Ep.128 Arizona’s Digital Driver’s License & Experience with J.R. Sloan, CIO for the State of Arizona

Joe Toste [00:00:05]:
Hey, what's up, everybody?

Joe Toste [00:00:06]:
This is Joe Toste from techtables.com and you're listening to the public sector show by techtables. This podcast features human centric stories from public sector, cios, cisos and technology leaders across federal, state, city, county and higher education. You'll gain valuable insights into current issues and challenges faced by top leaders through interviews, speaking, engage mints, live podcast tour events. We offer you a behind the mic look at the opportunities top leaders are seeing today. And to make sure you never miss an episode, head over to Spotify and Apple podcasts and hit that follow button and leave a quick rating. Just tap the number of stars that you think this show deserves. And to continue this darn good conversation, head over to the Q a section on Spotify.

Joe Toste [00:00:43]:
I had a number of conversations with folks across the US around this concept of a digital driver's license, and it's a topic that I really want one in California, so I'm really jealous. And the first time I saw the Arizona driver, the digital driver's license was our live podcast event in Arizona in Phoenix. I was at the Legoland the day before, I was at the Legoland Discovery center with Jack man.

J.R. Sloan [00:01:07]:
Where's Jack man? That's me.

Joe Toste [00:01:10]:
That's Annabelle. She's a little. She grew up out of legos a little bit. She likes Universal Studios now. But there's Jack Man, Legoland Discovery center. He loves those legos. So one of the things that I was reading online that I loved was that Arizona, I believe, is the first state in the union to offer a digital driver's license in an Apple wallet. That's huge.

Joe Toste [00:01:32]:
Can you maybe just brag about that accomplishment and just how that represents the direction that Arizona is going?

J.R. Sloan [00:01:38]:
Yeah. And I'm going to step back because we have to. I'll say, like, at all things technology, words matter. And we'll talk about. There's actually a difference between a digital driver's license and what we're calling, whether you want to call it mobile identity, mobile driver's license. And what we introduced in March of this year was native to Apple Wallet, the Arizona mobile driver's license, which will be a form of mobile identity or is a form of mobile identity. Prior to that march of this year, we did the mobile driver's license. A year before, we had introduced a digital driver's license, which was a separate application that's still available.

J.R. Sloan [00:02:15]:
And when we start to get to some of the questions of what are the use cases, how do you use these things? We'll dig a little bit more on that, but just understand that those kind of two separate things, two separate events have occurred. I'll say we weren't the first to bring forward the digital driver's license, but, yeah, we did have the privilege of being first, and that was maybe somewhat opportunistic. There are other states that have been traveling a similar path as Arizona, and we just happened to be ready when Apple said, hey, we've got a slot, are you ready to go? And our motor vehicle division said, absolutely. And they jumped in, they ran with it, and here we are.

Joe Toste [00:02:48]:
Okay, so I love that. Yeah. And for the audience, this is. Right. Even when we were in Seattle, NaSTD, there was a great conversation, Maryland CTO, he gave a great presentation on digital identity. And so we're just focusing on this, I think, narrow piece. We're not going to cover the holistic everything regarding that, but we are going to focus on kind of this mobile and digital piece of the driver's license. Now, you gave a very similar, or you gave a similar presentation on this topic at Nasio.

Joe Toste [00:03:20]:
Maybe just give like a brief summary for those of us who weren't there to just get us up to speed on what you've already given.

J.R. Sloan [00:03:27]:
Sure. The key element there is the appearance of mobile identity straight within the Apple wallet, I'll note, like it. At the top of your listing for a podcast today, you have a screenshot of what that looks like. So it's not maybe what you expect. It's not going to be like a photo of your driver's license that appears in, it's meant to be a digital credential, and the data is behind it. And there are standards that go along with this. There's an AMBa standard. And so for those that are in the realm of transportation and motor vehicles, Amba has meaning for you.

J.R. Sloan [00:03:58]:
ISO, which I think a lot of us are familiar with, also create standards, and there's ISO standards that wrap around this as well. But some of the key tenants inside this mobile identity idea for when you start to get some of the use cases are unlike your driver's license. When someone says, hey, can I see a form of id? You hand that thing over like you're handing over the entire credential, everything associated with it, all the data on it, and that may not be optimal in all cases with the digital form of that, in this mobile identity. One of these cases we'll talk about would be, hey, I can check in with the TSA. There's some things like the TSA can certify they actually have a certificate that says, I am the TSA and I am the one requesting this. Here's the information that I'm requesting and it's an ask. I don't have to say yes. I can say, nope, I don't want to go that route.

J.R. Sloan [00:04:41]:
I'd like to pull out my driver's license. I can opt in and say yes, do it this one time. So we've all seen that sort of prompt. If we have iPhone devices or any mobile device where it says, hey, do you want to share this now and allow once or do you want to allow always so I can set myself up in the future if I plan to do a fair amount of traveling. And I don't want to be prompted every time. I literally can just tap and go with the TSA going forward knowing that the only thing I've authorized is the certified TSA identity to have that information. And it's just the information that they need to validate that it's me.

Joe Toste [00:05:14]:
Okay. I love it. And actually, this bleeds like perfectly into my next piece. So I was looking at my Apple wallet over the weekend as I was thinking about this and audience just bear with me, Jhr. Bear with me. Business debit card in here. Yes. Check.

Joe Toste [00:05:30]:
Business credit card check. Personal debit card? Check. Personal credit card, check. Which is my Apple card, right? AMC movie theater pass tickets? Check. Vaccine card, check. Which I will say, by the way, I know different states fall on radically different lines around should you have a vaccine card? Should you not have a vaccine card? I'm not here to debate that. I'm saying I have one. And it's coming handy because my use case is having to visit my mom in the hospital because she's got stage four cancer.

Joe Toste [00:06:02]:
So that has been handy from a digital perspective because my paper one, let me tell you, has disintegrated. So the paper route, it will disintegrate. Home depot balance card, check. Yes, we got that one. Santa Barbara zoo, check. Okay, so I know you're like, joe, why are you reading off everything you have? Because the last thing, and I have my GEICO car insurance here. The last thing I want is my driver's license. That's what I want.

Joe Toste [00:06:30]:
And Arizona actually got it done. And you would be surprised because the stat I read, there's 118,000,000 iPhones in the United States. So it reminds me early on when, if you remember when Starbucks was one of the first, so was Trader Joe's with the NFC technology and the checkout clerks. All my friends who had Android phones were always making fun of me because they're like, dude, just get an Android. It has NFC, and Apple took forever to get it. Well, once they had it, you could actually pay for stuff. But the actual NFC device said only with Samsung pay, right? Or Android pay. This is roll the clock back maybe eight years ago, something like that, seven years ago.

Joe Toste [00:07:15]:
And so now I feel like, same stage, except there's just a lot of resistance for this catching on. But I'm really stoked that Arizona was opportunistic and able to pull the trigger and show that. And I don't know what the stat is. I read, I think it was in the New York Times. It was like 11,000 people signed up. It might have been in the first 30 days. I don't know the exact stat. And so it's obviously been some time a little bit, but I don't know what the numbers look like now.

Joe Toste [00:07:42]:
But I am sure I'm a millennial. Every millennial, most millennials in the state of Arizona, if they know about it, are signing up for a digital or signing up for their Apple wallet driver's license.

J.R. Sloan [00:07:54]:
Yeah. And you saw it as well. You were walking around in Arizona and you got prompted. You're like, hey, would you like to register your driver's license? You're like, man, I really want to. And so that's one of those things that we'll say Apple does based on location, is that all the millennials around the state are probably getting prompted and folks are. At least it's bringing visibility to the fact that's there. And the process is super simple. It's literally, you say, yes, I'm interested.

J.R. Sloan [00:08:19]:
And it says, hey, take a picture of the front of your driver's license. Okay, now take a picture of the back of your driver's license. And then it goes and does a encrypted validation with the motor vehicle department. And they say, yes, that's all good, and you're done. So it's pretty simple in terms of numbers. So right now, we've gotten past the 100,000 user mark, which is good. As I said earlier, that's actually slightly ahead of where Apple really expected us even to be at this point, just six months in. So it's encouraging.

J.R. Sloan [00:08:47]:
It is one of those things that use cases are going to drive adoption, and so it's going to be one of those things like, so where's the pickup going to be right now? The primary use case for this is at the airport, and it's not even all the locations at Phoenix Sky harbor. Right. There are areas where the TSA machines that have the NFC readers in them when they're there. And I think it's mostly in terminal three, usually fly out of terminal four. And so I keep waiting for the day that I get to use this. But you go through there and you can do it. And so I think it's those people that are tech savvy. And I agree, it's going to be the limitless, are going to be looking at somebody going, hey, how did you do that with your phone? What do you have to do that? It'll be this inline conversation and it'll have that kind of probably viral effect that once folks see it and more people have it and more people will be talking about it, then it'll really start to pick up.

J.R. Sloan [00:09:33]:
But I think as there's more use cases, that's really going to be the driver to accelerate. So stepping away for a minute, as we have two different forms, right. We have the digital driver's license and that app, and we have our mobile driver's license. We still use that digital driver's license app and where that gets used. And its primary use case is if you're logging into our motor vehicle website, which is AZmVD now, and you want to do, there's things that don't require a lot of authentication, like you want to pay your registration or that type of thing. You can log in if you want to do. We're talking about title transfer. So you actually want to move your car from you to somebody else, or you want someone to move their car to you, right.

J.R. Sloan [00:10:11]:
That's a valuable transaction. So you want a higher level of authentication than just someone got your username and password. So with part of the registration and enrollment process with that mobile drivers or mobile, I'm sorry, digital driver's license. I'm getting the terminology mixed up here with the digital driver's license. It's similar to that kind of face id enrollment, right. Part of anyone that's gone and had their picture taken at the motor vehicle department in Arizona, say, in the past ten years, part of that process has been collecting biometric data. You've seen this kind of special fisheye camera. It's actually taking a full 3d picture of your face, has that on file.

J.R. Sloan [00:10:46]:
And so when you go through this process, those biometrics are compared. And at the point at which I want to do that enhanced authentication, it says, hey, take a selfie. It's doing liveness detection. It's actually looking for the features of my face. And it's actually comparing that online, and then it's authenticating and saying, yes, you're good to go. Now I can do that. Higher value transaction. One of the things that starts to open up is to say there's different types of transactions that we do.

J.R. Sloan [00:11:12]:
Some are higher risk, some are lower risk, some are higher value. And to have the right level of authentication and verification associated with the transaction that you want to do, that's a valuable thing, right? We may not need MFA everywhere for everything or this even enhanced user verification kind of stuff. So it's having the right level of authentication for the right type of transaction.

Joe Toste [00:11:32]:
Oh, I love that. I'm going to clip that part right there. I love what you said about having the right level of authentication kind of at the right time. I love that. I think you're right. You nailed the use cases so well on the digital side. I recently, maybe six months ago, I just have been traveling so much. I don't really drive a whole lot in town in Santa Barbara anymore.

Joe Toste [00:11:54]:
So I had a buddy of mine called me up, lives in San Diego. Hey, man, you selling your car? And this is like top of market. The used car markets, like super hot. Yeah, man, I'll sell my car to you. So I'm like, hey, babe, are you cool if we go down to San Diego and we just become a one car family now? Because I'm on the road so much?

J.R. Sloan [00:12:10]:
She was like, yeah, no worries.

Joe Toste [00:12:12]:
We took the train back to Santa Barbara. But when you bring the deed down, it's frustrating in California, because on this back of this piece of paper, you're like side by side, making sure you're matching up. And anything where you have to do this with paper and you're trying to match up, and if you write in the wrong column, it's like, void. Please mail a new. I'm like, that makes no sense. So having that digital driver's license portal, all encompassing portal that covers title, registration, renewals, all that, that's fantastic. The other use case that I think, and it may be a little novel, but the Apple wallet to me is, I think it's just a must. If I had to.

Joe Toste [00:13:00]:
I know I'm not supposed to give my opinion out on too many things here because I'm the one asking the questions, but I think it's a must. I think it's a must. And I found we will talk about this around in a little bit around the fears around privacy, but I think there's a lot of resistance, unnecessary resistance to having the Apple wallet, having that in, mainly it's around Apple being vertical in our lives and expanding, and they already have. So is Google. It's a two pony world right now. You got Google, you got Apple, but I love that you're able to get this done. And now I want to go a little bit broader around the topic of digital and how does this really encompass around your strategic plan to really grow the digital experience with a more unified approach across the state?

J.R. Sloan [00:13:49]:
So one of the things that you can certainly see, whether it's that mobile id or the digital driver's license, either of these things, as we'll say, a digital credential for an individual. And when I start thinking about, okay, who's carrying driver's licenses? Well, there's only, I don't know, several million in Arizona that carry either a driver's license or a state issued id. And either of those are eligible for what we're talking about here because there's a photo associated with it. We have that biometric information. So then when I look across how government has traditionally been done, and I'll talk about Arizona in that depending upon the number of agencies you interacted with and what your needs were, you had at least one identity for every agency that you were doing any kind of transaction with. And on some agencies, you might have multiple identities depending upon what services that you needed, just because of the way historically, applications grew up. And we have some of these systems that the started before the Internet, and they're still around. And now we have the Internet, and we have ways to deliver services digitally, but those systems haven't necessarily.

J.R. Sloan [00:14:48]:
Some of the old things are still there, and we haven't had, we'll say, a fresh start in saying, if we wanted to make this as seamless and easy for our user community, whether those are citizens, visitors, anyone who needs to interact with the state of Arizona, how do we make it simple for them? How do we engender trust in that process? Because depending upon the nature of the transaction, that they're really, honestly, government, we deal in trust. If our citizens don't trust us, we got a big problem. And then having that same credential, you talk to any security person, right? What's more secure, one credential with a factor or enhanced authentication on it, where you have one thing you're managing, one thing you're watching over, versus telling a user that they need 510 or more. I think there's lots of great examples of folks that just. It's challenging to manage all of that. Right? In order to deliver, I think, better digital experiences. And the other thing we need to start talking about, and I'll say threading the right balance of convenience and privacy, that has to be part of the discussion. You can't talk about security, you can't talk about digital services without talking about privacy as well.

J.R. Sloan [00:15:52]:
And privacy is a key component in this is that I've talked about it before. I see this as something where as a user, I want to be asked what information do I need to share and to be able to see what benefit do I get for sharing that information? And how can I see effectively an audit trail of what have I shared and who has it gone to with you? I think if you're in California, you're probably more familiar with this, with the GDPR, and certainly Europe has been doing that for a while. But the fact that more and more states enforcing or creating digital privacy acts and things that basically are saying, hey, businesses and government, you are responsible and accountable for the privacy of citizens and the people that you do business with. And so you have to factor that into what you're doing. So bringing that into it. When we start talking about going back to some of the use cases, we'll say a probably near term likely use case could be with your mobile driver's license credential. You're ordering food from Uber Eats and you think you would like to have a beverage to go along with that. They want to validate, are you 21? So now you'll have the ability with this in your wallet that you could validate that you're over 21, doesn't have to send your date of birth, but that could be validated that the person who has already been verified as the individual owning this device is now validated that they're over 21.

J.R. Sloan [00:17:11]:
So now you can start to fulfill some of those types of requests as well. But it's sharing only the information is necessary. What's necessary there is a, do I know it's the same individual? And b, are they the right age? No more information has to be shared. We're not talking about having people knock on your front door and say, hey, I've got your food, but show me your id. I think I would be less comfortable showing my id to everybody that came to my door with food than being able to validate that all within an application.

Joe Toste [00:17:36]:
Yeah, you mentioned a phrase about threading the needle, and I really like that between convenience and privacy. And I think we're starting as a whole to swing towards so much privacy that we lose the convenience and let me give you an easy example on a website now, especially in the state of California, you will now see with GDPR and everything, you get so many pop ups. I'm like, what's going on here? I want to allow this and this and this and this. Oh, now I got the website. Okay. So there needs to be a balance. You set up perfectly, threading the needle between convenience and privacy. And I do love that, being able to, when my iPhone asks me, hey, do you want this app to track you? And you're like, no.

Joe Toste [00:18:26]:
So that's a great one.

J.R. Sloan [00:18:27]:
Exactly. A lot of what we enjoy in terms of the technology, its advancements, the innovations, a lot of it's been built off of our data. We were the product. Yeah, okay. Different podcast, different discussion to go and have about the merits and or ethics of all of that. But the reality is that as you're going to those websites, it's important for you, the user in this case, to understand what do they want to collect and what options can I select in terms of, yes, I'm comfortable with that. No, I'm not comfortable with that. I'm willing to give up your performance cookies because I don't really care.

J.R. Sloan [00:18:59]:
I'm not planning to go back to your site. I'm here this one time to get this one piece of information. And maybe if I take time and look through, I go, oh, yeah, there's actually marketing stuff in here. Maybe I don't want that. I don't want to be on your mailing list. I don't want to be sold to whoever you're collecting and selling data to. Now, while in the, I'll say government, right? We're not in the business of saying, hey, I just want to aggregate as much information as I can about people and then sell that to somebody, because that's not the business model. We're here to fulfill government services to folks.

J.R. Sloan [00:19:26]:
But we bear the same responsibility because we know like it or like, we hold a lot of data about people, and we hold a good amount of sensitive data about people. So part of that we talked about trust and privacy is demonstrating that we are respectful of a person's privacy, of their preferences. But there are opportunities. Right? So if I have a profile for Joe Toste in the state of Arizona, and I know that he interfaces with, say, one of our health and human services divisions for this service, I might have enough information to know, Joe, you're also probably eligible for this and this. Now, how do I approach that? I can approach it and say, joe, because you're eligible for this service. You may be eligible for these other ones. Would you like to opt in to share a little more information and confirm that, put the power back in your hands, as opposed to maybe a more disturbing experience? Could be. Joe, I saw you signed up for this service.

J.R. Sloan [00:20:20]:
I've signed you up for these two as well because I could see that you were eligible. May not feel as good, may not be really what you want to do. It starts to say now the government seems to be doing stuff with my information, my data that I didn't really ask for and maybe I'm not so interested in. I think we have to, like I say, walk that line, respecting the relationship between our constituents, those that we serve, and the data that we hold for them.

Joe Toste [00:20:43]:
I love that. Respecting the relationship. Yeah, no, that's great. This question actually was, we were walking to the restaurant, Jim Weaver asked you and he asked you, he said, jr, does Arizona charge a fee to his residents for the digital driver's license or for the mobile Apple wallet? So for those who are not familiar, does Arizona charge a fee? This is from Mr. Secretary Weaver. And how equitable is it? So I'm just rehashing that question to you.

J.R. Sloan [00:21:13]:
There is, there's no fee for either. So no fee to register your driver's license as a mobile driver's license in your wallet, no fee to download and run the digital driver's license application as well. All that is enabled and covered and is equally free.

Joe Toste [00:21:28]:
Love that. And do you have the option to have both the physical license and you can have the digital that? You don't have to pick one. It's just an option.

J.R. Sloan [00:21:37]:
Yeah. At this point, you don't opt out of having the physical license. You're going to go in, they're going to ship it to you. But the moment that you have that and you have that credential, now you can go ahead and register and get the digital driver's license version, and you can go ahead and register and get the mobile driver's license as well.

Joe Toste [00:21:53]:
Love that. Now, when it comes to integrating with police databases, how has the state decided what's relevant, what's not with the digital id? What have you seen across the country? What are you seeing right now? I think that was one of the most fascinating use cases that I heard from other folks across the US.

J.R. Sloan [00:22:13]:
So really, from what I can see, nothing has really changed here. Right. Because the fact is that for years and years before our digital driver's license was even a had, the information was already being registered, was being shared, and public safety has its own network for how all that stuff goes around. And they have a wonderfully great system that if I'm speeding in Maricopa county and I cross over into Pima county, they all have access to the same information and they can write me two tickets, one for each of those. And then I might be able to also engage with local law enforcement, depending upon what I'm doing, and they'll provide great service around all of that. So they've already had to solve the problem for many years about the fact that we are mobile inherently. We move around. We don't necessarily operate within just one of their jurisdictions, and so they need to be able to have access to credentials not only for people in state of Arizona, but frankly, people from out of state.

J.R. Sloan [00:23:07]:
So the public safety network and data systems have already solved the problem of how do I get a credential from somebody and validate who they are? And those things are already in place. And you can start to think about how would that work if we started to add digital to it, which is there's the idea of if I'm being pulled over because I'm a great driver and the officer really wants to know who to send a love note to because I demonstrated just amazing courtesy as I was driving with the rest of the Arizona courteous drivers that he could even, whether it's Bluetooth, NFC, what have you, I can receive a prompt to say, hey, Officer X would like to have access to your driver's information. Instead of him walking up to my window and saying, driving the license, registration, can I share that with him electronically? And he doesn't even have to come to the car. Now, maybe there's logistics with that in terms of maybe I need to take a selfie at the moment to go along with it. So we can see that my photo in the car with his lights shining behind me matches the driver's license photo that he sees and all the rest of the information. But theoretically, that type of a transaction that again, does this start to reduce, I don't know, confrontations that happen under those circumstances or just make that exchange just a little more seamless, bring that digital aspect to it?

Joe Toste [00:24:22]:
Yeah, no, I really like that use case. I think just going back, I think the whole digital experience broadly across the board is just going to cut down on a lot of toste. My favorite example is every time I go to the doctors, which is a couple of times a year, I hand the same two pieces of information over my driver's license and my health insurance card. Now I try and explain every time that you don't have to photo. I was here yesterday. You don't have to take another scan of it and put it in a folder. It's just wasteful. I don't know who's going to fix that.

Joe Toste [00:25:02]:
That's a cultural fix. But the day that I can just scan, just like with my phone, and I know it's humanly possible, it'll be a blast. I will be very excited. It's going to cut down on the number of times. And same thing with the police officer. I've handed my iPhone over to a police officer before in California. This was a while ago. This was early on.

Joe Toste [00:25:19]:
When it was early, early on, and I handed it over, I got pulled over, had my GeiCo from in my Apple wallet, and he was like, come on, do you have the actual paper? I was like, no, I don't have it. He's like this punk kid. So he goes back to the car, verifies it, comes back, hands me my iPhone back. I was like, thank you. It's like iPhone four, whatever. So yeah, it's been around, people are doing it and yeah, I really like that aspect. A topic that I find across the US talking to, whether it's cios, of dmvs, or of states or published articles, is that there's just a lot of fear around privacy. How do you separate fact from fiction? Regarding privacy concerns in the state of Arizona?

J.R. Sloan [00:26:04]:
I'll say I think it's the principled approach. Right, which is security and privacy first, and then we get into the use cases that provide convenience. Next, I think some of the things we talked about, I think the core principles and some of it's been built into the standards. So that's going to drive some behavior. So those AmBA and ISO standards basically say that, hey, if you're seeking to do an identity verification or validation with this mobile identity, you have to specify what are the data elements that you're requesting access to. We have the concept I talked about earlier where the TSA has digitally signed, so they have certificates installed on the machines that are the readers that says, I am the TSA and it's like a digital certificate, certified, verified. You're sharing your information with the TSA. Now.

J.R. Sloan [00:26:47]:
Again, level of verification for the right level transaction. I know if you get to a world where, hey, I'm walking into a, I go to a bar and again, we use this. We always love to get a drink, but to babysit you, verify my identity, do I need to know that? As long as the name on the reader matches the name that I walked in on the bar. And I know I'm only sharing just the fact that I am over 21 and it's okay to serve me. They don't have any other information and I'm necessarily being shared about me. Maybe I don't need to have a certified terminal that says that it's Joe's bar. So I think that it's really about demonstrating behavior and us being proactive as a state and putting. I hope we heard the thread in the conversation is you as a user need to participate in the process and we need to ask you and say it's basically permission based.

J.R. Sloan [00:27:38]:
So what do you want to share and then how do we maybe report back to you at a given time? What have you shared? Who have you shared that with and that through that type of you owning your profile, can you revoke that?

Joe Toste [00:27:48]:
Joe doesn't own a bar, but Joe. But Joe will go to a bar. And yeah, I almost think it was like a green, you pass, you're good, red, you're not 21, and then that's it. Yeah. Handing over your address is always a little bit of a weird thing now. So I do really like, how does.

J.R. Sloan [00:28:07]:
Your address say what age you are? That's just the place that you live. I'm not even sure your name is relevant. If you have a verified credential, if you having a single credential, driver's license, you would pull that out. What are they going to look at on it? What they need to look at is your date of birth. And they don't even really need to see that. They just need to see, okay, is this person over 21? That's all that needs to be told. And so if you literally had back, if it were just a pure paper world, if you had a credential, that was really the green check mark card that says, yes, this guy's over 21. And that's what you pulled out and that's all you had to show anybody.

J.R. Sloan [00:28:41]:
You might choose to do that, as opposed to point out your, here's my higher identity credential, please have a look. I think we're talking about doing that in a digital format.

Joe Toste [00:28:50]:
Yeah, I love that. What are your top two to three favorite use cases for? And it could be either just the digital driver's license, or it could just be for the Apple wallet that are outside of a bar and Uber Eats or Grubhub.

J.R. Sloan [00:29:04]:
I'll say those are probably the more near term ones. Apple did announce providing access to the mobile driver's license and wallet to their developers. We're excited to see, okay, what's going to start happening with this. I know there's a couple of other states that are headed down this path, so they're engaging with Apple. They're having those discussions. I expect you'll see some additional announcements here before too long. And again, as this starts to roll and build critical mass, the use cases will continue to flow. I think it's just anywhere that you need to verify who you are.

J.R. Sloan [00:29:33]:
So what are all the places that you could ask for your driver's license? Even at the grocery store you go to grab groceries. So we have these wonderful self checked things. Then we have this manual process that the moment you swipe a piece of alcohol across it, you're now waiting and a little red lights flashing. You're hoping that someone's paying attention and will come over and they'll swipe their card and put their code in and they want to look at your driver's license. Imagine if you could do that all with your mobile phone, all at one time and not disrupt that self service experience. That would accelerate things and even reduce the intervention of the attendance for that. I think those are the, I'll say, the top use cases. Like, where are you keeping asking, getting asked to pull out your driver's license? Okay, but do I need to have this whole thing here now? Then there's other things when you start to say some of the in app experiences where you might need to verify who you.

J.R. Sloan [00:30:19]:
That's whether it's like you said, the doordash, the grubhub, the Uber eats those if they wanted to be able to start to say, okay, can I, with more confidence, order and or deliver, let's say, alcohol or something like that? So I think that those are the next ones. And then probably the more exciting ones, Joe, are the ones that, because we're trying to make connections to things we already see, those are not where the most interesting use cases come from. It's going to be something that we aren't thinking about right now that is going to be like, oh, wow, that wasn't even possible before I had this thing on my wallet, and now it is.

Joe Toste [00:30:49]:
And I'm just curious for testing stuff like this out now, are you constantly thinking, like, when you're out in the community, so this is JR the citizen. Are you out in the community figuring out, hey, how could I use this? I feel like you have to be if you're one of the first state to roll this out. Because I feel that there are a lot of other states where empathy would do them very well. And what I mean by that is when you are able to walk in the show. I learned this when I worked at a property management software company looking behind end users, and I was always helping them. And it was fascinating to me, and I took this lesson away where it was like if you could watch how a user interacts with the software or uses it, you can actually really start to empathize and figure out, oh, this is how they use it. So let me tie this together. I'll give you an example.

Joe Toste [00:31:44]:
And I love the state of California. Weather is great in the state of California. One of the things on their website, when you go through, and actually they redid the website, it's actually pretty good. But one of the minor things that can turn into a major thing is you don't actually know what address you have on file. So the only reason I was thinking about this during this podcast is because I had to go get the new California real id driver's license. I actually don't know what driver's license is on file with the DMV. And so how do you authenticate that? It's not possible, right? So at least in the state of California, but I know some other states are like this. So I'm sorry, I went down the rabbit hole in this podcast because I was trying to break stuff.

Joe Toste [00:32:25]:
That's the other thing. I love breaking stuff. I'm like, let me just go test this out. I told Wendy Barron, who's the CIO for the Texas DMV, I said, hey, if you ever have a user group, can you just invite me? I want to break all the software you have. I just want to beat it up. I want to test it. I love being like, I am not even a beta test user. I am like Alpha.

Joe Toste [00:32:45]:
I will try anything I can get my hands on. So on the curve of adoption of users, I'm like that little minority that's over here, but I think being able to test. So wrapping it back around to you, Jr. How do you think about testing out the services? And you said what you had mentioned was great, was like, there are services that we don't even know we're going to use today. How do you find out what the future might look like? How do you keep yourself in tune with that? Maybe talk about that?

J.R. Sloan [00:33:15]:
I think that's a challenge, right? Because I think for any business and certainly for government, we look at things from the inside and we tend to start with what would make my life easier or what do I think would be a good way to navigate this process? One of the things that I'll say we challenge ourselves with and I'm pleased I'm seeing more of our agencies as they're going through modernization projects. They're starting to ask the question like hey, before we go through it, we might have all our requirements together, all the things that the system needs to do, but why don't we actually talk to our users about how they use it? And how are we involving our users in our processes early to get their feedback on this user interface? Because if we design something that meets our needs, it may not necessarily meet the citizens needs or be as efficient and pleasant to use as it could be for them. Again, we're not in the full blown consumer product. If I build something I can afford to put, let's say we'll say amazing dollars in to give this amazing user experience. We're trying to be good stewards of the tax dollars that come in. We are trying to make the interacting with government to be a more straightforward, easy experience. We're trying to eliminate inefficiencies and I think that's before we get to wowing customers with oh, that was an amazing application. Let's start with are we doing the basic stuff of not asking for their name, address, Social Security number and all this piece of information like twelve times over the course of an application.

J.R. Sloan [00:34:41]:
Can we do that just once and let them know that hey, thank you, I remember what you told me. And then through this permission process can we start to say, hey, are you willing to share this? So when we talk about you talked about going to the motor vehicle and hey, I need to update my driver's license. I'm not sure what address the have on file. In Arizona we have over 100 agencies, boards and commissions and they probably all have different data about. Not everyone works with all of them, but those that might work with say a person you could end up with. They all have their own data stores about who you are and what address and what email address. And these things I guarantee are not in sync. They might have you, Joe here and Joseph over here and Joe T over there too, but we'd have a hard time pulling that together.

J.R. Sloan [00:35:23]:
Now a real convenience would be you move and you put an address change in and you can say yes, this is my new address. Push this everywhere and that could then notify and then all the parts of government that you do business with would know, I've got Joe's new address and it's actually been verified.

Joe Toste [00:35:40]:
Yeah. You would actually be surprised, or maybe you won't be. But the whole Joseph Joey Joe T. Thing is a real problem for me, especially during the voting time, because every election cycle, they're like, hey, we've got four of you down. I promise you. There's only one me. Only one of me. And I always give my full name, which is Joseph Anthony Tassie III.

Joe Toste [00:36:04]:
And, oh, I was number five on this list. And I'm like, you guys need to modernize your database right now. They look at me like a foreign alien, and my wife's laughing at me, okay, so I love this conversation a lot. I love the work that you're doing in Arizona. I love how you might not view it as a risk, but I feel like you're taking some pretty smart risks heading out there, being opportunistic. I think innovation requires a little bit of risk taking, and it might not even be a technology risk, but it could be just a cultural risk. It could just be pushing the status quo. So I love that this is the entrepreneur in me that I love to see, and I love seeing it in the state of Arizona with a number of, like, Doug, who was once there, and Tim pushing the boundaries.

Joe Toste [00:36:49]:
I love that. So thank you for coming on tech tables. I know this is going to stir up a lot of questions for a lot of other CIOs in other states as they're grappling with, how do we thread the needle? And every state is going to have to answer that question for themselves. But I think you setting a really great precedent will help those other states out. So appreciate you coming on tech tables and appreciate you taking the time today. Thank you.

J.R. Sloan [00:37:12]:
Thanks, Joe. Hey, if I can really quick, I really want to give a shout out to our department of transportation in Arizona. They're the ones who really demonstrate the leadership on this. Got to give credit to the team in the motor vehicle department, led by Eric Jorgensen, the program director, Dave Kenegi, and of course, my counterpart, CIO over There, Steve. Steve west. They put together making this happen for Arizona and done a tremendous job. And I think that's true. I get to be the face on some of these things because me and the asks me the questions and I can do the research and bring some of the answers forward, but they're the real experts that have really executed on this and brought this forward and made it possible.

J.R. Sloan [00:37:46]:
And that's a true story. I want to say across all the agencies that I get to work with, they're doing good things. I want to be the, I'll say the megaphone that amplifies what they're doing and talks about how it's great. It's not always, hey, this was all my idea, and I did this start to finish. I get to be the guy that comes on and talks about it and really celebrates the good work that's getting done. So I'm happy to do that. Last thing, Joe, I'd love to say on this topic of identity. Circle back.

J.R. Sloan [00:38:10]:
And early in the podcast, you mentioned Massachusetts. They've got some really interesting ideas. Get their CTO on, get their CIO on. Mike Leahy, if you need. I will provide a personal introduction. He's done some really strong thinking in the realm of identity, and they're doing some really good work there. And that's the other thing I love about government, is this is not competitive advantage. We're willing to share information, and we're all trying to solve pretty similar problems and do it in ways that, because, again, we deal with people and we need to deal with them in trusted ways.

J.R. Sloan [00:38:38]:
And coming back to the principles, security, privacy, et cetera, and the problems that we need to solve need to be solved at the local government level, the state government level, and even extend up into the federal government level. And so you start thinking about this problem of identity, and how do we do that in a way that isn't even just limited by state lines, right. That can cross boundaries and really serve us as american citizens as well.

Joe Toste [00:39:02]:
Yeah, I love that. Before we end, now, I have to brag on you. This is one of the reasons why I love tech table so much, is because JR is such a humble leader. I love the shout out to the Arizona Department of Transportation that you gave. I don't know. Imagine. But maybe I'll just have to get all of them on all at once. We'll just do one panel.

Joe Toste [00:39:20]:
But I love that you're just bragging on them. They're putting in the work. And you're right. You get to be the megaphone that amplifies the great work that they're doing that I know other states are looking at. And so they're setting a standard, setting an example, and love that you mentioned them. And, yeah, Michael, we need to have him on the podcast. He does have strong thinking. I love that a lot about him.

Joe Toste [00:39:41]:
I see him on, I think, Twitter and LinkedIn, and I think he is one of those rare cios who's willing to actually chew on a question pretty deeply and long. So you got some long threads sometimes, but I love the thinking and I think that challenging of the status quo is I think what makes the organization's best throughout is kind of what makes the organizations those are the best ones. Willing to challenge, willing to ask hard questions, willing to grapple, willing to push back a little bit in a kind and nice. And that's how you innovate and that's how you innovate and make progress. So I love that. Thank you for coming on. I appreciate it. Hey, what's up everybody?

Joe Toste [00:40:24]:
This is Joe Tassie from techtables.com and you're listening to the public sector show by techtables. This podcast features human centric stories from public sector, CIOs, CISOs and technology leaders across federal, state, city, county and higher education. You'll gain valuable insights into current issues and challenges faced by top leaders through interviews, speaking engagements, live podcast tour events. We offer you a behind the mic look at the opportunities top leaders are seeing today and to make sure you never miss an episode, head over to Spotify and Apple podcasts and hit that follow button and leave a quick rating. Just tap the number of stars that you think this show deserves. And to continue this darn good conversation, head over to the Q a section on Spotify.