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State shows progress on North Dakota Gateway (Business Gateway); Deloitte and ServiceNow leading build of starting-a-business use case
Summary
NDIT told senators the $5 million Gateway project is live in pilot testing, uses ServiceNow with Deloitte as development partner, and aims to launch a "starting a business" dashboard with single sign-on, checklist and chat features; integration and identity platforms remain to be completed.
Yvonne Ahmanson, chief business applications officer for North Dakota Information Technology (NDIT), briefed the committee on the North Dakota Gateway (formerly Business Gateway), a centralized portal intended to consolidate online services for businesses and agencies.
Why it matters: The gateway is billed as a "one-stop" for business interactions with state government. If fully integrated, it could reduce duplicative data entry, provide automated reminders for compliance deadlines, and reduce calls to agency help desks, shifting some workloads online.
Ahmanson said the Legislature appropriated $5,000,000 in the last biennium to build the gateway. NDIT selected a low-code approach, comparing the platform to Lego-style prebuilt modules so state and agency staff can assemble workflows more quickly. She named the underlying platform as ServiceNow and said Deloitte is the vendor partner doing the development work on the platform.
The project is organized into four projects: project 1 (discovery and requirements) completed Dec. 19, 2024 with five pilot agencies (Secretary of State, Tax Department, Workforce Safety & Insurance, Job Service and Commerce). Project 2 is portal development and testing; Project 3 is the integration platform to enable systems to "talk to each other"; Project 4 is an identity/proofing platform for sign-on and identity management.
Ahmanson said the team was in testing for the "starting a business" use case and had demonstrated functionality to the five agencies. She said testing would be performed by NDIT and the five agencies, and NDIT was targeting Feb. 18 (year not specified on slides) for implementation if testing and sign-off are complete. She described a public-facing business quiz that does not require login and a dashboard for logged-in users that shows tasks, a calendar of deadlines, document repositories and frequently used tools. A chat/FAQ feature built from agency-provided FAQs is intended to reduce routine inquiries to agency staff.
Senators asked about procurement details, vendor selection and training. Ahmanson said Deloitte won the RFP; the ServiceNow "Impact" training program (run by ServiceNow) is being used to train state staff and NDIT had purchased an additional year of Impact training. NDIT staff said two state staff have completed training to date and the agency expects to rely on vendor partners for higher demand in the next biennium.
Ahmanson and other NDIT leaders said the gateway currently redirects users to agency sites where integrations are not yet built; full integration was framed as a future goal once the integration platform is completed and agency priorities align. They emphasized that the gateway began from a business-focused use case (starting a business) and noted other states often begin with citizen services; North Dakota's choice created some unique implementation details.
Ending: The committee heard a demonstration and Q&A; committee members asked for follow-up on user accessibility and planned continuing appropriations to carry projects across the biennium if testing or integration delays extend past the current budget cycle.
