How Kansas’ labor department’s tech became ‘built for tomorrow’
Fiordaliso via Getty Images
By
Chris Teale
The state was reliant on 1970s-era systems that were exposed by COVID-19. Since then, it has moved to the cloud and embraced AI as part of a major modernization push.
The 1970s brought many cultural touchstones, be they Star Wars or the advent of disco. It also marked the launch of the Kansas Department of Labor’s original unemployment insurance system.
In the 50 years since, there had been attempts to upgrade it, said Amber Shultz, the Kansas secretary of labor, but the state never really changed from its original system, setting up what she described as a “house of cards.” Customer service representatives were reliant on old green screens, and had to memorize and use short codes to navigate the platform, which meant calls could take 30 to 40 minutes to resolve.
Then, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed those shortcomings, as the state’s unemployment rate jumped from just under 3% to over 12% practically overnight, and the number of calls the customer service center received each day jumped from 15,000 to 1.5 million. It proved to be a lot for a system that Shultz said was “duct-taped and bubble-gummed together” and was deemed as at high risk of failure.
It prompted Gov. Laura Kelly and other state leaders to start a major modernization push in early 2021. In the space of 29 months, the agency had turned to the cloud and artificial intelligence to bring its system into the 21st century. That system can now be expanded for times of high demand, which Shultz said means it is “built for tomorrow,” not just the short term. It also does not experience any downtime, enabling it to be used around-the-clock by residents. The old system was available around 65% of the time by design, as it went down each night to process transactions.
“What we knew was that we needed to build a system that was not only going to work for us today, but also for decades in the future,” Shultz said during an on-stage interview at last week’s AWS Summit in Washington, D.C.
Now, around 90% of those seeking help can be served online, rather than have to contact a customer service center. And for those working in that service center, training that used to take eight weeks to get employees able to start taking on cases now only takes two weeks under the simplified system .
And with many mundane processes like call transcription and auto-adjudication of applications and paperwork now automated, they are able to focus on cases that require greater human intervention. Shultz said it all has created a “snowball effect” where everyone’s lives, from applicants to employees, get better.
“The biggest outcome is … it is dreadfully difficult to be unemployed, your emotions are all over the place, your family, your apartment, your home, cars, so it’s just to make sure that there's one path for claims and we can ensure that we will be there for them,” Shultz said.
The Kansas Department of Labor was something of a modernization pioneer, Shultz said, noting the agency was “so far ahead” of many of its peers but also “so far behind” on adopting new technology. In the meantime, residents’ expectations for government services have changed as they demand transparency, responsiveness and the ability to solve problems quickly.
Experts said AI can help speed up that modernization process and make applications that are in some cases decades old work more efficiently and quickly in constituent service. Although, they said, it will take time for those dreams to become a reality.
“Overall, I don't think you've seen governments really able to deliver on that promise yet,” Alec Chalmers, AWS’ director of educational and government technology, told Route Fifty in an interview on the sidelines of the summit. “I really do think what you're going to see with AI, it's going to allow them to modernize these legacy applications, some of which are 30 and 40 years old.”
Numerous agencies at the state and local level are modernizing their legacy systems and turning to AI to help make employees work more efficiently. Shultz said it cannot be business as usual as government leaders look to better serve residents.
“Government can't work like government anymore, especially in terms of procurement, technology and service delivery,” Shultz said. “We're really failing individual citizens, businesses, our stakeholder groups, organized labor. It's not just one person; we're failing everybody.”
Modernization will remain an ongoing task, as this system will likely add new features and will also need to comply with new regulations and laws passed by the state legislature. The agency will never stop moving forward, Shultz said.
“If you think you’re done, you have failed,” she said.