eHawaii.gov Portal
Hawaii's digital government, taken from the bottom 25% to best in the nation
The problem
In the early 2000s Hawaii's eGovernment presence ranked in the bottom 25% of US states: siloed agency sites, legacy Perl systems, and few services residents could actually complete online.
What I did
Over 13 years I led the platform through three roles: modernizing the stack from Perl to Java, building the portal operations practice, and ultimately running the whole self-funded organization as President. We delivered 120+ active online services across 30+ state and county agencies and migrated the state's web presence to AWS.
That AWS migration covered 450+ state websites in 12 months, across WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Alfresco, and Jekyll, without interrupting public access. In 2014 we launched the first personalized and gamified eGovernment experience in the US: a single account that showed residents and businesses how much paper, gas, and money they had saved by transacting online, a unified notification system across every state and county service, and, finally, a Hawaiian-language version of the portal. The organization also sponsored TEDx Honolulu in 2011 and 2012, part of a broader push to raise Hawaii's tech visibility during the same stretch.
Service breadth
Beyond the portal itself, the platform ran the full DCCA (Dept. of Commerce and Consumer Affairs) service line: Business Registration (BREG, 12 services, with nearly 90% of businesses filing their annual reports electronically), Professional & Vocational Licensing (8 services, with single sign-on and a personal "myPVL" portal), Insurance (5 services), Real Estate (3 services), and Administrative Hearings (2 services). Secure, agency-agnostic form intake across DLIR, DOH, the Attorney General's office, DCCA, Public Safety, Dept. of Taxation, and DLNR ran on an internally-built framework ("WikiFlow") handling validation, routing and approval, payment processing, permit and license generation, and archival integration.
That breadth extended well past DCCA. Owner-reviewed listings still traceable to this era span some two dozen state and county agencies, from a dozen apiece at the Department of Land and Natural Resources and DCCA to nine at the Attorney General's office, seven at the Department of Health, and services built for all four counties (Hawaiʻi, Kauaʻi, Maui, and Honolulu). Individual services ranged from land title records search and criminal background checks to hunting and fishing licenses, sex offender registry search, and medical cannabis registration.
Service count kept climbing through the final year, from 100+ in December 2015 to 120+ active services by the time the role ended in November 2016.
Impact
Hawaii's government services rating went from 43rd to 1st in the nation between 2006 and 2014, collecting 42 national and international awards along the way, including Best of the Web (2013 Finalist) and Best State Government Website (2014).
Customer service handled 59,337 responses in one year across 54 services (phone, email, live chat, plus billing and technical support), and an independent survey of 63 partner agencies found 84.1% satisfied or very satisfied.