Sometimes it’s easiest to see the magnitude of a federal initiative when it’s applied at a local or state level. This is perfectly illustrated by states and local government who are making concerted efforts to improve and modernize their technological approaches for the benefit of their residents. We had the opportunity to learn more about these more localized technological improvements in a recent interview with Caleb Wederquist, Lead Developer at State of Nebraska.

Wederquist spoke with us about how they are utilizing information and case management solution OnBase to ultimately improve their interaction with the residents of Nebraska through digital transformation. To give you an idea of how much information that actually entails, here’s a stats card, courtesy of State of Nebraska, about the size of the information that is being managed with their technology:

Here’s what Wederquist had to say about the state’s technological evolution, how it has improved the office’s relationships with constituents and customers, and where the state of Nebraska is headed:

Federal Technology Insider (FTI): What are some of the key initiatives driving tech adoption for the State of Nebraska?

Caleb Wederquist (CW): I’d like to frame my answer by sharing the governor’s vision and mission, because that might help set the stage on how some of these initiatives come together. When the governor was appointed, he established a new vision called “Grow Nebraska.” And the mission of that is to create opportunity through more effective, more efficient, and customer-focused state government. That’s our mission as a government entity.

So some of the initiatives around that include a paperless Nebraska – how can we reduce paper and become more automated through mobile, web, and content management services. We also have an initiative focused on creating a centralized IT center. That means consolidation and bringing in all of these IT resources into one central office to help support it and do away with unnecessary, duplicate systems. In the end, we want to have more centralized enterprise platforms across the board.

We’re also pushing towards agile development and away from waterfall development. Our team has been focused on that, so there is a growth and a focus on building agile teams and having that agile focus to keep moving forward with our technology deployment.

FTI: How does this tech adoption improve services for residents of the state of Nebraska?

CW: With the overall mission focused on customers, we’re making sure that our tech initiatives surround that as well. By moving to agile, we’re trying to make sure that we’re more up front with our customers who serve the residents of the state of Nebraska.

We’re helping to build more dynamic and robust solutions for the customer, so that when the residents of Nebraska access those solutions, they have a better response. They have a quicker delivery of information. It could be with regards to how they report issues they’re experiencing in the community; it could be how they are getting access to public records. It’s also very helpful in delivering a self-service experience for them that is less dependent on paper.

With the help of our teams and our partners (Hyland and Data Bank), we’re building solutions that are removing paper completely and instead giving them a web frontend and electronically notifying citizens by email about the updated status of their pending requests.

We’ll be sharing more from Wederquist about important lessons learned, cloud adoption and the future of IT for the state of Nebraska in our next installment of this Q&A.

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