The Montana Department of Commerce (DOC) is the first agency in the state to become fully digitized, achieving Gov. Greg Gianforte’s statewide digital challenge.
“Modernizing state government is critical to better serving our customers, the people of Montana, and being better stewards of their hard-earned money,” Gov. Gianforte said in a statement. “By adopting a culture of customer service across state agencies, we are changing the way state government does business. By transforming state government to digital, we’ll better serve Montanans while also saving taxpayers millions along the way.”
As part of his commitment to improve customer service and modernize technology in state government agencies, the governor issued his challenge to all agencies in the state to be ‘Digital First’ by the end of this fiscal year.
In this challenge, the governor also charged the Department of Administration with leading an enterprise-wide digital redesign and digitization effort to cut waste, eliminate inefficiencies, and streamline operations.
“When Governor Gianforte issued this challenge to all state agencies to be digital-first, Commerce gladly took on the challenge,” said Montana DOC Director Scott Osterman. “With help from partner agencies involved in ramping up this initiative, we’ve worked diligently and swiftly to meet this goal.”
DOC developed new processes that will add significant improvements to their workflow for a more efficient operation, both internally and externally. DOC was able to achieve this with assistance from the Montana Administration Department, which provided the agency access to the ServiceNow software platform to improve internal work efficiencies and strengthen external customer service.
With this access, DOC can provide its customers with a more user-friendly one-stop shop for services. The interface also requires less technical ability for internal and external users. It will also significantly decrease the workload for state IT administrators.
According to the governor’s office, the Montana Department of Administration will continue to work on pushing more agencies to become fully digital and meet the governor’s challenge.