NIC : Nurturing a Culture of Innovation

Serving as the R&D shop for government, innovation is our lifeblood. Even though National Innovation Day is this week, we don't limit our innovative thinking to just one day. In fact, at NIC, we are passionate about creating a culture of innovation-a place where great ideas can thrive and employees are encouraged to explore new technologies and create new solutions.

To continue to drive our culture of innovation, in 2017 we launched the NIC Innovation Program. This program consists of hackathons throughout the year where employees team up to explore new technologies beyond our existing solutions and help further define a futuristic vision of digital government.

A key success factor of our hackathons is the fact that they are open to all of our employees, across our 30 locations. For us at NIC, diversity of thought goes beyond exploring ideas born by our technical workforce. People with different educational backgrounds, careers and skill sets bring interesting concepts and ideas to the table, and through these hackathons, we get to explore them. Curiosity and passion to experiment are the only skills required.

Last year, the NIC Innovation Program consisted of two successful hackathons. A cross-section of portal and NIC resources participated to explore how our government partners can leverage Blockchain and Bots & Machine Learning.

Blockchain

Because of the skyrocketing use of cryptocurrencies and the possibilities of their underlying technology, blockchain, group of NIC employees formed five teams and participated in a one-day hackathon to explore the opportunities for blockchain in government. Together, the five teams each explored a different idea and use for blockchain, determining that the technology has a lot of possibility with digital government, in such areas as identity management, the irrefutability of documents, licensing and other aspects of regulatory compliance.

Bots & Machine Learning

As we have been expanding our use of these technologies, we gathered participants for two lunch-and-learn sessions to gain a deeper understanding of bots and machine learning. We leveraged an existing NIC conversational assistant, named 'Missi', that was built for our Mississippi partner as a catalyst for our discussions before beginning the hackathon. This hackathon was so successful that multiple teams plan to take their chatbots to demo or production this year.

We are committed to helping our government partners explore the latest technologies. Whether it's the nation's first personal assistant for government Gov2Go, virtual reality statehouse tours, voice-command systems, or new technologies that are on the horizon such as blockchain, we will continue to collaborate to develop innovative solutions. In its first year, the NIC Innovation Program was a success with highly-engaged teams and innovative ideas and we're looking forward to growing and developing our program further. Innovation can stem from one idea, one individual, but at its core, it's rooted in collaboration. Only companies focused on nurturing a collaborative and open-minded culture can truly innovate.