You can't manage what you can't see

Agility, accuracy and efficiency. Constituents have been imploring state and local governments to improve it for years, and now government policy is mandating it. 

The passing of HR1, which penalizes states if they reach a certain threshold for misappropriated SNAP and Medicaid benefits, is a bellwether of this fundamental shift, in which government is expected to incorporate policy changes without a dip in service delivery.

Unfortunately, legacy infrastructure is prohibiting the inter-department collaboration necessary to adapt to these new demands because systems are just as siloed as the departments they serve. 

For example, HR1 is changing SNAP eligibility standards for veterans and segments of people in the foster care system. Administrators in health and human services or other departments evaluating applications often need to personally call or email someone in veteran affairs or child and family services to obtain critical background information. More broadly, cross-referencing an applicant's efforts to find a job might require coordination with whomever is distributing unemployment benefits.

The problem isn't just that each department’s systems lack interoperability — it's that no one owns how the work actually moves between them.

The Pitfalls of Siloed Systems

While each individual department’s system may work exactly as designed, the lack of interoperability between them forces employees to create largely manual, fragmented and invisible processes to connect them. They call or email others to retrieve critical information. 

Documents are downloaded, uploaded and sent again to set approvals in motion. Multiple versions of applications and executive documents are circulating with no visibility. This manual correspondence and data transfer lengthens processing time, sometimes causing initiatives that should take days to stretch into weeks.

Manual cross-department collaboration also relies heavily on institutional knowledge. When experienced employees leave, either of their own volition or as part of a new mayor’s, city manager’s, or governor’s regime change, the understanding of how programs run goes with them. 

Work managed outside the system doesn’t leave a reliable trail, which poses a major compliance risk. When auditors ask questions, records are often incomplete because critical correspondence is never captured. If there is a dispute over whether a benefit was correctly applied, agencies have to “show their work,” so to speak. If the correct rationale for a reviewer's decision was conducted in a phone conversation or buried in an email, an agency wouldn’t be able to adequately defend itself in an audit.

When the steps connecting siloed systems live in inboxes and spreadsheets, agencies aren’t able to improve programs effectively. Managers can’t clearly identify where work slows down, where errors occur, or how services could run more effectively.  

You can't manage what you can't see. And the administrators buried in emails and Excel files feel the pain in the form of bureaucracy, while the residents waiting on the other side of those delays suffer even more aggravation.

Not Truly “Digital”

Siloed systems also hamper states’, cities’ and counties’ efforts to truly streamline government to meet emerging legislative and regulatory demands for nimbleness. “Digitized” processes end up merely being PDF or online versions of the paper-based ones. Automation is similarly applied in a vacuum, say, siloed within a particular department. Residents still have to print, complete, scan and submit documents by email. 

More consequentially, the same manual work is required on the back end. Meeting HR1 mandates and residents’ desires for smoother experiences requires more than just system interoperability; the processes connecting the systems — the routing, the review, the approval, the record — must be digitized, too. 

In fact, these narrow, isolated digital initiatives don’t solve arguably the most fundamental problem with public sector legacy systems: relevant data is still spread across multiple systems. Thus, the evaluation, approval and onboarding for a social services grant program, for instance, can slow to a crawl. The approving department may get delayed locating records from HHS pertaining to partner nonprofit mental health providers. 

Somebody has to remember to prompt legal to approve contracts and vet submissions to ensure regulatory compliance, especially when federal funds are involved. Finance might have a separate system for fund transfers, necessitating manual reconciliation of financial transactions with program records that exist in another database.

Agencies Must Own Collaboration Between Systems — and People

To survive and thrive in today’s increasingly demanding regulatory climate, “modernization” has to encompass something much more complex than simply implementing new databases and applications in isolation. Agencies must take ownership of how information moves — and how workers collaborate — between those systems.

That entails automated routing rules that move work to reviewers across multiple departments without a phone call, and a single view of every application regardless of where data sits. Digitization and automation must extend across every department that has a hand in executing a program — not just the one that initiated it.

When that coordination becomes visible, structured and manageable, programs can adapt to new mandates without starting from scratch, staff turnover doesn't erase institutional knowledge, and constituents get the services they need without absorbing the cost of broken processes behind the scenes.

Most importantly, state and local governments will exceed the people and the federal government’s higher expectations.

David O’Connell is the CEO of SimpliGov, a company that helps government agencies deliver the services communities depend on by automating how work moves across systems, teams and departments.