Ricker and her colleagues had plenty to say about the changes wrought by the pandemic, but she noted her surprise at how the accelerated nature of IT work has been maintained, even today. “It feels like we’re still running at an extremely fast pace, even 18 months later,” she said. “We’ve settled into this extreme amount of demand that still exists.”
The state has used that momentum to make significant progress on some major organization-wide projects. Like many states, Illinois is in the midst of an upgrade to its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
As for citizen-facing initiatives, Illinois recently launched the first major piece of a broad identity and access management project, intended to simplify the way people interact with the state, no matter what agency they’re dealing with. Called ILogin, the first application brought on board was unemployment insurance. But UI, Ricker said, is the first of many. “The goal here is to get as many of our state applications as possible behind this solution.”
Indeed, the quest for single sign-on has the attention of many states. Identity and access management has made its way onto NASCIO’s CIO priorities list for the first time this year.
