Indiana shines in Statescoop Awards
The winners of the sixth annual StateScoop 50 awards were announced in May, kicking off the National Association of State Chief Information Officers’ midyear conference. Indiana came home with four honors, the second most of any state. The awards honor the projects and people driving state government technology and cybersecurity.
Hemant Jain (pictured on the right with State CIO, Dewand Neely), Director of Security Operations at IOT, received the title of State Cybersecurity Leader of the Year.
Alexandra Ibragic, of Management Performance Hub (MPH) and Connor Norwood of Family Social Services Administration (FSSA) were awarded State Up & Comers of the Year.
FSSA INconnect was awarded State IT Innovation of the Year. INConnect is a FSSA platform developed to improve citizen’s access to the various state resources available to them through FSSA. Through the data aggregation and use of mapping technologies, users can determine which programs are close by and available to them. Users can search for, among other things, Medicaid providers, child care providers, find agency locations, take an assessment survey and identify addiction treatment services.
In January, members of the state and local IT community nominated thousands of leaders and projects for the awards. StateScoop narrowed the list to 180 of those who received the most nominations and readers cast more than 2 million votes nationally between March and April to select the final 50 winners.
IOT has dedicated staff that is focused on dealing with emergencies and business continuity. Last month, the group met for a TableTop eXercise (TTX), which simulates an emergency, to discuss their roles and tested their preparedness. 
This exercise brings awareness to the importance of Business Continuity (Continuity of Operations Plan – COOP) and, at the same time, identifies gaps and seeks improvement to this plan.
The team was given an emergency scenario and members were instructed to test the ability to restore and maintain IOT mission essential functions, communicate with staff and identify gaps that exist between response actions.
The main gaps the team found included finding the order of succession, where employees can find the COOP plan in their agency and how to communicate with other agencies and the public if an emergency occurs.
The COOP team discussed many options to make improvements to this plan and will continue working together to get it up-to-date and accurate. Following leadership approval, the COOP team will submit the plan to the IDHS State Continuity Planning Manager to share with other agencies to help them discover their own COOP plan. COOP is an important part of IOT to ensure that state government operations can be up and running quickly during an emergency.
Increasing usage of Self-Service Password Management
Employees in the workforce prefer to have self-service options to quickly and easily handle problems themselves. That is one of the reasons that last year IOT implemented the Self-Service Password Management (SSPM) system. All employees were enrolled in SSPM last year and initial usage hovered around 50% usage. Since then however, usage has decreased, and in the last year there have been nearly 32,000 phone calls to the IOT Customer Support Desk just to reset passwords.
Using SSPM saves time for both employees and the IOT Customer Support Desk. Since implementation, employees have saved 4,225 hours of working time by using the simple SSPM process.
With more than 60% of password resets being made by phone and with a proven time-saving self-service method, IOT will begin implementing mandatory usage of SSPM for all password resets effective July 1.
If an employee calls that is already enrolled in SSPM, customer service will direct them to use the tool. If the employee is not enrolled, customer service will provide a temporary password and encourage them to enroll in SSPM.
IOT does not intend to disrupt critical business, but with the SSPM offering, this is a tremendous opportunity to save employee time. If you have questions, the SSPM training guide may provide some answers. You can view the SSPM training guide to help you get started.
The State of Indiana recently went through a design refresh for government agency websites to help maintain a modern design and enhance the user experience. More than 160 websites were updated that reflect feedback from user studies, design trends and other factors.
Take a look at an engaging presentation that examines some of the features in the new design and the recent history of the agency template.
In 2009, IN.gov was the first state in the country to move all of its agencies and departments into a unified design template system. Since then, IN.gov has gone through several revisions of the state template design, typically every other year, to continually improve on the citizen and state employee user experience.
The state's website is used extensively - IN.gov is the 8th most popular state government website in the U.S, the 26th most popular .gov website in the U.S., and the 1,286th most popular overall website in the U.S., according to Quantcast (as of May 2019).
In 2018, IN.gov had more than 33M visitors and 203M pageviews. In April 2019 alone, IN.gov had more than 3M visitors and 14.5M page views.
View the presentation to see some of the new changes: https://on.in.gov/ndpdq.
Since 2014, the State has participated in at least one hackathon a year, collaborating with the Indy Chamber to host events that brings together technology and government to discuss challenges and develop solutions to problems affecting the lives of citizens.
This year, the Indiana Department of Corrections is presenting a challenge around its customer re-entry. Additionally, the City of Indianapolis has a challenge targeting increasing educational attainment.
At hackathons, volunteer coders, designers, programmers, marketers and people from all other areas of work, spend their time to develop the initial spark of a solution to a problem. Last year, nearly 100 people came together to address the challenge of food insecurity in Indianapolis. The state provided a lot of data sets to assist teams in developing its solutions.
The event will begin at 5:30 p.m., Friday, June 14 at Launch Indy, 525 S. Meridian Street, Indianapolis. Dinner, breakfast and lunch are served throughout the event so that teams can effectively work the entire 24 hours of the contest. If you are interested in more information, visit https://indychamber.com/events/indy-civic-hack/.