Ideas for IT: A Look at DMV’s Strategic Plan

The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), one of the state’s largest, most public-facing entities, is underway on a variety of IT modernizations. The department’s 2021-2026 Strategic Plan, created under the leadership of Director Steve Gordon, named in July 2019, offers more information on how IT and innovation inform its work. The DMV, which last month named Prashant Mittal as its new chief information officer and deputy director of the Information Services Division, is underway on creation of the Digital eXperience Platform (DXP), its three- to five-year replacement of core legacy systems. In February, the department held the virtual Vendor Day 2022, to seek solutions on challenges including activity-based costing/modeling process optimization, a workforce communication platform and automating human capital management. Its vision, per the Strategic Plan, calls on DMV to be more “technology driven.” The DMV’s strategic plan centers on five goals, four of which lean particularly heavily on IT and innovation:

• DMV aims to find quicker, simpler ways to fulfill customer needs by expanding its digital services — making transactions easier, and “substantially” increasing its digital services outside of in-person interactions. Modern customers have come to rely on technology and now expect “instantaneous service and information,” shorter wait times and staffers who can be more focused on them while simultaneously doing complicated tasks.
• DMV wants to create technology systems that are “flexible, scalable, and secure,” significantly increasing the area of its IT portfolio that’s available on standard platforms — boosting enterprise-level visibility across systems that are integrated and can be monitored in real time to deliver real-time business intel and increase privacy and security. At the same time, though, the department acknowledges that sharing information in real time across platforms can potentially bring new threats to customer data. While transitioning to “more modern and intuitive” platforms, the plan indicates the department must also make sure that information is protected.
• The department intends to embed “measurable efficiency” throughout the organization. DMV wants to increase “quantitative measuring” of productivity and performance and increase productivity beyond industry service delivery benchmarks.
• DMV intends to be the state’s leading customer-centric public-sector entity, in part by building customer trust and satisfaction by applying a human-centered design approach to all of its new services and products.