Overdue Update on Digital Government in Utah

2018 marks 25 years since I created my first government website. A quarter of a century.

The past year has been full of planning, strategizing and implementing new digital government services within a context that is focused on a new technological nexus that includes IoT, artificial intelligence, cloud services, blockchain, and other promising developments.

Just this morning, the Utah Data Research Center posted its new site with promise of more robust visual analytics supporting Utah's efforts to improve educational outcomes with more effective use of longitudinal data.

We have been focusing efforts to promote a platform model of digital government that is much more holistic in its approach. Our efforts are working towards incorporating Gartner's approach to delivering a Digital Government Technology Platform built on a mesh app and services architecture (MASA).

One of the key components will consist of a reliable, pervasive identity and access architecture that will enable us to provide more seamless access to business and citizen services securely and efficiently.

In 2017, we spent a great deal of time to define and improve our user experience throughout the Utah.gov domain that we now use as a brand not only for web and mobile experience, but for a growing number of platform services, whether that be on Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple Watch, or other third party platforms.  We were excited when the Center for Digital Government recognized the State's accomplishments in attempting to build and enhance the multi-channel experience, but also understand that there is much that still remains to be done to achieve our goals in this area.

Moving forward, I expect to see increased emphasis on 3 components of the digital government platform. We have reached a high level of maturity in delivering individual digital services as reflected in the upper left corner of the platform model. We have really just begun on building out the ecosystems and IoT platforms. We have approved standards in our architecture review process that can enable this to happen, but must do a better job of providing an integrated architecture that will underlay these components and enable them to be better supported by the Data and Analytics or "Intelligence" platform.

I had a discussion last week with leaders from US Ignite and Utah Ignite to promote a more coordinated approach to IoT and Smart Cities in Utah.