Missouri Department of Social Services uses ServiceNow to boost citizen experience

Through savvy tech investments and a unified platform provided by ServiceNow, the Missouri Department of Social Services is saving its residents time, its caseworkers thousands of hours monthly and its small-but-mighty IT team a lot of headaches.

The state agency is responsible for administering a number of social services each year, including Medicaid, SNAP and TANF benefits; child welfare services; and more to millions of Missourians. A major tech modernization effort, begun last year under incoming Missouri Department of Social Services Chief Information Officer Toi Wilde, has generated exceptional early returns, saving an estimated 40,000 monthly caseworker hours in child welfare services alone.

The agency has also set ambitious targets for its online portal to process 80% of all applications for Medicaid and SNAP services, to reduce renewal processing times by 60% and to shave days off the time it takes for eligibility to be determined after Missourians submit applications for services.

But the ongoing modernization journey, she said, began with a simple question and a blunt assessment.

“What is the mission for our organization and what is the driving force behind what we’re doing, and how we are truly using technology to drive that mission?” Wilde said May 6 at ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2026 conference in Las Vegas.

That became the agency’s “North Star,” and Wilde said answering that question made it clear that a buildup of years’ worth of technical debt was preventing the agency from “serving our customers and clients to the highest ability that we can.”

“I will be honest with you, it was very ugly,” Wilde said. The agency “had lots of technical debt” that was “creating more complexity for the citizens and more complexity for our caseworkers.”

Wilde, a trained registered nurse by trade, became a technologist almost out of necessity. Early in her career, she said she “was volunteered” by a previous employer to help with an electronic health records implementation because she happened to be tech-savvy. The young nurse used the opportunity — and healthy bias toward end-user experience as an end user herself — to become a technology subject matter expert. She worked her way up to oversee technology and interoperability strategy at Missouri’s Department of Mental Health prior to taking the top tech job at the Missouri Department of Social Services in April 2025.

Before diagnosing the solution to her agency’s tech debt, Wilde and her team ventured to call centers, shadowed caseworkers and gathered data from the front lines on what was and wasn’t working for staff and customers.

“I am a true believer that you need to get into the weeds to understand how folks are using your technology before you just start applying technology to their workflows,” Wilde said. “We needed to roll up our sleeves and do a lot of work, and that's when we started making platform decisions about what technology can support [our] vision, and that's really where we started aligning with the ServiceNow platform to be that catalyst to help us align that vision on what we wanted to see for our citizens and our caseworkers.”

In a panel conversation with Wilde in Las Vegas, ServiceNow Vice President of State and Local Government and Education Barry Ridgway underscored the complexity of the undertaking. “It's a very complex environment, lots of legacy systems, lots of integration across many different workflows, lots of political — and I would say policy — changes and legal implications,” he said.

When discussing platform necessities, Wilde said her agency — like many state agencies — needed it to be simple, straightforward and user-intuitive, easily scalable and agile enough to make quick alterations due to frequent federal or state policy and regulatory changes. She and her team also didn’t want to be bamboozled by “the next, new shiny thing,” had to be cost-conscious due to limited state resources and needed something easy to maintain for a small IT staff. The agency already had a “solid” foundation with ServiceNow, and that factored into the team’s decision too.

“And it was getting our team focused on, what are our current technologies, how can we use them, how can we scale them before we just go out and start buying the next new shiny thing?” she said. “My vision, and the vision that our [department of social services] team came up with is that we should be able to use technology in a way that serves the citizen to make it easy for them to apply for their benefits, to have omni-channel communication and understand where they are in the process, but, while doing that, our caseworkers are getting data and information to make the best determinations around eligibility.”

In the past year, the ServiceNow platform has a critical component for how the agency delivers services, but Wilde said more work is on the way. While “not sexy,” document storage and document integration with ServiceNow will further streamline and digitize paper-based processes. 

Another key upcoming piece, she said, will be an “orchestration layer” that will serve as a case management system for caseworkers.

“Information that is being garnered and gathered from the citizen when they’re applying for these programs now will come in a caseworker’s case management solution and have an orchestration layer where they can manage the case,” Wilde said. “And have a place where all of the information is coming to one spot for them.”