Customer Experience Guides Pennsylvania’s IT Strategy

1. What can you tell me about Pennsylvania’s new IT strategy?

Two main things underpin our strategy. As the Office of Information Technology (OIT), we have to deliver for our workforce and make sure they are equipped. Also, our residents and businesses are the recipients of agency services, and we have to think about them as customers as well.

Experience is a main pillar. When a new employee starts, it’s a delightful experience for them to open their new laptop and get the tools they need to work. It’s the same for a resident using our new pa.gov website to find a service they need without knowing which agency provides it.

We also have three strategic initiatives: a secure and resilient network, a delightful help desk experience and a reimagined grants experience. First, we make sure all our IT foundations include security. Next, the help desk is how we show up for the 80,000 employees of the commonwealth. Last, so many agencies offer grants to Pennsylvanians, and it’s a very complex process, especially for smaller nonprofits or individuals trying to find funds. With the support of CODE PA, we’ve leaned into a new grants experience.

2. Can you tell me more about CODE PA and the new grants experience?

CODE PA gives us in-house capacity, as opposed to going through consultants and vendors. It also takes a human-centered design approach. The grants project is a perfect example. After doing a lot of research and looking across the life cycle of grants — from the application to the dispersal — we landed on a need to help users find grants. We engaged with grant seekers and people on the agency side. Now, we’ve launched phase one of a prototype, which we’re calling the Grants Discovery Experience. We’ve aggregated grants from 30 different agencies, creating a simple search experience, qualification criteria and links to apply.

We now have over 300 grants programs searchable at pa.gov/grants. We also have an enterprise application that supports agencies throughout the process, because there’s a lot of complexity behind the scenes.

3. What else are you doing to improve the customer experience?

We have internal customers here at OIT and the resident as a customer. Internally, we have the help desk initiative, and we have call centers to support basic employee needs. The goal is to get to more self-service, where you don’t have to make a call because it works much more seamlessly.

Security is also paramount. We need every employee to be rotating their passwords, but that can sometimes lock people out. How can we make that seamless so they’re not spending hours wrestling with that frustrating experience? That’s just one example.

4. How is the state approaching generative AI?

Pennsylvania was one of the first states with an executive order establishing values around how to use generative AI and how to make it a responsible workforce enabler. We’re about a year into our first pilot now, and it’s been fascinating to learn from employees how it’s benefiting them. It’s a time-saving tool, and we continue to provide guidance with a policy, office hours and training.

One of the use cases was our HR folks are constantly having to update position descriptions as jobs evolve. They used a custom ChatGPT to navigate 3,600 position descriptions, saving 30 hours on updates they had to make. It was an effective tool, and they felt confident using it with the support we’d given them in the pilot.

It’s also been effective to explore other more limited use cases. We did a code evaluation pilot for a modernization project with a [Department of Human Services] legacy system.

There was complex business logic in that system that wasn’t written down years ago. We were able to use generative AI to reverse engineer the business logic, which accelerated building new requirements for the modernized system.

This story originally appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of Government Technology magazine. Click here to view the full digital edition online.