Enhance Engagement with Identity & Access Management

Tyler Podcast Episode 74, Transcript

Our Tyler Technologies podcast explores a wide range of complex, timely, and important issues facing communities and the public sector. Expect approachable tech talk mixed with insights from subject matter experts and a bit of fun. Host and Corporate Marketing Manager Beth Amann – and other guest hosts – highlights the people, places, and technology making a difference. Give us listen today and subscribe.

Episode Summary

Citizen identity and access management solutions can enhance government's digital engagements with their residents. This episode features an interview with Mike Teeters, Tyler’s Senior Product Manager of Corporate Development, and Nick Winston, Sr. Director of Product Strategy for Tyler's Digital Solutions Division. During the conversation, host Beth Amann learns about CIAM, how residents are interacting with these systems, and how governments can deliver better services by creating a digital profile for their residents that can be shared across departments and jurisdictions. Topics covered include single sign on, identity proofing, AI, payments, and how governments can better understand how their residents are using their services.  

Transcript

 

Beth Amann: From Tyler Technologies, it's the Tyler Tech podcast, where we talk about issues facing communities today and highlight the people, places, and technology making a difference. I'm Beth Amann. I'm the Corporate Marketing Manager here at Tyler, and I appreciate you joining me for another episode of the Tyler Tech podcast.

Today, we're joined by Mike Teeters, Tyler's Senior Product Manager of Corporate Development and Nick Winston, Senior Director of Product Strategy for our Digital Solutions Division.

Mike brings his expertise in customer identity and access management to this conversation.

In his role, he guides the productization of Tyler's identity workforce and identity community solutions playing a pivotal role in service delivery and resident engagement. Nick directs the roadmap and initiatives Tyler's resident engagement platform, shaping the resident's digital journey with a strategic perspective on product development for Tyler Tech. Together, we will dig into engaging residents through digital services such as customer identity and access management solutions. Mike and Nick, welcome to the pod.

Mike Teeters: Thanks for having us.

Nick Winston: No. Thanks. Happy to be here. 

Beth Amann: Well, we are here to talk about a keyway in which governments can engage with their residents through digital services but before we dig into it, let's get some definitions down. What does customer identity and access management mean?

Mike Teeters: Great question, Beth. When we think about customer identity and access management, we're thinking about tools that our organizations that we work with our clients use to determine a person's identity to ensure that the interactions that they're having are secure and also said that they're able to have an enhanced customer experience. Right? 

So if you think of customer identity management, we can just swap out the word citizen per customer, and it fits really well, and it's the same acronym for public sector.

Beth Amann: It's very convenient that we can still use the same acronym because CIAM is something we will be using. So citizen, customer, and since this is a public sector podcast, it works out perfectly that we can say citizen instead of customer. So, how are residents coming across CIAM systems in their daily lives?

Like, for me as a resident, how would I recognize that?

Nick Winston: Yeah. I mean, you're probably experiencing CIAM more typically in just your general online presence, especially, like, if you're doing any kind of online shopping at a common e retailers. Take Amazon, for example, very common example to use in these situations, but, you know, not only do you have a username and password to sign in, but you have a lot of information about your recent purchases, your payment information, anything like that, extensive profile details, and you know, with that, then they're able to layer in understanding of who you are, understanding what you've done in the past, and better guide you to the things that you may be interested or desire. So it's, again, it's more than just being able to log in, just a username and password or anything like that. It's username and password plus.

You're having some understanding of who you all are in context of the relationship to the retailer or to the online situation that you might be interacting with.

Mike Teeters: And, Beth, I’ll add to that. I think what Nick's highlighting is that we voluntarily help Amazon build out this profile.

Another really good example of that. And, again, we see parallels in public sector is you probably get emails from Amazon, telling you about things that are sale, a prime opportunities, really looking at your purchase history and the kinds of things that you're interested in, and then really kind of aligning that to highlight where there are opportunities for you to potentially save money. Right?

Kind of match you up with different products or services that would be a good fit for you. Right? I think we could probably talk a bit more about how that really fits in a sector, but really good examples of things that you see in your day to day experiences with retailers. 

Beth Amann: Yeah, I, first off, really appreciate hearing that it's CIAM, so I learned something new already that it's not C I A M, but CIAM is the acronym. And I think it's a really interesting point of view because for so much of these conversations, I'm coming at it from the point of view of, okay, what can governments do? What can governments do? And I feel like in the past two conversations I've had in our previous episode with Russell Gainford about the resident experience.

I'm learning so much about how it can benefit the resident, like the value prop you give to the citizen to the resident. And just the way you all brought that up that I am giving information to help me have a better experience with the government that it's not just having a single password to use. By my sharing information, with my government, about my preferences, about the services I use, that it starts allowing the government to start provide better services and create efficiencies.

So I feel like I just learned something already about a residence experience, but from a government's point of view, How can CIAM improve and expand those digital services that they're already offering? It seems like there's a lot of room for efficiencies to be created. 

Mike Teeters: Yeah. I think we've seen a lot of growth just in the idea of being able to leverage in identity access management solution. That's public facing. Right? That's really geared towards citizens.

Probably the area that we've seen the most growth is really around this concept of single sign on or SSO. Right? And what we mean by that is that a lot of times, you probably had experiences where you interacted with different apartments or agencies at the same government, but you needed a different set of credentials in order to go in and pay your utility bill, and then you needed a different set of credentials in order to do something else with that same government entity.

SSO really moves us down the path of having one set of credentials Right? So you only have to authenticate one time. We use that same set of credentials, and it gets you across all those different services. So that's a really good first step.

And it's an area that Nick and I have seen really a lot of growth. So you can imagine now you get a much more fluid experience being able to move between different websites that are also with the same government or different services. There's no need for an additional authentication step. 

Nick Winston: Yeah and, to add on to that a little bit. The beauty once you have that single sign on solution, that SSO solution in places, you then have a singular CIAM system, which then creates the ability to have a singular identity to represent a given user. Right? And that and that identity to be shared across those different agencies, those different departments, and even potentially the different levels of government.

We have some opportunities that we're actively building out some interfaces, leveraging Tyler ID with, you know, to be that CIAM solution, both for the state, but also into the counties and into the city so that those users just have one sign in across all those different levels of government. But having that shared identity that I kinda was mentioning earlier allows us then to have a singular profile of who that user is. Right? And that profile could include some basic information of my name, my phone number, my address, Right?

So I don't have to constantly put that information in each time I'm interacting with government, but it even goes further to understand what are my vehicles. Right? What are my pets I have and the pet licenses I have for those pets? What are my professional licenses and being more proactive letting government be more proactive in a consolidated manner to help me understand what are my commitments and interests and what I need to go do. 

And that even ties into, you know, these very robust service catalogs. I mean, just to give an example, some of these states the state level government alone will have four hundred, five hundred services for their citizens.

And to navigate and understand all those different services I need to go to when the government really doesn't know me as a consolidated person, right, is really difficult because then it's on me. It's the burdens on me to go find these things and under on how to navigate to these different services to get to the end result I'm trying to get to. If we know that, if we have a single identity, we have singular understanding, then we can help connect that for the citizen proactively and help guide them through and say, of the four hundred or five hundred services - here's the ten or twenty that you might need to go interact with, and here's maybe even the sequence that you need to go interact with them so that because one might build on the other.

I said a lot there, but I think that's really kind of getting to the crux of what resident engagement is and how that helps government, right, than how government then helps citizens, in in navigating this complex world that is the different services and such that government play provides to their citizens. 

Beth Amann: Yeah. There's so much good stuff in what you all just shared. And the things that kinda stand out to me are the idea of, like, I am responsible for remembering all of my passwords to the DMV and the department of licensing and the department of taxation and I need to know where my pets are registered and where, like, my kids are going to summer camp and where they're at public schools and all of those details.

If they were in one consolidated place, that would change my interaction with government. And you brought up a point about having data shared between different levels of government that I think is really critical because you live in a city perhaps but that city might be housed within a county and that county is housed within a state, or you live somewhere like I do, where I live in DC, And so I'm interacting in my daily life with Virginia and Maryland. And if I'm feeling adventurous, Virginia or Pennsylvania, but there are so many different governments that I'm interacting with on a daily basis as someone who lives in a centralized location.

And that's the same for anyone who maybe works in the city but lives in the county or lives in a town and works in a city that there's so much data sharing that could be beneficial to everyone on both sides, not just saying, oh, it's making things easier for me, but it's making things easier for the government who's trying to offer comprehensive services to their community.

Mike Teeters: Yeah. And, Beth, I'll kinda add a point to what Nick highlighted. You know, I think most of us can think of really basic things that we do when we interact with government, Right? You know, we have to fill out form in order to qualify for the service.

Right? Or, you know, we have to pay a bill, right? You know, to Nick’s point, if you just look at some of these basic things that we do, really kind of making these incremental improvements in terms of adding that data to a profile, allowing that data to be shared, right. You can imagine you've got a lot of form, Well, all of the information you've already filled out, your name, phone number, your address, right, all of those kind of key pieces of data, if you're open to sharing it, form gets filled out automatically. 

So all of those kinds of efficiencies, I think when we've talked with clients or perspective clients, it’s that kind of low hanging fruit that I think gets people excited, and it's very doable. 

Nick Winston: I think it gets even like, I didn't elaborate on this, but I think this is maybe a good point to kind of elaborate on this a little bit. It even gets beyond having a singular identity and having a singular profile where we know and we can help share that information, especially taking into security considerations and data privacy. And then, you know, all those nuances that go into solving this problem, But it gets much further beyond that for us as Tyler, right?

Because we can also do things like centralized payment and have centralized payment features. So you can have one, say, payment method or one access to your Apple wallet or whatever that might be for all of your checkouts using Tyler payments across all different government entities that might be connected with that. We can centralize all of your receipts, right?

So if you need to go back for tax purposes and tax write offs and such, based on some of the taxes you might have paid for other situations, you can get back to all those receipts and have proof of that in one centralized location.

You can manage all of your recurring and scheduled payments that you might have with government in one centralized location.

We can centralize events and calendars for you. So that it's a more personalized based on your commitments and interests, right, and not have to go poking around in different calendars to find out. We can even centralize things like official documents. Say there's a document that comes out for a park pass that you get out of a transaction. We can put that in a location that's right next to your, maybe, your nursing license or something like that and have one place where you can get to all that. So that's what, you know, kind of expanding upon the idea of science, having a singular identity, having a singular profile and sharing that, you can go so much further over time once you kinda have those those pieces established.

Beth Amann: We'll be right back for more of our conversation.

Jade Champion: What's up Tyler community? It's so crazy how quick the summer flew by, but we are so excited about August this year because we are one step closer to City Hall's Selfie Day which happens to be on Tuesday, August fifteenth this year.

City Hall's Selfie Day celebrates public service, and it elevates its importance by asking community members take a creative photo in front of their local government building.

City Hall Selfie Day is organized by ELGL, short for engaging local government leaders, which is a professional association for people who work in and with local government.

At Tyler, we're all about empowering people who serve the public, so we wanted to make sure you knew about this special day. We might be biased, but City Hall Selfie Day is one of the best days of the year because we see all your smiling faces and see a cool selfie that showcases your love for your local government. All you need to do is take a creative picture of yourself or of your crew in front of a local government building, like City Hall, a library or a courthouse, and then post it to social media.

Creativity is highly encouraged. Use costumes, different angles, and just have fun with it because ELGL hosts a People’s Choice Award. And if you win for the most creative photo, you get bragging rights for the entire year.

Use the hashtag City Hall Selfie to enter and if you're a Tyler Tech client or partner, use the hashtag Tyler Tech Selfie so that we can find your photos. Don't forget to tag ELGL and Tyler Technologies in your social media posts. We can't wait to see your selfies.

Beth Amann: And now back to our conversation.

That is a good point. And it makes me start to think about, okay, all of my things are in one place. This is great, but what happens if that one place becomes the place that is discovered by a bad actor. And I can fully admit I'm the person who does not have their credit card information on their phone or have the ability to unlock their car with their phone because I want everything spread out. It's one thing's gonna go down, I wanna be able to control it. So for a resident that's putting their information into that central location, there's a concern about security and our government workers are public sector servants. They are trying to ensure that they're being good stewards of our data, and they are trying to protect their community's information.

But there's a really complex threat of cyber attacks. And so when you're thinking about this, like, where does cybersecurity come into play and how can governments protect the digital identities of those who are interacting with their services?

Nick Winston: That's really key to kinda how we're thinking about this and how we work through solutioning and architecting anything that we're building out related to this. I mean, that has to be first and foremost in this conversation. It's just like security. Right?

And there's a lot of approaches and there's a lot of and there's a lot of situations. It gets even beyond security. I would even I would even say kinda layered into that is data privacy and data permissioning, data ownership. How can I, as a citizen, own that data?

How can I determine who can have access to it and not? Right? And then on top of that, how do we make sure that that's secured based on, you know, on top of those permissionings? So it comes down to two really big things for me.

The very first thing how do we help the citizen as much as possible do the right things to secure their information?

And, you know, empower government to have those capabilities so that we're doing everything we possibly can. Some of that comes down to edge some of that comes down to policy and rules and system kind of settings, getting into good password practices and high taking full advantage of multi factor authentication, you know, both on the proactive and the reactive side of things with putting things in places to make sure people do the right things and then let them know when they maybe need to adjust or kind of think about that a little bit more. So, yeah, I think for me, we have to think about - we have to start with the citizens, how do we do that aspect and help them as much as possible do the right things when when it comes to security and security around their information?

Mike Teeters: Yeah. And I'll build on that, Beth, because with Identity Community, I think we recognize it can be very challenging in public sector. In some instances, we have clients or organizations that are using what I'll call homegrown solutions.

All the way over to kinda where we started, where we've got a bunch of different departments and agencies that each have their own solution.

And that could make it really challenging to apply policy across, right, all of those sort of underlying entities the approach that we've taken is really to do two things. One, we've partnered with one of the industry leading IAM technology solutions. And that's OKTA, which is a recognized leader as a I'm gonna add another acronym here. IPASS, which is an identity platform as a service.

But, you know, we really, in in the analysis that we did looking for how we wanted to approach identity on authentication, We found Okta to be really one of the superior solutions. So we partnered with them, and then really the next step there was we've supplemented what OKLA brings to the table with our own capabilities.

And this is really where our domain experienced, the Tyler, really having worked across all different levels government and really in different domain areas. In government, comes to the head, we're able to leverage their capabilities around things like network monitoring, password management, threat insight scanning, you know, a lot of capabilities that are essentially built into their platform, and then we extend those with Tyler capabilities. Right? So we have a cyber security team.

That's an offering that we include as an option for our clients. It's a great example where we're able to extend on some of the basic capabilities that Oka has and really build on that. So for us, I think it puts us in a unique position where we're building on an industry leading platform. We're adding that public sector spin and know how.

And it puts us in really unique position to be able to best deal with different attack vectors or period practice that we know are common in public sector.

So for you or I or Nick or anybody, you know, a higher level of confidence when we're putting data behind that, you know, authentication solution, putting in a profile, there's a higher level of confidence there.

Beth Amann: Yeah. It's interesting to hear about all of the partnering that has to go into this that it's not just a government and Tyler, a government and the resident that there are other very experienced important partners to kind of interface with. And so, I mean, I'm inclined to say, like, just call Tyler Technologies, and we'll help you out with yours CIAM. That's maybe not the first step. So when you're thinking about the first step to get started, you all put some great information. Both of you contributed to some ebooks and some white papers about resident experience and identity assist management that I'll put in the show notes. But when you're thinking about those resources and the first steps that you wanna start taking, how would you recommend governments get started exploring, implementing, deciding upon a modern CIAM system?

Nick Winston: Yeah. I think the first thing is really that establishing a centralized CIAM system and creating a single sign on experience across the government that creates immediate value both for government and for the residents and is logically the first step that you have to have to be able to kind of build upon that and do so much more that that is possible when you kinda think about the broader resident engagement, resident experience aspect of things.

Mike Teeters: Yeah, Beth. I'll kind of build on where Nick started. You know, you have that SSO solution in place. The next thing is really getting those different department or agency services integrated, right, into that experience.

So that when somebody actually signs in, they can easily navigate across those different types of services. Right? That gives you that very secure, but fluid experience being able to move around. You know, honestly, we find that to be one of the key steps that needs to occur.

And if you think about it, really, in terms of, like, what do you do next? Well, it's really identifying parts of your organization that have really good use cases where it makes sense for them to be part of that integrated, you know, improved resident experience.

I'll have that this is a really good opportunity to get different stakeholders involved. Right? Anybody that's had any experience in public sector and government knows, there's a lot of different stakeholders, right, a lot of different parties to participate, but this is a good opportunity where, for example, at the local level, you could get, you know, people on your city council or commission.

You could get resident organizations a game, try to think about folks to play, a big role in terms of community and government they can all help shape and prioritize, you know, where you're gonna start first, where you're gonna go next and so forth. I'll add one other big piece here. I think that Nick and I have seen, and Nick kind of highlighted this.

Obviously, at Tyler, you know, we have a huge capacity to handle payments. That is an area that we do see a lot of attention. If you think about a lot of the interactions that people have with government, The reality is I'm paying stuff. Like, I'm paying a bill, I'm paying a fee.

And so a lot of times those use cases will really level up to the top. Right? That ability to make it easier and quicker to make a payment. Think about things like paying the utility bill.

Obviously, It's a lot easier if it's something that becomes scheduled or an auto payment, especially if it's a consistent amount every month. But there's other use cases like renewing a business license. You can think of other situations where you're interacting with government Payments involved. A lot of times those are gonna pop right up on the priority list.

Beth Amann: So I'm hearing SSO first stakeholders second and then start thinking about the ways thinking about the opportunities that you have to actively and regularly engage and what could be approved. So the payments example is you're right. A very simple place. I am often paying my car license renewal or maybe a parking ticket or some other interface where I am having a regular interaction that that's the place to start.

Once you've done that, after you've gotten started and assessed that, what are the emerging technologies or capabilities or technologies in the CIAM space that governments should be on the lookout for.

Mike Teeters: Yeah. That that's that's a great question. I mean, we've talked about building blocks, right, and, you know, Nick mentioned SSO.

We see that a lot. We also see in getting stakeholders engaged. Typically payments is a big piece. I'll add as one other part of that before we roll into talking about some of the emerging things, it it's really getting your residents engaged.

And so there is a bit of marketing involved in that, if you will. So I'll just kind of think of those things as kind of technology people process, you know, you get very project oriented, but it's very much the idea that you can lay out a plan and really have some measurable success if you start to take those steps. Your question about emerging technologies is really a great one because we hear a lot of this, you know, talking about what we think it's as building blocks. But a great example of this would be something like identity proofing.

So for those of you listening, identity proofing is simply using biometric data with something else in order to not just verify, hey, that's a valid email address, but also who is the person behind that email address. And so if you had any experience where you had to take a picture on your phone, take a picture of your driver's license or your passport, and then that was essentially verified through a database. Right, comparing that image and the official document, that's a good example of a proofing exercise. Right?

Those are not new. But they're becoming more and more apparent because we're looking at making the shift from having what used to be these in person interactions. Right? Hey, I wanna apply for a driver's license and really moving those to an online experience.

And so it's a really good example something that's kind of emerging. Nick and I get, you know, we get asked about that a lot. Those are really good use cases we would argue after you kind of get that foundation in place. And, Nick, I think we've seen some other areas as well.

Nick Winston: Yeah. I mean, that naturally one of the more interesting ones, and that's coming up in our conversations more recently is around artificial intelligence.

Start kinda getting into the proliferation of the chat GPTs and some of those other artificial intelligence technologies and start to explore and think through how can you leverage some of those capabilities with these types of interesting data sets to help better support individuals and their experience with government, how can it be more automated, how can it be guided based on lots of history and lots of understanding of how people to have interacted with government services that have similar kind of profiles or similar kinds of situations.

So really early still for us on that side of things trying to make sure we're doing that in the right way. There's, you know, of course, some risks in that, and we wanna make sure we're approaching that very carefully. But also some really, really exciting potential with a lot of that. Yeah.

Beth Amann: There's so much potential of what you just talked about, and it's always fun to me to talk about AI in this context because for so many people AI is like, oh my gosh. It's this new shiny thing. It's brand new. AI has been around since the fifties.

Like, artificial intelligence is not a new concept of the computing power has expanded so significantly that it is now so much more powerful than we could have previously predicted, but it's interesting to talk about that. And I love that you're calling that out as something to have in your mind to be responsible with, to think about the data that you're using to train your AI models. If you're using any type of generative AI, that it's a critical thing to keep at top of mind so that governments can be responsible participants in shaping our AI future instead of catching up. Another thing to the identity proofing, I think I just chuckled to myself hearing you talk about that, Mike, because it's this idea of, like, you wanna see a picture of my face when in reality you would just bring your face with you to an in person office hand them your ID, write down your information, and then say, look, it's me.

Whereas the idea of putting it through a digital interface seems so much scarier. But if we just bring ourselves back down to that idea of, like, okay, we know that our governments are focused on cyber security, being good stewards of our digital identities, our government is marketing that they are sharing that information appropriately with the only parties that need it. There's a safety that comes for me as a resident, think, okay. They're not gonna do something weird with my picture of my ID in the same way they wouldn't have done something.

I was like, oh, they saw me in person at the counter, and then I moved on with my day. So, I mean, there's so much to think about. I could probably continue asking you all questions about this for days, but I feel comforted to know that, like, I've learned some stuff in this conversation, but also that so much of it is things that I've already interacted with within government. None of this is so new that it's completely unfamiliar once you start chatting about it.

Mike Teeters: Yeah. I think that's a really good point, Beth. And, you know, and I think what we've seen really post pandemic is there's been such a growth around online services. I mean, I think everybody's seen that.

That's really been a big push in applying a lot of the existing technologies. Right? IAM and some of these emerging technologies.

I suspect, we're gonna continue to see a lot of significant growth over the next several years. So absolutely love to come back and talk to you about what we're hearing in a few years in the next podcast.

Beth Amann: I'm hearing a part two already, Mike. You're ready. Nick you're coming too.

Oh my goodness. Well, thank you both so much for joining me today to talk about digital resident services and identity and access management and my new favorite acronym that I will say correctly this time, CIAM. I am I mentioned some resources today that you all contributed to. I wanna make sure people get to read the ebook and the white paper, and I will link them in the show notes. But thank you both so much.

Mike Teeters: Thanks again for having us back. 

Nick Winston: Yeah. It's been fun. Thanks again.

Beth Amann: Government can leverage identity and assist management systems or CIAM systems to improve their user experiences and security. I feel like I learned a lot in this conversation about the opportunities that exist for governments, and I hope that you are listeners did too. 

Thanks again to Mike and Nick for their time today. I always delighted to learn from our internal Tyler experts. From Tyler Technologies, I'm Beth Amann. Thanks for joining us.