State of Minnesota boosts citizen trust and workforce retention with Dynatrace

Delivering critical public services is key to building trust

The State of Minnesota government delivers critical public services to about 5.75 million Minnesotans. Many essential services are accessible online, including the Department of Employment and Economic Development’s unemployment insurance. This service provides partial wage replacement and job search support to constituents who have found themselves unemployed and assists employers with handling wages and claims.

As part of the State’s digital strategy, it aims to build trust with constituents by cementing its reputation for providing secure, timely, and high-quality services. However, it faced challenges meeting this objective as the IT department worked in a series of sub teams, creating silos that led to a lack of transparency and inefficiency. Each sub team, from database administrators to the middleware team, had access to different monitoring data and relied on verbal communication for progress updates or to learn about critical issues. With this approach, it could take days to resolve complex problems, which negatively impacted the constituent experience and staff morale.

Eliminating silos to improve team collaboration

The State of Minnesota’s IT team needed a new approach to managing the performance and availability of its applications. It selected Dynatrace due to its automatic and intelligent observability capabilities. With Dynatrace, all IT teams would have access to the same data, eliminating silos and promoting a more cohesive and collaborative workplace. Dynatrace’s continuous monitoring would also enable teams to be more proactive in managing the applications by giving them critical information on any issues in real-time and helping resolve them before they impact constituents.

“Our siloed approach was becoming a roadblock for us in meeting our goals of delivering excellent online services,” says Kailey Smith, Application Architect, State of Minnesota IT Services. “We had a transparency issue—asking a team to verbally explain what data they are seeing is not the same as seeing it for yourself. Dynatrace provides full visibility across our entire environment, enabling us all to work together in solving problems efficiently and update our business partners more easily.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Greater visibility: Dynatrace provides IT teams with a single source of truth displayed in real-time dashboards, breaking down silos and fostering better working relationships. Technology and business teams see the same data and assess problems collectively, promoting greater collaboration and cohesion across the organization. Business partners can now immediately understand issues in real time and see what measures teams are taking to resolve them.
• Faster resolution: Dynatrace’s AIOps and automation capabilities enable teams to identify root cause and resolve issues more swiftly. On average, teams have reduced their resolution times for complex problems from 2-3 days to just 2-3 hours, while simpler issues now take 15-20 minutes to resolve, instead of a few hours. This efficiency gain has resulted in significant average cost savings of 85% per incident, delivering substantial return on investment.
• Higher staff retention: Dynatrace’s ability to eliminate fire drills and repetitive tasks has increased motivation among staff. Many teams are required to support multiple applications and divisions across the department. Dynatrace’s intelligent observability eases the burden by saving them time, freeing them up for more meaningful work and giving them more work satisfaction. With real-time insights at their fingertips, teams can be laser-focused on solving problems, resulting in less stress, and reducing the need for overtime.
• Enhanced citizen experiences: With Dynatrace’s automatic and intelligent observability capabilities, teams can now ensure the State of Minnesota is able to deliver timely services to citizens when they are most affected. Dynatrace helps teams identify bugs in the code before it is deployed to production, improving performance and availability levels, and delivering a more reliable experience for end users.

“Dynatrace enables us to do more with less,” says Kailey. “It instills confidence that we can fully support our applications, meet all our SLAs, and deliver what the business wants. Dynatrace has also been important to talent retention at the State of Minnesota. When staff are excited, they have more time to innovate, and they want to stay with us. Ultimately, with Dynatrace, we feel confident we can meet the needs of citizens who expect and deserve a great digital experience.”