When COVID-19 hit, Oklahoma, like every other state, had to figure out a way for its mostly office-based government employees to work from home. Office workers unfamiliar with configuring IT gear without hands-on support invariably had issues and questions. Before COVID-19, the Oklahoma Office of Management and Enterprise IT desk fielded about 500 support calls a month. Overnight, that number spiked to more than 1,500 calls per day, says Jerry Moore, CIO, State of Oklahoma. They needed a solution and fast.
Within eight days of receiving a call for help, the Oracle team in Oklahoma and members of Oracle’s Austin-based Cloud Solutions Hub designed and deployed a chatbot to help Oklahoma’s newly home-based workers get productive as quickly as possible.
The chatbot, enabled by Oracle Digital Assistant, lets users ask basic questions, such as how to reset a password, how to set up a VPN, or how to download workplace applications. This quick and easy avenue to answers was instrumental in reducing the volume of calls to the IT helpdesk and getting approximately 30,000 state employees up and running.
During that same period, Oracle also built a mobile app for the state’s Department of Human Services that tracks time and purchases related to COVID-19 work. “If an employee buys 12 cases of hand sanitizer, they can take a picture of the purchase and upload it to the app that tracks all activities specific to the pandemic,” Moore says. “Overall, in eight days Oracle built and delivered two applications. Not only was this an impressive feat, but showed Oracle’s commitment to helping us and our communities run more smoothly in this difficult time.”
These applications help ensure that Oklahoma government workers can keep providing important constituent services, even while working at home.
