The Challenges Of Deploying Box In Local Government
Boxworks 2016: How can local government authorities make the most of Box without disrupting services and protecting citizens data?
“One of the reasons was security and the five levels of encryption. We use single sign-on with Okta to manage all the data and the information. The single sign-on works with all devices so if someone leaves their iPad on the train, they’ll have to go through the council to get information. We’ve found Box to be useful for that and we put our own security measures in place,” Kasonga explained.
Rapid adoption
Aside from security and productivity, the rollout will save the council money too, Kasonga says. But none of this matters if employees and contractors don’t use it.
End users don’t care about the administrative features, and so Box and Dropbox have spent significant amounts of time improving the usability of their platforms, and offering free storage to consumers so they can influence IT departments.
Ease of use
Kasonga says Box integrates with many of the council’s existing applications, eliminating a lot of potential disruption, and is user friendly. Council workers often have to share significant amounts of data, something Box could help do more efficiently.
“I was instructed to work with the legal department immediately because of the large document bundles,” recalls Kasonga. “Courts and judges were fixed with having paper documents with them. We found two judges willing to try it out but then the legal department was outsourced so it never happened! But a similar use case was the coroner’s office.”
Box is used by children’s services, planning officers, HR and IT, as well as other departments and external contractors.
“We’re still deploying little by little,” he explains. “Because I’m the only person deploying [Box], we’re doing it by request.”
So far there are more than 900 users, but word of mouth is spreading and Kasonga is receiving more requests.
Challenges
The invalidation of the ‘Safe Harbour’ data transfer agreement between the European Union (EU) and US has been a challenge but even that has not proved disruptive. It’s issues closer to home that appear to be of greater concern.
Kasonga speaks highly of Box and his willingness to work on rollouts with more local government organisations. But he fears politics could prove a barrier to wider adoption; possibly because stalwarts will object to change without being consulted.
“Some users like using [a new service] but still have questions and can make things difficult by asking ‘who made this decision?’” he laments. “I don’t like to get into the politics I just want to get on with it.”
