How tech helps officials save time, money, and resources

Technology isn't just a convenience – it's a lifeline. Officials worldwide recognise the significant impact of technology on saving time, money, and even human lives. It’s not just making things easier, it's revolutionising how we respond to crises and manage resources.

As a provider of top-quality IT services to customers in many sectors, including government and public, Sigma Software Group collected in-house cases to show how technology impacts the government and public sector in various countries across the globe.

“Kharkiv is my home”: Chatbot for the near-frontline city

Sigma Software Group has Ukrainian roots, so it’s no wonder we contributed to developing governmental and municipal services before and after the full-scale Russian invasion. We took an active part in developing the Diia platform, which became a global sensation with 25 million downloads and is now called 'the golden standard for e-government'. The app allows citizens to use digital documents on their smartphones instead of physical ones for identification and sharing purposes. It allows access to over 80 governmental services, including the first fully digital ID and the fastest business registration in the world.

Our company was founded in Kharkiv, a city of 1.5 million people located 30 kilometers from the Russian border. Since February 2022, about 6,000 residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed in the city. Thousands of residents who had fled their homes due to the invasion wanted to know what had happened to their homes.

Sigma Software helped the Kharkiv City Council create a chatbot that allows city residents to discover the degree of damage caused by war and the utilities’ state. Now, we've added a new service to the chatbot – it allows Kharkiv residents to check the status of their applications for compensation for restoring damaged real estate objects. During the year of its operation, the chatbot processed 480,000 requests from city residents.

Chatbots could also be helpful for regions affected by natural disasters, like earthquakes or floods. Now, we’re negotiating with a company that plans to provide such services to UN missions, the Red Cross, etc.

Sweden: Digitise the country

Sweden ranks among the world's leading countries in government and public service digitalisation, and Sigma Software takes pride in its significant contributions to this achievement.

Governmental and municipal institutions manage vast amounts of diverse data. Much of this data, confined within legacy systems, remains inaccessible for effective search, retrieval, and presentation in the required format. To address this challenge, we partnered with our client, Formpipe, to develop the Long-Term Archive (LTA). This digital preservation platform ensures that documents retain their original context and remain in a human-readable format even after 50 years. Today, this product is employed by 90 per cent of government institutions in Sweden.

Another exemplary product by Sigma Software for government institutions is Platina ECM. This platform empowers institutions to fully digitise their information workflows. It equips users with tools to establish unbroken chains of digitised documents and enables seamless case management across the public and private sectors. Presently, Platina ECM commands approximately 40 per cent of the Swedish ECM market. It is utilised by 80 per cent of all government institutions in Sweden, including the Financial Inspection Agency, The Tax Agency, the Swedish Coastguard, and the County Administrative Boards.

Smart lighting: Improving over one million street lights in America

Our client, Telematics Wireless, delivers smart solutions to control street lighting, water supply, and transportation. The Sigma Software team helped Telematics Wireless create the IoT street lighting solutions deployed for cities across the USA, Europe, New Zealand, Brazil, and Asia. We designed the architecture and principal functionality of the IoT software, making it user-friendly, scalable, and easy to customise. We also developed a mobile app streamlining device deployment on luminaries.

Smart lighting controls can reduce annual operating costs by 20 per cent in addition to the anticipated 50 per cent cost savings from converting to LED. This solution is integrated into 900,000 street and area lights throughout Georgia in the US, over 60,000 street lights in Cleveland, Ohio, and over 130,000 street lights in Montreal.

Now, we are collaborating on a new project with Telematics Wireless. This solution could significantly improve the water supply issues in the municipalities.

After participating in last year's GITEX Africa, we've also gained great interest from governmental and public institutions in African countries. We are in talks with a few ministries in Morocco, Tanzania, and other countries in the region that want to digitise healthcare, post services, etc.

— Mahboob Subuhani is the business development manager at Sigma Software Group. The views expressed are his own and do not reflect the newspaper's policy.

• KT Network