‘Individualized’ government tech could improve customer experience, Florida official says
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Rich Evans, CIO of Florida’s Department of Management Services, said during a recent workshop the public sector should embrace emerging technologies as a way of better serving constituents.
Governments of all sizes are looking to digitize their services and embrace emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, all in the name of improving the experience for their residents.
Some states have sped up benefits approvals, cut their applications backlogs and embraced generative AI to streamline their procurement processes or quickly connect employees with information. Others, meanwhile, have looked to migrate much of their operations away from legacy, on-prem technology and into the cloud to allow for greater reliability and capacity to handle surges of interest or applications.
It's a long journey towards modernization, but one government leader said it is just the start. Speaking during this week’s Nextgov/FCW and Route Fifty CX Workshop, Rich Evans, chief information officer at the Florida Department of Management Services, said that, in time, government should look to provide an “individualized” experience for customers, similar to the private sector.
“We should be able to find the things we're looking for based on how we normally interact with technology,” Evans said. “It shouldn't be something that's convoluted and difficult for us to navigate. It should be something that we can interact with seamlessly, almost as an extension of ourselves. I'm very excited to see how technology is going to continue to evolve over the next few years.”
Florida is underway with its own IT modernization effort, Evans said. The department, whose primary role is to provide support to other state agencies, has prioritized migrating to the cloud and plans to have most of the applications housed in the Office of Information Technology to be fully in the cloud by next summer.
The department also plans to make more use of data analytics to help with its decision making, Evans said, as well as strengthening its cybersecurity to deal with various ongoing and emerging threats. Modernization is an “ongoing journey,” Evans said, which is not a “destination” but “something we’re continuously doing.”
Those efforts at the Department of Management Services help other Florida agencies get more efficient and streamlined, especially ones that are public-facing. Evans cited the example of certain state certifications, a paper-based process that would take applicants 45 days to navigate from the time of their application to receiving their credential. Using automations and technology, that approval process now takes less than 30 minutes.
DMS has also stood up web portals and mobile applications for residents to use, as well as AI-powered chatbots, data analytics and other tools to better communicate with users.
“We want to streamline processes, eliminate paperwork or reduce wait times for anybody, whether it's our employees here at DMS, our employees at sister agencies or the citizens that are working with those employees,” Evans said.
AI represents a new frontier for government technology, Evans said, especially in making employees’ work more efficient and so providing better customer service for residents. The department is already dabbling with AI in certain restricted use cases, Evans said, but it’s still very early days.
“How can this be a tool that helps us be more effective, and what can we do as we watch the technology continue to evolve?” he said. “Sometimes it's good to hold off a little bit before you jump into something that's just coming out. Sometimes it's good to be an early adopter. In some places we are early adopters, and other places we hold off to understand. AI is a great example of that, because there's so much data that we have to be concerned about.”
That can be tough, however, given the speed of change in emerging technologies as they evolve. Keeping educated is the best way for employees to stay on top of how things are changing, Evans said, and can help them figure out the best way to harness them to help Florida residents.
“Technology is moving at warp speed,” Evans said. “We're doing everything we can through the lens of continuous learning to try to keep up with it and understand how those technologies that are emerging can help us be more effective and efficient.”
Improving customer experience is crucial, and ”satisfaction is often my key indicator,” he said.
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