Alaska Grows Single Sign-On With Mobile App, Focuses on Privacy
CIO Bill Smith said that the myAlaska platform has existed for years, but now the state is adding protections like identity verification and expanding the digital services residents can access.
It’s no small task to stand up a single digital portal to access government services. A “one-stop shop” or “Amazon-like experience” has long been held up as the goal as governments work to provide easier access to everything from receiving social services to renewing driver’s licenses to making online payments.
At the National Association of State Chief Information Officers Annual Conference this week in Denver, Alaska CIO Bill Smith said his state’s single sign-on platform, myAlaska, has been around for years. Indeed, the system went live in 2010 and its first use case was for residents to apply for the state’s permanent dividend fund. Residents are familiar with it and they have existing usernames and passwords.
Now they’re building onto the platform. That includes a mobile app that launched this past July through which users can access 50 state services. Smith called the current version a “minimum viable product,” but said it will continue to grow. Part of the expansion has included beefing up security with multifactor authentication, identity validation and other protections that ensure privacy.
“Obviously privacy has to be something that we are always concerned about,” Smith said. “And I think that as we move forward on some digital identity initiatives it’s going to be paramount in what we’re doing.”
Thad Rueter writes about the business of government technology. He covered local and state governments for newspapers in the Chicago area and Florida, as well as e-commerce, digital payments and related topics for various publications. He lives in Wisconsin.
Nikki Davidson is a data reporter for <i>Government Technology</i>. She’s covered government and technology news as a video, newspaper, magazine and digital journalist for media outlets across the country. She’s based in Monterey, Calif.
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.
