A Powerful Digital Experience Provides Essential Services and Information for Citizens, Businesses and State Employees

By offering its internal stakeholders the tools they need to rapidly onboard to ODX, the ODX team is now delivering seamless digital services to citizens and businesses across the state.

With current global pandemic conditions in effect, the State of Ohio team has been analyzing the type and volume of incoming requests to their ODX site instances so that they can adjust services as needed and be as responsive as possible to the needs of their citizens. As part of their analysis the team has seen the incoming rate of business-critical request traffic increase from 200k per hour, in the pre-pandemic period, to 6 million requests per hour, which is approximately a 3000% increase — without any interruption. This demonstrates the remarkable power of HCL Digital Experience’s ability to scale, its reliability, as well as its ability to provide the operations team with the information they need to best serve the state.

“Whether an entity wants to replace their legacy intranet or build one from scratch, they now have everything they need to move quickly,” continues Armstrong. “Using ODX avoids costly infrastructure investments, and their accelerators eliminate the need for months of technical work. As a result, they’ve already achieved cost avoidance in the region of US$18 million — enabling them to enhance their digital services while delivering value to the taxpayer.”

As more agencies move to ODX, the team is hearing success stories from across the organization. The Department of Agriculture was one of the first entities to move to ODX.  In the past, the Department of Agriculture relied heavily on its IT team to make updates to its public-facing website, which made it extremely difficult to respond in a timely manner to incidents affecting the public. Before the Department of Agriculture began using ODX, most content updates required a subject-matter expert to raise a ticket with the IT department. Since deploying HCL Digital Experience, no one in the department has needed to raise a single support ticket for website updates.  The Department of Agriculture has empowered its communications team to take full ownership of content. In fact, during the last Ohio State Fair, members of the Department were publishing updates to the website from their mobiles in real time — faster than members of the Associated Press at the same event!

By enhancing its approach to content management with the HCL solution, one division of the Department of Agriculture has reported an 80% reduction in calls for help finding content on its site. Similarly, by using HCL Digital Experience to deliver self-service capabilities, the Department of Health has cut helpdesk calls for issues such as password resets by 40% — predicted to deliver an annual cost-saving of US$75,000.  This success is an example of how other divisions are creating self-service opportunities and gaining operational cost-efficiencies along the way.

With a digital experience powered by HCL, the State of Ohio is well placed to realize the goals of its transformation.

Because the state is now able to bring together content in a centralized way where pertinent information can be delivered across different agency websites and tailored to each user’s mission rather than by department, it’s now easier than ever to connect people with the information they need — helping to meet high expectations for digital services.

Armstrong concludes: “As more government programs, agencies and departments embrace the ODX program, the State of Ohio is seeing that it’s easier than ever for people across the state to access the services they need.— and they look forward to continuing our collaboration with HCL and Base22.”