4 Considerations In Unemployment Modernization

4 Things to Consider Before Modernizing Unemployment Insurance

The pandemic has driven digital service transformation faster than any CIO initiative over the past 5 years.???In several government services conducting business with government switched from in person to “contactless” where citizens were able to interact seamlessly.??In these cases, the service itself, like DMV motor vehicle tag renewal, was online.??With DMV employees shifting to work from home manual paper processes and cumbersome workflows were adjusted to provide business continuity.?Yeah, government made the shift!?However, not all government services were online and ready for the scale of service demand, like unemployment insurance.??

As we know, the pandemic created a ripple effect on the nation which we have not seen before.?With the shutdown came no access to travel, hotels, restaurants, and entertainment.?With the entire service industry out of work the demand for UI claims grew by 500 percent.???While this is going on government service is completely upended with government employees, including the call centers, trying to work from home.??With some great work from IT, government employees were able to continue operations, including moving call centers from on-premises to virtual but they still could not keep up with the volume of calls.

States across the country now have an opportunity to use federal funds for things like modernization, cyber security, and broadband expansion.??Unemployment Insurance (UI) is a key system targeted during this next several years for digital transformation and to be more citizen- centric.

Modernization efforts are not simply about modernizing the application.??Cloud based applications provide great opportunity to dramatically improve the methods we use for citizens to do business with government but also expose us to new security and operational risks.?Mitigating and controlling these new cloud security risk requires a holistic view of Development, Security and Operations in a new DevSecOps approach as illustrated in the picture below.?Successful organizations have taken the approach of modernizing development, security, and operations in a joint project.?The goal of these joint projects to modernize all three components is to accelerate, standardize and simplify application modernization efforts.

Voice of the Customer and Citizen-Centric Digital Service

As we know one of the first steps in design thinking is to put ourselves in the shoes of our end user stakeholders to understand how they use and interact with our systems.?In this Unemployment Insurance modernization case, the two primary stakeholders are our citizens and UI employees.???Let’s double click on the fundamental question on why did the citizens who are trying to use UI service must call for service or have question in the first place??Imagine, this is the first time you have been forced out of work without any hope of finding another job.?After the panic wears off, you start the unemployment process but cannot find answers online, so you pick up the phone and call the state and wind up on-hold for hours or dropped when phone lines become saturated.

Citizens are expecting government services which emulate other online commercial personalized applications.??Citizens expect digital citizen-centered services.?Citizens and residence expect all government services to be integrated and not siloed.??They want services to be personalized where information is shared between departments, programs, and systems.??They want services which are tailored to their unique situation.??They want and expect government to integrate the data they have on individuals to be integrated to provide the best service possible.

Our government employees also are major stakeholders in system design and want all the various government program’s information to be integrated enabling them to efficiently provide high quality services to their clients. ??They also want systems to be integrated bringing together ALL the information from various systems into a single citizen 360 view enabling fast and efficient case management.??Our employee’s system design needs along with our citizen must be considered in our design modernization design.

Modernize through Modular Approach

How long did it take to build our current Unemployment systems???These old legacy systems did not get built overnight and have been modified, enhanced, upgraded, and tweaked over 15 to 25 years.??We cannot expect these large systems to be replaced quickly.????The ideas of the 1990s using big bang approaches where we could build a new system to replace the old system and convert to the new in a just do not work anymore.??A more systematic modular approach is the key to being able to upgrade small modules while leaving main parts of business logic and the database in place.??It is like replacing the wheels on a school bus while it is going down the road.?The key is system design where we can break these monolithic systems into business functions and modernize these functions over time in a stepwise approach.?

One approach is to build out a business, technical and data architecture to connect new mobile applications to legacy processes and databases.?Unwinding complex business logic out of legacy modules is complicated.?Modernization legacy systems is a complex process since these old systems have been built on a common architecture which rewarded tightly coupled engineering.?Unwinding tightly coupled systems into a modular loosely coupled design requires some solid architecture and engineering.?However, it is possible to design ways to potentially leave the legacy business rules in place while modernizing customer and employee facing functions. ?In some cases, focus on customer experience functions as the first step.

Where to start? ?I have seen successful modernization efforts on these old legacy systems start with citizen experience portals.?Some government organizations are now focusing on a single Customer Experience Platforms, as seen in a recent Value Point RFP, to create a single platform for their multi-agency modernization efforts.???These mobile portals focus on improving the citizen experience by enabling the citizen access to all the self-service functions which are appropriate.?Integrating new mobile citizen experience front ends with backend legacy business logic and databases is the key.??API and data integration cloud-based technologies are critical in the ability to modularize pieces and parts of these large monolithic applications.

Modernization efforts have the benefit from advancements in recent years in quantity of cloud services.??Modernization efforts would not be possible if we did not have access to cloud services for things like AI, ML, identity proofing, authorization and authentication, data exchange and API management.??

From the infrastructure management side trying to manage both legacy applications and now modern mobile applications securely has complicated the role of the traditional data center operations.??I have seen success where organizations have adopted a multi-platform management approach to deal with both VM and native cloud applications through Kubernetes.??Successful organizations, using a single pane of glass management console, have been able to have a single set infrastructure manager manage legacy and Kubernetes clusters seamlessly.??Additionally, they have been able to pass compliance audits by being able to apply consistent security policies across VMs and cloud services enforcing the appropriate compensating controls.

Take a Holistic End to End Approach

Taking an end-to-end system view we have an opportunity to understand how our employees will utilize the systems and workflows most effectively.??In many cases our monolithic system by system approach does not focus on a system view from the employee’s standpoint.??In many cases in processing Unemployment claims our employees need to travers many other systems like transportation, revenue, licensing, childcare and other federal and local systems to get an entire view of the UI claim.?In many cases we do not make it easy for this system-by-system navigation to take place.?Our employees use different MFA token, different user-ids and passwords.?For our employees, traditionally navigating system by system to complete a UI claim is time consuming and sometimes frustrating. ???

Use design thinking in your modernization efforts. Focus first on citizen and employee interaction with the system and understand their point of view and access needs.?Designing systems interfaces to match the ways that citizens and employees will enter, retrieve, query and integrate information with other systems will provide great insight. ??Additionally, doing a deep dive into the questions previously asked of customer support will quickly identify some of the obstacles from the legacy system.?Design a system where citizens can understand how and where to locate answers and perform their own self-service.

Likewise, in designing a system for our employees we need to understand the workflow and interface needs or our employees.?In designing our new UI system employee experience, keep in mind how our employees will use the system and related systems to execute their business function.

Taking a holistic view provides us the ability to integrate these disparate systems in an easy-to-use employee application portal where system access is granted through a single click, provided the user and device are authorized.????Understanding the user device also needs to be considered into the modernization effort.?With the ability of mobile devices to capture video, audio, location, natural language processing and other telemetries services how can we use this information to reduce the amount of manual data collection either by the citizen or employee.

Build in Security for End-to-End Visibility

Security has and will continue to be a number one concern of agency CIOs.??Enterprise security requires complete visibility of transactions from end point thru the network to the application.??Traditional security architectures where we would use perimeter-based design and trust employees on our internal networks and not trust external users are not as effective anymore due to the shift to WFH efforts. Security cannot be bolted on but must be designed into the system.??Implementing a Zero-Trust Security architecture is the best method for combating the sophistication and the complexity of new cyber threats.?Having controls which can verify the user, the device, the network, and the application along with knowing the characteristics of good behavior to so we can detect bad compromised cyber activity.??Additionally, experts are recommending migrating to a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solution to provide cloud level security for remote users.

In UI modernization efforts security is even more complicated by integrating both legacy technology and cloud technology securely.??Managing federal compliance across multiple platforms, environments and business functions requires a solid security platform approach vs bolting several point security products together.??This integrated security platform approach enables us to have visibility to every component of security from user, device, network, operating platform, and application.

Being able to manage all of the various thousands of devices, users, dozens of application and end point detection / remediation is complex.?I have seen successful organizations turn to cloud services and use “zero-touch” modern device management platforms as a way to simplify the complexity.?Being able to implement a zero-trust approach through cloud services enables our end user computing teams the visibility they need to see vulnerabilities across the network and quick shut down and respond to a compromised device.???With a majority of the workforce still working remotely we need to focus on security architectures such as zero-trust as one method to combat the sophistication of cyber threats. In the chart below I tried to illustrate how zero-trust is implemented across the various control points from user, device, network, cloud, and application workload.???

In summary, Unemployment Insurance modernization gives us great opportunity to change perceptions of our citizens and more importantly legislatures who control funding.?Changing the perception that government services are outdated will take time as we slowly modernize systems.?However, the use of platforms will allow us to accelerate modernization efforts, improve services and reduce cyber risks.???Turn to vendors for support and look for architectures and platforms which align to your modernization roadmaps.

Herb Thompson

VMware Sr State, Local and Education Strategist?