things (IoT) transform the public sector? This is the question that Jeremy poses to Alex Osbourne, Senior Director at IoT service provider ServiceNow, and David Pugh, Manufacturing Partnerships Lead at Digital Catapult.

There is huge potential for public bodies to take advantage of future network technologies, like the IoT and 5G, to improve services and infrastructure with data analytics and automation. 

Applications of these future network technologies are going to connect citizens to better services, and the public sector is already starting its transition and adoption of this new technology. They aren’t doing it just for the sake of digitisation though, but to enable increased economic growth, environmental sustainability, security, and public safety. 

But putting these future network technologies into practice is easier said than done. Local authorities [LA] and public bodies have to overcome numerous barriers to really get the most out of them.

“I would say we're still very much in the infancy and that's the barrier to entry, the overarching challenge... the public sector has been late to adopt cloud. So a lot of them [LA] still sit in their own data centres, which just aren't ready or ripe for the additional workload of data that's going to come their way.” 

Key takeaways:

• What ServiceNow does
• The advantages of IoT to the public sector
• The public organisations that are ready for utilising IoT
• The challenges of implementing IoT in the average local authority
• Use case examples of IoT in practice

Resources: 

• https://www.servicenow.com/