Not so long ago, it took approximately three months for a student services application to be processed within Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
But thanks to a new digital services program, that time has been whittled to three weeks or less.
Chahta Achvffa — or One Choctaw — is a relatively new application framework that streamlines and reduces the time it takes to access tribal member services.
“In a general sense, tribal members were not happy with a lot of the way we handled our services,” said Jimmy Williams, CIO of Choctaw Nation, Tuesday during the presentation “Digital Communities, Digital Member Services” at TribalNet Conference and Trade Show. “It was really how we had our processes set up and how we used technology. People had to give the same documentation over and over again. It was really hard to know exactly where members were and what was going on because our data was so broken up and siloed.”
Chahta Achvffa solves multiple problems that were prevalent throughout the tribe’s communications and services. There’s more sharing of data, more ways for citizens to access information, and no time constraints in a virtual portal that can be accessed any time of the day.
“And we just couldn’t build offices everywhere,” Williams said. “We’re a pretty large tribe. So as technology evolved we just really saw that everybody was getting accustomed to online applications and using technology to interact in the world, and we were behind.”
The goal with Chahta Achvffa was to build a single tribal experience, “a citizen-centric data model,” with readable and scalable components. Integration was of paramount importance, with goals including one member experience, anytime, anywhere; the ability to access services and track the status of requests for services: ease of communication and facilitation of member interactions; and comprehensive data management through a citizen-centric approach.
“We focused on building reusable components,” Williams said. “We knew we needed to be able to turn very quickly as new programs spun up.”
Chahta Achvffa proved to be especially useful when the COVID-19 pandemic began earlier this year. According to Williams, the platform was especially helpful in providing services to citizens as the pandemic caused closures.
The new platform also helped unify the culture in the tribe’s member services organizations that “had to think and act differently,” Williams said. And providing citizen-centric data was extremely important.
“I really believe if you want to get everything you want out of this, you got to think of the data in a citizen-centric fashion,” he said. “You got to consolidate and create one view of your tribal member. It changes a lot of the ways these programs think about things and the way they operate.”
