Introduction
Like many state governments, South Dakota has a large workforce. Managing payroll and benefits for 18,000 current employees and retirees is no easy task, and paper-based processes made it more complex and inefficient. South Dakota needed to move away from manual processes where employees submitted paper forms to HR personnel, who then re-entered the information into a database. State leaders wanted to transition to self-service tools that let employees do things like changing their direct deposit information, updating their tax withholding and providing a new address — all in just a few clicks.
South Dakota found its solution in a cloud-based platform that provides capabilities for everything from absence management to compensation management, which ultimately gives employees 24/7 access to payroll and benefits information and saves the state’s HR department valuable time it can redeploy to higher-value tasks.¹
South Dakota is just one example of how governments can benefit from digital transformation. However, navigating transformation isn’t simple. State and local agencies find digital transformation challenging because they must contend with legacy technology, budget constraints, and resistance to organizational change.
To better understand these challenges, the Center for Digital Government (CDG) recently surveyed 150 government officials throughout the country, representing a range of functions, including auditing, finance, human resources, IT procurement, and operations. They shared insights into their biggest obstacles to making long-term technology and digital investments and how these hurdles impact everything from record-keeping, permitting, and licensing to worker efficiency and financial and talent management.