PHILADELPHIA — State technology leaders are continuously striving for ever more modern, efficient systems. And with
AI rapidly taking over the landscape, it stands to reason that CIOs see its potential to help them speed the transition between legacy systems and more modern operations.
This approach is further fueled by a challenging budget picture in many states, including Washington, where CIO Bill Kehoe remains committed to progress on critical initiatives like an enterprise resource planning (ERP) upgrade, a resident portal as well as a customer identity and access management system.
“It’s been a difficult time from a fiscal perspective, but the stance that we’re taking is we have to continue to move forward and utilize the staff that we have to the best of our abilities,” he said.
The modernization journey can involve retrieving data and rules behind complex eligibility systems for social services, for example.
“Those eligibility rules a lot of times are in COBOL programs or in old business rules engines. And we can use AI to extract that and then put it into plain language and then potentially load those into a modern cloud-based business rules engine,” he added. “It’s a huge accelerator.”
Video transcript:
We see AI as a central to modernization. And the reason I'm saying that is we consider modernization more than legacy system modernization. We consider modernization everything from the customer experience to the business process re-engineering that's associated with that. Because you can have legacy business processes to data and data analytics and getting our data out of these legacy systems and really getting the insights on how our customers are utilizing our services from that data; integration and then also, you know, over time decommissioning our legacy systems. AI plays a real part now in modernization because we can use AI to extract business rules from our old systems. And that's a huge improvement from the past. It used to take months or years to actually extract that data. AI can help us convert data. AI can help us analyze data, AI can help us on the front end with our customer experience with chatbots and other things. So AI is integral to modernization, accelerating modernization, helping us engage with our customers in a much better way.
e.Republic Executive Editor Noelle Knell is a contributing editor to Emergency Management magazine.
Lauren Kinkade is the managing editor for Government Technology magazine. She has a degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and more than 15 years’ experience in book and magazine publishing.
