Digital States Survey 2020: Cloud Is More Critical Than Ever

Source: GovTech Published: October 28th, 2020

A STATES

Georgia

2020 Grade: A

2018 Grade: A

CIO: Calvin Rhodes

Before and during the pandemic, Georgia has been making some big strides in modernizing its technology infrastructure and deploying new services to make state workers more efficient and offer more self-serve options to its growing population. At the core of that work is GovHub, Georgia’s new website and digital services platform, which it rolled out in April 2019. Using the platform, along with tools for monitoring accessibility issues and other pitfalls, the state has embarked on a project to migrate websites to a new content management system while improving security. Meanwhile, the state has engaged helpful new communications channels to help citizens, including chatbots that helped people answer questions during the pandemic and digital assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. New digital services include a school bus safety monitoring system that makes problems with buses and drivers more visible through automation of formerly manual processes; a new statistics dashboard for prison management that auto-generates text and email alerts to staff when critical incidents occur; and new additions to an app for early childhood care that allows providers to pay fees and report information from mobile devices. Many of those services, including the early childhood care app, feed data to websites that help citizens answer their own questions, such as which child-care facilities remained open during the pandemic. 

The state has also been making progress on cybersecurity, supporting a new initiative to train all executive branch workers, a new managed security services contract that includes a variety of technological upgrade options, and the implementation of an active directory system for applying policy based on the user rather than the network. Ongoing research and training work at the state’s nationally prominent Cyber Center included a three-day exercise in 2019 with several partners, including the country of Georgia. 

Michigan 

2020 Grade: A

2018 Grade: A

CIO: Brom Stibitz

Michigan is once again a top achiever in the Digital States Survey, and there are some commonalities as well between its strong performance two years ago and what it has accomplished now. Namely, in 2018 Michigan had added a new Office of Performance Transformation to do exactly what the name implies; now, the state has added an Office of Continuous Improvement. Part of what the latter has done is work to ensure that a lean process improvement methodology is applied prior to any investment in new IT work, thereby helping all IT work to net positive results. This is perhaps an extension of a previous move the state made to combine its tech department with that of management and budget to ensure efficiency.   

But it’s not all about the money in Michigan — it’s also about data. The state has now required all agencies to have a chief data steward, a dedicated staffer that supports the implementation of data classification within each office. This, it should be noted, even extends to email communications, which is a rarity and should be commended. Taking that work a step further was the implementation of enterprise-wide master data management aimed at creating a share-first culture. Finally, the state also built an enterprise-wide analytics center.   

Finally, Michigan is one of the states leading the way when it comes to applying human-centered design principals to outward-facing tech products. The list of new customer-centric work in Michigan with online components includes a Customer and Automotive Records System, a mobile app for communicating directly with the state police commissioner, and the automated selling of hunting and fishing licenses.

Missouri

2020 Grade: A

2018 Grade: A

CIO: Jeff Wann

Over the past couple years, Missouri led several internal and citizen-facing projects to make both its staff and services more effective. Since it was formed in May 2018, the state’s Cabinet IT Governance  Council (CITGC) has become a forum for collective decision-making on IT projects, focusing departments on specific goals in line with the governor’s priorities and reviewing IT projects above $500,000 to assess their benefit to citizens. Over past two years, the CITGC has created statewide strategies for ERP planning, cloud, chatbots, citizen experience, data governance and call center transformation. Also prioritizing workforce education, the Information Technology Services Division had employees train for two hours per week on tools such as Pluralsight, and it set up onboarding and professional development programs to boost staff retention and skills. 

Citizen engagement and education have also been priorities for Missouri. The Department of Higher Education and Workforce Development launched an online platform to help students navigate the path to college, from financial aid information to school and major selection. In 2019, the state launched a slew of projects aimed at efficiency and cost savings: an application to simplify the transfer of surplus property from one state agency to another, which saved more than $242,000 in new equipment purchases; a portal for citizens to pay driver’s license reinstatement fees online; a contract with Accenture for a chatbot to answer citizen questions about taxes, motor vehicles and driver’s licenses; and a crash-mapping tool to help assess which highways need work, to name a few. 

In the interest of public health, Missouri worked with the state highway patrol and the Department of Social Services on a website for anonymous tips to prevent mass shootings and other violence at school. It also implemented a new Medicaid payment system for behavioral health services that led to a 20 percent increase in the number of people receiving those services, and an 83 percent increase in the number of people receiving medication for substance-use disorders. The MO HealthNet Division, which administers the state’s Medicaid program, reduced opioid use across the state with data analytics to monitor use and inform decisions by Medicaid partners on granting prescriptions to residents. Data dashboards in general have become more popular in Missouri since its Department of Conservation used Tableau to visualize data and better understand the impact of state programs, so staff would know what to address.

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Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash