The U.S. Navy is testing a team of drone boats to protect harbors here and abroad. The boats, which are basically autonomous versions of the Rigid Hull Inflatable, are connected to a AI routing system called CARACaS. In original 2014 tests the boats worked separately to protect ships in a harbor and the new routing system now allows them to swarm as a team to surround and neutralize threats.
The system is also running an automatic vehicle identification system that allows the boats to assess friends and foes on the high seas.
Autonomous boats work well because, well, there isn’t much to hit in the ocean. These boats are especially useful in keeping unwanted boats away from Navy vessels and because they work in concert they can patrol a spot and then mass together to prevent a threat. The best thing? These aren’t special, custom-made boats. The Navy is simply outfitting standard boats with AI and control mechanisms and letting the loose making it far easier to retrofit older “dumb” boats and recruit them into the coming machine army.
The Government Will See You Now: A Private Sector Solution for Public Sector Problems
There’s a long-standing belief out there that governments, and government websites in particular, could do a better job of providing access and information to the public. Fueled by their experiences with private industry, citizens no longer have the patience for anything less than immediate access to information and total visibility into the status of their inquiries. This can be a high standard to meet, especially for smaller governmental bodies, but the truth is these expectations are justified.
Here’s how a few forward-thinking government agencies are modernizing the way they do business and easing the customer journey in an effort to improve relations with their constituents.
The city council for Sunderland in the United Kingdom handles more than 700 separate services for its 280,000 citizens. Until recently, attempts to reach the correct city personnel required numerous calls, and citizens had to repeat their basic information and reason for calling each time. The process needed to be streamlined, but without reducing the number of services offered.
The city council found a solution in customer relationship management (CRM) tools that allow agents at the first point of contact to quickly confirm the caller’s needs and transfer the inquiry and pertinent personal data to the proper department. Multiple requests can be made in one call, and city employees can check on the status of any inquiry regardless of department.
In Charlotte, North Carolina, in the United States, the manual processing of individual event permits rapidly became outdated when the 2012 Democratic National Convention rolled into town, bringing with it 35,000 delegates and attendees. The city needed both automation and the ability to affordably handle large volumes of traffic—and a long deployment timeframe was out of the question.
Opting for a scalable, cloud-based, and self-service permitting portal was the clever choice. Now when large events are hosted in Charlotte, extra server space can quickly be allotted to meet demand. Equally helpful is the new central event management knowledge base, which allows city employees to quickly answer event-related questions and save past event parameters for the next time an organization comes to town.
From water to electricity to waste removal, every department in the US city of Grand Rapids, Michigan has long striven to put the people first. The problem was, each department had worked out its own system over time, resulting in longer hold times and higher administrative costs across the board.
Declaring “One Call to City Hall” their new motto, local authorities replaced their disparate old systems with a unified, CRM-driven solution they call Grand Rapids 311. Now citizens and staff have access to a unified knowledge base covering all departments. Since their CRM implementation began, Grand Rapids has seen answer times plummet from 6 minutes to 22 seconds, leading to a budgetary savings of more than $600,000 in the solution's second year.
From public safety to healthcare and education, government entities now have access to tools capable of easing public access to services and streamlining workflows to the highest private sector standards. If you’re looking for a solution that can reduce stress for your citizens while helping your department be leaner and more responsive, check out the tools available from Microsoft Dynamics CRM. And for a more in-depth perspective, read our white paper, Engaging and Serving Citizens.
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The Government Will See You Now: A Private Sector Solution for Public Sector Problems
There’s a long-standing belief out there that governments, and government websites in particular, could do a better job of providing access and information to the public. Fueled by their experiences with private industry, citizens no longer have the patience for anything less than immediate access to information and total visibility into the status of their inquiries. This can be a high standard to meet, especially for smaller governmental bodies, but the truth is these expectations are justified.
Here’s how a few forward-thinking government agencies are modernizing the way they do business and easing the customer journey in an effort to improve relations with their constituents.
The city council for Sunderland in the United Kingdom handles more than 700 separate services for its 280,000 citizens. Until recently, attempts to reach the correct city personnel required numerous calls, and citizens had to repeat their basic information and reason for calling each time. The process needed to be streamlined, but without reducing the number of services offered.
The city council found a solution in customer relationship management (CRM) tools that allow agents at the first point of contact to quickly confirm the caller’s needs and transfer the inquiry and pertinent personal data to the proper department. Multiple requests can be made in one call, and city employees can check on the status of any inquiry regardless of department.
In Charlotte, North Carolina, in the United States, the manual processing of individual event permits rapidly became outdated when the 2012 Democratic National Convention rolled into town, bringing with it 35,000 delegates and attendees. The city needed both automation and the ability to affordably handle large volumes of traffic—and a long deployment timeframe was out of the question.
Opting for a scalable, cloud-based, and self-service permitting portal was the clever choice. Now when large events are hosted in Charlotte, extra server space can quickly be allotted to meet demand. Equally helpful is the new central event management knowledge base, which allows city employees to quickly answer event-related questions and save past event parameters for the next time an organization comes to town.
From water to electricity to waste removal, every department in the US city of Grand Rapids, Michigan has long striven to put the people first. The problem was, each department had worked out its own system over time, resulting in longer hold times and higher administrative costs across the board.
Declaring “One Call to City Hall” their new motto, local authorities replaced their disparate old systems with a unified, CRM-driven solution they call Grand Rapids 311. Now citizens and staff have access to a unified knowledge base covering all departments. Since their CRM implementation began, Grand Rapids has seen answer times plummet from 6 minutes to 22 seconds, leading to a budgetary savings of more than $600,000 in the solution's second year.
From public safety to healthcare and education, government entities now have access to tools capable of easing public access to services and streamlining workflows to the highest private sector standards. If you’re looking for a solution that can reduce stress for your citizens while helping your department be leaner and more responsive, check out the tools available from Microsoft Dynamics CRM. And for a more in-depth perspective, read our white paper, Engaging and Serving Citizens.
We are excited to announce the general availability of theAzure Import/Export Servicein Microsoft Azure Government. The Import/Export service allows migration of large amounts of data in and out of Azure blob storage by shipping hard disk drives directly to the datacenter. This service is suitable in situations where you want to transfer several TBs of data in or out of Azure Storage, but uploading or downloading over the network is not feasible due to limited bandwidth or high network costs. Some scenarios where this service can be used are data seeding, content distribution, recurring data update, offsite backup, disaster recovery.
Benefits of using Azure Import Export
Fast: We recommend using Azure Import/Export if loading data over the network would take 7 days or more. Shipping disks directly to the data center can save weeks or more off of network transfer time.
Secure: Data is secured by Bitlocker encryption. The keys are securely uploaded using SSL REST-API and do not travel along with the disk.
Reliable: The client tool has internal checksum logic to maintain data integrity. Various verbosity of logging is available directly in customer storage accounts making this process highly reliable.
While all import/export functionality is available, we currently only support the REST API interface for creation and management of import/export jobs in Azure Government.The Portal experience for Import/Export jobswill come in the new portal later this year. See below for details and samples for getting started with import jobs via the REST API.
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