North Carolina environmental agency embraces automation, process improvement

Any construction or development project in North Carolina that disturbs one acre or more of land requires a permit from the state’s Department of Environmental Quality to monitor stormwater and erosion.

But the process for issuing and renewing those permits over the life of a project was cumbersome and paper-based, requiring NCDEQ staff to monitor, retrieve and send emails to permittees to enforce the regulatory requirements. By automating that permitting process and having reminders sent out automatically, NCDEQ collected over $1.2 million in backlogged fees for that one type of permit while reducing staff time spent on it by 73%.

It’s part of a broader push in the agency responsible for implementing federal and state regulations to protect North Carolina’s environment to rethink and streamline its processes and use technology to help achieve those goals. While digitization is a major goal, Miriam Patrocinio, NCDEQ’s chief data officer, said it is part of a wider effort to rethink how the agency does business every day while staying within the bounds of laws and regulations.

“A process is created to satisfy the implementation of a law or a regulation, so that is indivisible,” Patrocinio said. “We cannot go beyond that, but starting from that, how can we think in a creative way, using technology, or sometimes just a better way of managing processes? Can we think of how to reduce the steps, reduce complexity, reduce red tape, so both internal and external stakeholders can be more successful at that process?”

That move to automation represents a major shift for NCDEQ, which Patrocinio said has traditionally been a “paper heavy” agency. But digitization began several years ago amid a push to modernize, building on an existing partnership with content management company Laserfiche, which acts as the agency’s central document repository.

A centralized document management system has helped automate various processes, sped up fee collection and allowed the state to hire more permit reviewers. Service delivery, then, becomes much improved.

“If you need to apply for a permit on your personal home, or if you're a business that needs to apply for a permit, anything that's going to touch an environmental perspective, they're able to streamline that process and automate that process,” said Andy MacIsaac, senior strategic solutions manager for government at Laserfiche. “They submit the permit applications online, then they can work that through an automated workflow that gets it done quicker. Then if there's a problem or a hang up, they can quickly identify where that is and get those permits processed a lot quicker.”

From NCDEQ’s perspective, making the processes themselves more efficient has been a big challenge, especially as some have become ingrained in how the agency does business over several decades and are siloed. By interviewing key staff and mapping out processes, NCDEQ can then figure out how to make them more integrated and efficient.

“Normally, processes that are isolated, they are expensive because they involve too many steps and too many people in the process, and they have cyclical turns that don't need to be there, which makes it longer and more complex,” Patrocinio said. “Processes are more expensive to agencies and on a time that we are optimizing not only technology, but people, it's very important that we pay attention to the nuance of the process.”

Sometimes, those interviews can yield interesting developments as staff can suggest new ideas on how the agency can work. Just having those conversations, even if those ideas are too early to be fully implemented, can get employees enthused about the work they are doing and how it can be improved, Patrocinio said.

“Sometimes their ideas are a little too premature for the time when they presented,” she said. “But now we are open to innovation, so that's a chance they have, and that normally gets the staff very excited. Sometimes it's not a full formed process, but through that initial collaboration, you have different minds coming together, and it becomes a very fun, very collaborative process. By the time it comes to technology, we went through that puzzle making together, which makes the technology application much easier.”

While it may be tempting to see technology as a game-changer for agencies of all sizes, Patrocinio warned that leaders must also think carefully about how to alter their processes to best take advantage.

“Technology is not a magic wand,” she said. “Technology is here to serve strategy first, and as leaders, we should be transformational leaders, starting with people and resolving problems that help people, that help our staff, help our constituents, help the people that use our services, so we can be better for them. We're not technology focused, but technology certainly is the main way we help people become more effective and productive and have that work life balance so they can have more quality in their lives as well.”