Ohio Department of Job and Family Services

Author bio –

Jade Moyer is the chief technology innovation officer of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. She is a 10-year IT professional who specializes in leading diverse teams in the creation of technical, cutting-edge solutions.

Leading the application development office of a large state agency can be difficult in this exponentially growing IT landscape. Ensuring these applications meet the needs of our clients is particularly important when you consider that millions of Ohioans rely on Ohio's Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS) for food and cash assistance, unemployment, child support and career support services. From an external perspective, our applications must be stable, easily accessed, and meet the needs of a diverse group of clients. From a business operations perspective, they must also focus on internal process improvement and allow us to take advantage of technologies such as automation to make the most of our limited resources. As IT professionals, we also realized the importance of standardizing our engagement model with our business partners to promote automation possibilities.

Accomplishing these myriad results requires a unified approach to automation. While we received many great ideas from throughout our organization, we needed a way to process and consider these ideas. To do this, our enterprise architecture team spearheaded the creation of an automation center of excellence (CoE). Creating this has allowed our IT professionals, from architects and developers to business analysts and quality assurance specialists, to standardize our automation request processes. Once in place, members of the automation CoE engaged with our business customers to help them understand the path to identify automation needs within their offices. This evolved into natural and consistent conversations about the importance and benefits of adding automation to our business processes and applications.

We now have a healthy list of automation ideas and interests from around the agency, including ideas involving robotic process automation (RPA) and chatbots. We have successfully deployed six RPA solutions and six chatbots into production, all resulting in internal efficiencies and improved customer experiences. One of our most publicly utilized solutions is a chatbot for our Unemployment Insurance program. This chatbot, named LISA, assists users by answering various questions and explaining filing processes for what is a complex and daunting system. LISA puts members of the public at ease by providing relevant information and even routing them to live agents for more intricate queries. We are excited not just about the success of this project, but what it signals for even more such projects in the future. We are also excited that as we mature on our automation journey, we will begin exploring use cases for generative artificial intelligence (AI) in our solutions.

  ​The application development landscape can be siloed by systems, so we knew we needed to do something different for automation 

Our efforts have not been without challenges. Like everyone in the public sector, we have limited resources, which start to dwindle as our list of automation requests grows. Ramping up resources can be difficult and time-consuming. While temporary staffing is an option, staffing a permanent team of employees is preferred. The application development landscape can be siloed by systems, so we knew we needed to do something different for automation. We used vendor partners such as Gartner and InfoTech to help us better understand the roles necessary to build an automation development team. Throughout the next year, we plan to staff that team with skilled and passionate developers, business analysts, architects, and testers. We also plan to develop career paths for the automation team for current employees who are passionate about learning new technologies. Being a part of the AI revolution is intriguing to our technology professionals.

As an IT leader, stepping into new technologies can be exciting, but we also must remain diligent and set appropriate guardrails. Throughout this entire journey, consultation with security and legal teams was critical to keeping our data safe. With teamwork, standardized processes, and a motivated workforce, we are ready to embrace the next set of business problems through our technical solutions.