Dynamic Duo of Digital Experience and Volt MX Provides Essential Citizen Services

The Solution

Targeting Transformation

Every year, online services and app usage becomes more tightly woven into daily life. As consumers and businesses alike increasingly choose digital channels to communicate, collaborate, and purchase, the pressure is on for government organizations like this State Government Organization to meet growing demand for online services.

The State Government learned that citizens have higher expectations of digital services from governments than they do from retailers. Despite this, public-sector IT departments are typically less prepared to deliver online services than their counterparts in the business world.

Like many US state governments, the organization enables citizens to access critical public services online and at their fingertips through apps on their devices. In the past, each state agency department was responsible for delivering its own digital services. However, citizens often need to access services that span multiple departments to accomplish their goals. As a result, citizens had to register multiple user accounts, which added friction to their journeys. For example, unemployed constituents would need to register in four separate sites to access support with healthcare, food, childcare, and employment.

To solve the challenge, the State Government organization decided to create a central identity and access management platform and deliver single-sign-on (SSO) capabilities. Building on the foundation of a robust SSO platform, the organization aimed to create a portal that empowered citizens and businesses to access all the services they needed through a single user account.

They also knew that it’s in the public’s interest to make every interaction with the government as easy as possible. For citizens, digital self-service does more than save people the inconvenience of driving to an office and waiting in line. It also improves operational cost-efficiency, which helps deliver greater value for the taxpayer dollar. Similarly, making it straightforward for companies to access critical State services and information means they could attract more businesses to the state and strengthen employment across the state. They collaborated with HCL to help make the transformation a reality. With this team effort and experience in adapting technologies and solutions to meet an organization’s needs, the team brought a unique blend of technology, design, and strategy expertise to successfully drive this project, where strengthening the relationships between the government agencies and citizens was key.

Building a New Digital Experience
To achieve its goals, the State Government Organization, created a statewide employee portal, myState and a new multidisciplinary, citizen-facing portal called State.gov based on the State Government Digital Experience (SGDX) with SSO capabilities. At the same time, the State deployed its identity management platform to all 88 counties and every local government entity in the state.

With more than 100 different entities providing services across the state, the SGDX team was keen to encourage government programs, agencies and departments to embrace the new portal. To reduce internal barriers to adoption, the state built a set of accelerators on the HCL Digital Experience platform.

The Lead Architect for the State Government Organization at the time, says “The State Government wanted to keep the technical work required to migrate a legacy intranet site to their platform to a minimum,” and adds “By creating portal templates on top of their technical tools, they can now offer an integrated package of technology and change-management solutions that reduces the time spent on technical work to as little as three percent of the total migration project. The results have been extremely positive. They recently onboarded one of the state’s largest agencies to the MyState platform in under two months — and most of that work was knowledge-transfer around data governance and ownership.”

By experiencing the speed with which the platform was deployed and the associated time and cost savings, combined with word-of-mouth endorsement, it was an easy progression for state entities to adopt and move to the SGDX. The State Government is now achieving its goal of driving internal engagement.

The Lead Architect adds: “At the start of their deployment, they decided they didn’t want to mandate their users to move to SGDX, which wasn’t the norm for projects of this scale. They were confident that inspiring people to come to us because they’d heard about the benefits of our platform would be a more powerful way to drive adoption than mandating everyone to use the portal from day one — and their approach is paying off. Even before the team finished testing, departments were lining up to get on the SGDX platform.”

From concept to completion, a small development team was able to utilize the HCL Volt MX platform to develop, test, and deploy five robust apps for ease of consumer use in less than a year. The platform, hosted on the AWS Cloud, offers flexibility with a single code base that could deliver apps for any operating system and any device. HCL Volt MX has a rich set of features including a component library of reusable and customizable “parts”, that aid in the fast creation of apps. It has a greater value per dollar compared to other low-code solutions in the market. These apps run on iOS and Android mobile devices and have been used every day since then.

The apps provide crucial services accessible by citizens anytime, anywhere such as:

• A court-hearing portal that gives citizens the opportunity to ask the state for a hearing if their benefits were wrongly denied or terminated.
• A child-support app that allows secure access to parents’ information, including support orders, making/receiving payments, and payment history.
• A labor-market app that aggregates historical labor market statistics related to labor force numbers, payroll jobs, unemployment rates, and provides users the ability to download the raw data into easy-to-use reports.
• A rapid-response app that helps the organization quickly identify, train and deploy qualified workers who have been recently furloughed so that they can be placed into new jobs and get back on their feet.
• A SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) related app that allows citizens to access information regarding food stamps, local farmers’ market locations, and important nutrition information.

The successful creation and execution of these apps has encouraged the organization to expand their app development to other services that will benefit the state’s many citizens.