The State of Minnesota received an A in the Digital States Survey – for the first time in the state’s history. It assesses how IT organizations within a state align their work with the governor’s priorities. 

Explore highlights from Minnesota’s submission below or read GovTech's coverage.

Aligning Leadership Across IT and the Executive Branch

• Minnesota’s Modernization Playbook powered the state’s ability to transform how we deliver value by consistently using stakeholder engagement, project management best practices, and IT modernization principles.
• The Governor tasked IT leadership with driving vaccine technology solutions for Minnesotans with the vaccine locator map, Vaccine Connector, and enabling vaccine incentive programs. 

Workforce Planning (Minnesota ranked #3 in the country) 

• MNIT’s Human Resource Executive Dashboard tracks and reports on the current state of MNIT’s workforce.
• The Department of Administration and MMB created a COVID-19 screening application for state employees to report work status. MNIT automated the COVID-19 vaccine attestation process. 

Constituent/Customer-Centered Mobile and Digital Services 

• MNbenefits combines nine public assistance programs for cash assistance, food, and health care into a single, streamlined application to simplify processes and get help to the state’s most at-risk individuals and families.
• MNDRIVE is an all-in-one process for driver and vehicle services for Minnesotans. The Driver and Vehicle Services landing web page provides links to all self-service features available to Minnesotans. 

Cybersecurity 

• MNIT’s Enterprise Security Office produced measurable outcomes such as: 
• 30% improvement in click-through/failure rate for state-run phishing campaigns from baseline measurements. 
• 100% of all executive branch assets (laptops, desktops, PCUs, cloud instances, servers) are covered by a centralized EDR solution. 
• MNIT expanded Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) defense layers statewide and implemented a new web application firewall and bot management service that can be used on any state website. 

Elevating the Digital Estate: Governance and Analytics

• MNIT enables the technical capacity to break down data silos and reduce barriers to data reporting – creating data lakes, moving infrastructure to the cloud, and building an application portfolio management dashboard. 
• Over 95% of school districts and charter schools in Minnesota are synchronizing data to the Minnesota Department of Education’s Ed-Fi system – an increase of 80% in just over the past two years.
• Minnesota created the COVID-19 vaccine dashboard, which was one of the state’s first public dashboards to address an immediate, public need.
• Minnesota launched its first-ever children’s fiscal map – a data visualization that provides fiscal information on state programs that serve children and youth 18 and under. 

Aligning with Agency Partner’s Missions

• The new Minnesota Crime Data Explorer (CDE) from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) creates visibility for crimes against persons, property, and society. 
• MNIT and MnDOT piloted a program to better organize MnDOT’s Capital Program data area, which includes capital projects, contracts, and funding to construct and maintain MnDOT facilities. 
• Work Comp Campus (CAMPUS), the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry’s (DLI’s) new web-based portal for filing and accessing workers’ compensation claims, rolled out on November 2, 2020. 
• Minnesota’s Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) and the Department of Human Services partnered with MNIT to launch the Workforce One Connect (WF1 Connect) mobile app. The app connects Minnesotans to Workforce One, the case management system for DEED and DHS, which supports more than 20 programs across two state agencies. 

IT Investment 

• MNIT can better assess the progress and risks of IT projects and initiatives across the executive branch. This happened by introducing go-live processes, audits, dashboards, and an established portfolio management process. 
• MNIT is using data analytics and dashboards to bring together financial information from different data silos, reducing the number of places people need to go to access data. 

Resilience and Recovery 

• The State’s cloud migration will increase the resilience of Minnesota’s applications. 
• MNIT has increased its exercises of critical applications to meet a goal of exercising 20% of critical applications every year. 
• Annual mainframe testing ensures that 14-16 applications per year are tested to ensure backup availability of physical systems. 
• Hybrid workplaces support continuity of operations by enabling employees to work anywhere and at any time of the day if necessary.

Continuous Innovation 

• Chatbots and robotics process automation were first used to respond quickly to high IT service desk volumes during the remote work transition and were later made available to all state agencies. 
• MDH’s moved its core disease surveillance system, MIIC (Minnesota Immunization Information Connection) into the cloud in mid-2020 and then off-loaded non-transactional workloads into a sophisticated data processing and reporting system built around data lake technologies. MIIC processed 1.4 million positive COVID-19 cases and 21 million tests by May 2022. 
• The Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAV) Office at the Minnesota Department of Transportation made significant technical and planning progress over the past two years. 

Connected Infrastructure

• MNIT has architected and implemented public cloud connections for every executive branch application. 
• MNIT deployed 10,000 small home routers to enable call center agents to work remotely and increased VPN capacity from supporting 10,000 to 30,000 state employees to secure these connections. 
• Improved internet speeds at state parks and state-managed land to increase speeds and reliability for DNR staff and visitors.
• Increased the bandwidth to non-metro locations in greater Minnesota. This ensured that employees and Minnesotans working across the state had higher access speeds and reliability. We are growing our backbone from 10GB to 100GB statewide. 

About the Digital States Survey 

The Digital States Survey is a biennial national survey from the Center for Digital Government (CDG). It assesses CIO-led organizations’ alignment with governor priorities. Minnesota IT Services submitted the survey in May 2022 and received results on Sept. 29, 2022. A national overview of all 50 states and their grades can be found on the Center for Digital Government’s website.