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How long was the wait during your last visit to a motor vehicle office?

What if your next visit took less than 15 minutes?

Putting citizens at the heart of government services to drive efficiency, safety, and delight

As told by Eric Jorgensen, Director, ADOT Motor Vehicle Division, State of Arizona

In partnership with Brian Shell, Senior Partner, Kyndryl

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The Arizona Motor Vehicle Division knows that even a half-an-hour is too long for customers to wait

The Arizona Motor Vehicle Division (AZ MVD) wanted a better experience for the state's citizens. With encouragement from Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) leaders all the way up through the Governor's office, Eric Jorgensen and his team developed a vision and plan to build the motor vehicle services – and the driver experience – of the future.

AZ MVD wanted to deliver fast, efficient, and friendly service online and in-person. Customers would be able to access personalized accounts online in seconds. And their vision, once realized, would make AZ MVD offices both a great place to visit and rewarding place to work.

The team took that customer-centric vision and applied it to building a first-of-its-kind digital driver license initiative.

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“

We recognize that we are a thief of time and energy of customers. We came up with the statement that has been the guiding principle: Out of the line and safely on the road.”

Eric Jorgensen,

Director, ADOT Motor Vehicle Division

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Steps to streamline every process

AZ MVD envisioned an experience where motor vehicle office customers could choose self-service, assisted self-service, or full service.

But to do it, the AZ MVD needed ultra-fast, modern systems, technology, processes, and networks.

To understand exactly what his new systems would need to support, Eric immersed himself in both the customer and staff experiences. He and his team became "flies on the wall" at AZ MVD offices, mapping all interactions, transaction types, and sources of delay and duplication. They identified steps to streamline virtually every process that touched the customer.

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A cloud-first strategy

“When we have a cloud-first strategy, it allows us to spin up the resource of the kind that we need in the moment that we need them.”

—Eric Jorgensen, Director, ADOT Motor Vehicle Division

A young black smiling woman show her drive license

It’s about people, not transactions

“Arizona’s rebuilt their whole system from the ground up, and most modern systems are built this way where it’s customer centric. So, we no longer have this giant database of vehicle transactions. We have data structured around the citizen.”

—Brian Shell, Senior Partner, Kyndryl

Driving Off Road Concept. Sport Utility Vehicle on the Sandy Arizona Desert Road.

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Discovering built-in bottlenecks and blockers

Among the team's findings: There were bottlenecks across multiple processes because of too few cameras. Siloed databases, slow networks, and inefficient procedures slowed service, frustrating both customers and employees.

Low bandwidth network connections stretched out processing of payments to as much as 90 seconds each
The need for more camera stations kept staff inefficiently pinned to their stations while most customers sat in the waiting area
The ticketing system blocked parallel actions taken by multiple customers
Backend data architecture by transaction type, instead of by person, inhibited responsiveness to customers

“

Everything we do to enhance self-service enables our staff to serve customers better overall.”

Eric Jorgensen,

Director, ADOT Motor Vehicle Division

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Redesigned offices to complement completely re-engineered processes

Together, the Arizona Motor Vehicle Division and Kyndryl improved AZ MVD office flow and introduced new technology across many levels.

To ensure success, the team had to completely re-architect back-end and front-end processes, rebuild applications, migrate data, and undertake significant data cleansing and management projects. Improvements to offices included modernizing scheduling and queuing, adding digital signage, and opening up the floor plan to support servicing multiple customers simultaneously.

Updated hardware, software, network, workstations, and assistance with staffing for peripherals integration development work were necessary. Consulting work on the design of how the office flow could work and look was needed as well.

A deep set of capabilities

The project team consisted of Kyndryl and select third-party providers. The database and application re-architecture was done on Microsoft® Azure® Cloud. Kyndryl helps support the system through an Amazon Connect call center and ServiceNow®.

To lay the foundation for customer-centric experiences across Arizona motor vehicle offices, the Kyndryl and AZ MVD team had already rearchitected an existing mainframe database into SQL on Azure. That work enabled identity management across AZ MVD transactions. AZ MVD calls the rearchitected system MAX.

MAX supports a new, customer-centric account portal where customers can log in to see all their information in one place. And MAX is also the foundation for a broader engagement between AZ MVD and Kyndryl to modernize the ADOT and AZ MVD physical offices. In modernizing offices, Kyndryl collaborates with Microsoft, their strategic partner, to integrate each office with the new cloud-first architecture.

The Kyndryl team delivers the right solution for each part of the AZ MVD office modernization, flexibly selecting among vendors. For instance, the team chose to implement and manage a new payments application, self-serve kiosk apps, and peripherals including scanners, printers, and cameras on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

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What Progress Looks Like

More than 60 services are now online for real-time AZ MVD transactions.

Today payments are processed in 2 seconds over an AZ MVD high-speed secured internet line

AZ MVD staff is more flexible in their work within and across offices. Offices can even engage virtual customer service staff across the state when visits to their particular office are spiking. And payment processing and document scanning are done in seconds, not minutes.

Behind the digital transformation effort

Kyndryl has worked with AZ MVD for a decade on application and infrastructure projects. In that time, the AZ MVD has steadily grown into a truly citizen-centric organization. And undertaking such an extensive digital transformation makes ADOT and AZ MVD national trailblazers among state government organizations.

“

The project is very much a work collaboration. We're overhauling their network and bringing in new workstations, kiosks, and point of sale devices. Disaster recovery and cyber resiliency are improved with modern security architecture and cloud-native tools.”

Brian Shell,

Senior Partner, Kyndryl

What will the future bring?

The power of partnership for continuous innovation

Innovation continues around software defined network, advanced workstations, streamlined kiosks, and assisted self-service. The modernization work done to date is an evolving proof of concept. The plan is to modernize all 44 of the AZ MVD offices by the end of 2023.

With field office transformation, time spent processing work will be closer to 5 minutes than 10 minutes. And customers are more likely to experience 2-minute wait times rather than 15 minutes.

The AZ MVD team is dedicated to keeping the system flexible. Components can be changed because the core and microservices design and architecture are responsive. As a customer service agency, AZ MVD can use the system to respond to customer needs and move forward.

About the Arizona Motor Vehicle Division

Within the Arizona Department of Transportation, the Motor Vehicle Division employs more than 600 Customer Service Representatives in 44 local offices across the state.