Innovation can seem like a lofty goal meant for people wearing plaid and sipping lattes in trendy co-working spaces. But it’s just as achievable for local government as it is for Silicon Valley. In our 30+ years of experience, the key ingredient to innovative success is in the cloud.

Here’s how:

The cloud enables a strong IT department

The cloud significantly reduces the effort to manage and maintain IT systems. This frees up the IT department to spend more time on strategic projects. As the current local government employee pool moves toward retirement and the demographic shifts to younger professionals, utilizing cloud technology will help attract top talent that is looking for opportunities to work in innovative cloud environments.

The cloud eliminates the need for over-qualified babysitters

Much of the IT department’s daily tasks are attending to technology that simply keeps your jurisdiction running. With the cloud, that responsibility is shifted away from the IT department giving them more time to do other things. Too often IT all-stars are spending their talents diagnosing server malfunctions instead of designing new products and solutions. Nearly 75 percent of IT budgets go to maintaining the status quo. By shifting this “babysitting” away from the talented members of the IT department, you are poised for endless innovation because they are able to focus on more proactive activities rather than reactive ones.

The cloud makes us more flexible so we can innovate faster

The best part about the cloud is the ability to consume other cloud-based services with ease. Need electronic signature functionality for vendor contracts, permit or plan submission? No problem, integrate with Docusign. Need to create an Esri Storymap in GIS from a GovSense project? Boom! Click and Create. How about publishing OpenData for constituents and local business? Creating and publish searches to the web for others to consume. All of these things historically took a significant amount of time and resources away for your IT strategic plan, now they are available in the cloud.

While your IT department may not come up with the next Uber, it will be able to eliminate many of the pain points that they currently face by shifting to the cloud. Many fear that a cloud solution will eliminate the need for an IT department altogether, but that’s simply not the case. They are such valuable members of your organization that your jurisdiction should want to take advantage of their full potential and the cloud allows you to do that.