State CIOs pursue ‘no wrong door’ approach to digital service delivery

Two state chief information officers told StateScoop in recent interviews that their work improving how they deliver services to residents is largely driven by the principle of “no wrong door,” or designing processes so that everyone can easily access the same reliable information, regardless of how they contact the state.

Utah CIO Alan Fuller said his state plans next year to launch a new identity management platform and a citizen services portal that will ensure anyone seeking services won’t hit a dead-end when looking for help.

“The idea is a ‘no wrong door’ approach where someone comes to the citizen portal, they log in, it’ll be a high quality log-in and we can bring the state data to them, their data to them,” he said.

Fuller said the new services portal will — with user permission — fetch data from across many state agencies to display personalized information, like a link to the user’s beekeeper registration or the latest fishing report for Strawberry Reservoir, a popular location for trout fishing east of Provo.

But beyond providing a convenient and personalized online experience, Fuller said, the state also expects the portal will make it easier to attain social benefits.

“Some of these are designed to help some of our most fragile members of our society and we want to make it easier for them,” Fuller said. “Right now it’s really tough for people to get through just the application process for some of these social services. … It’s like a mountain of paperwork they have to get through.”

Indiana CIO Tracy Barnes said his state similarly wants to ensure the public has uniform access to reliable services and information. After three years of work, he said, Indiana recently launched a contact center platform that consolidated 5,000 agents working out of 35 call centers in 20 agencies.

Before the consolidation, he said, callers who called a general line looking for help sometimes were asked to hang up and call an agency-specific call center. Barnes said that arrangement was inconvenient and demanded that the public possess a thorough knowledge of government’s workings.

He said part of the project involves combining the data used by the state’s call centers, websites and chatbots, to ensure people have just “one door to Indiana” when they’re seeking reliable answers to their questions.

“It’s not like the situation with the airlines where if you call three times you get three different answers,” he said. “That’s really the big key is standardizing the information and knowledge base across those stacks to make life for service acquisition a lot easier.”

And though websites and apps often gain more attention than in-person help desks or call centers, Barnes said it’s important for states to consider users that prefer traditional modes of communication. Barnes and Fuller each noted internal surveys showing that approximately 20% of users prefer to speak with a live person, rather than complete their business entirely online.