State of Minnesota boosts citizen trust with Dynatrace

The State of Minnesota 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 (DEED) 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.

The State of Minnesota’s digital strategy is set by its IT agency, Minnesota IT Services (MNIT). The State seeks to deliver secure, reliable technology solutions that improve the lives of Minnesotans. To meet that mission, MNIT had to find new ways to access monitoring data and communicate about critical issues for the unemployment insurance system. Each responsible team, from database administrator to the middleware team, needed to increase efficiency and transparency to reduce how long it took to resolve complex problems, which can negatively impact the user experience.

MNIT needed a new approach to managing the performance and availability of its applications within DEED’s unemployment insurance program. It selected Dynatrace due to its automatic and intelligent observability capabilities. With Dynatrace, MNIT IT teams would have access to the same data, eliminating silos and promoting a 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.

“By streamlining our monitoring across teams, we can meet our goals of delivering excellent online services,” says Kailey Smith, Application Architect, Minnesota IT Services. “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.”

• 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.
• Enhanced citizen experiences: Dynatrace’s automatic and intelligent observability capabilities help State of Minnesota 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 instills confidence that we can better support our applications and meet SLAs for the unemployment insurance division,” says Kailey. “Ultimately, with Dynatrace, we feel confident we can meet the needs of citizens who expect and deserve a great digital experience.”