Roundtable’s speedy deployment model

For government agencies trying to deploy new technology, it’s difficult not to encounter overspending and delays. On the aggregate, government tech projects over $6 million only succeed 13% of the time. Too often, state, county, and local government projects find that new solutions aren’t set up for quick, effective implementation:  

• One police department in the Midwest spent over $1 million on a new dispatch system that was plagued with issues, including difficulty locating the origin of a 911 call.
• A large city’s school district spent over $1 billion on iPads, only to find they necessitated additional training for teachers to integrate them into the curriculum.
• A new billing system for one city’s utility ran tens of millions of dollars over budget, and initially allowed thousands of customers to see each other’s bills.

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There are countless more examples of government technology deployments mired in inefficacy and inadequacy through no fault of the agencies themselves. 

The truth is that most technology deployed in government agencies isn’t built for the specific needs and unique environment of government. These are among the most complex institutions responsible for solving society’s hardest problems, from helping people experiencing homelessness and responding to emergencies to administering elections and caring for veterans. Government agencies’ IT staff are stretched thin and leaders are used to deploying technology incrementally, by committee. 

It is the responsibility of tech companies to rise to the challenge of meeting the needs of the public sector. Navigating government’s inherent complexity, reducing the burden on IT, and ensuring a smooth, holistic software deployment are non-negotiables.

When technology is not designed to be implemented quickly — because it gets stuck in administrative limbo, security audits, or custom configuration processes — it will miss the moment when it is most needed. Tech companies therefore must cultivate a deep understanding of agency stakeholders and their needs. This ongoing learning should not slow down implementation, but, as an intentional element of the relationship building and discovery process, will in fact enable tech companies to implement more smoothly, and therefore faster. When tech companies can incrementally build upon successes, they will avoid biting off more than they can chew. And more importantly, they will be providing value to public servants at every step of the way. 

Here’s how Roundtable achieves those results:

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Deploy Roundtable in days

Roundtable has, in urgent circumstances, been deployed in under a week. This is because our government operations platform was designed to be launched without custom elements required, allowing us to get up and running fast. Roundtable’s deployment model is comprised of three stages, none of which require a heavy lift from IT:

1. Understand your mission and vision: We work with your team to understand what you want to achieve, what metrics define success, and what would be the most impactful uses of Roundtable.
2. Build your launch plan: Once we understand goals, we plan the Roundtable ecosystem your team will need, identify a small group of beta users, and develop a plan to help members learn about and use Roundtable, and train your team as needed.
3. Configure the platform: We set up access-restricted spaces so users can securely access only the information they need. We’ll also help you upload and tag initial content and resources for immediate utility and support the development of community guidelines and goals. 

In weeks, we’ll have your entire collaboration toolkit — listservs, messaging tools, document repositories, websites, learning management systems, CRMs, and more — consolidated into a centralized, easy-to-use platform.

“Roundtable was easy for IT to set up, and it was minimal work for us to get going. It’s so easy to use and solved a long-time need for us,” said Dana Carey, Senior Business Services Administrator at the Prince William County Department of Social Services.

With Roundtable, we get frontline public servants answers to their most important questions and access to the resources they need — quickly and easily. 

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Getting into the trenches

When government agencies buy out-of-the-box tools from legacy providers, they’re usually left on their own once the tool is set up. 

Our team prides itself on being experts in not only government technology but also change management. We’ve developed these practices by taking the exact opposite approach: We spend countless hours in the trenches with our customers from day one to day one thousand, and every day in between. 

“Roundtable helped us implement their government operations platform and get it right, with some tooling on the backend to support data migration,” Brian Leach, from South Carolina’s State Election Commission (SEC), told us. 

Our technical services team has helped federal, state, and local agencies migrate their critical documents and resources and connect to common systems like Sharepoint to alleviate the burden on IT. We build curated project plans and trackers as well as reporting and analytics dashboards and conduct in-person trainings, too.

Whatever you need, we’re there for you. Because when we call ourselves a “government operations platform,” we take that commitment seriously.