AWS announces inaugural State and Local Government Champions

Millions of Americans rely on state and local government technology systems every day. From drivers licenses to marriage certificates, every day interactions with government depend on technology. Behind that technology is a cadre of public sector experts making sure things work. For many of these dedicated public servants, working is not good enough. They seek to innovate, improve, and increase efficiency. Amazon Web Services (AWS) recognizes these luminaries of state and local government technology.

On July 12, 2023, AWS announced the winners of the inaugural State and Local Government (SLG) Champions Awards at the AWS Imagine Conference in Sacramento, California. The SLG Champions join the AWS Education Champions community, which was launched last year. The Champions program celebrates public sector agencies whose work empowers innovation and transformation in education and government using the AWS Cloud.

What is the AWS SLG Champions Community?

The SLG Champions Community is made up of government agencies and departments leveraging technology to improve government services. These leaders come from across government including information technology, transportation, public safety, and more. Their work demonstrates the power of the AWS Cloud to improve efficiency, transparency, and outcomes. AWS SLG Champions are ambassadors for technology use in the public sector, actively sharing their experiences, solutions, and best practices.

The 2023 AWS SLG Champions Cohort

These Champions were selected from more than 7,500 government agencies supported by AWS. They represent both large state-wide departments and small city governments from across the United States. Each honoree has demonstrated a commitment to modernizing, improving, and innovating government to the benefit of millions of Americans.

The LA County Public Defender’s office is the first and largest indigent defense firm in the country, serving people who typically can’t afford legal representation. Agency staff represent 140,000 residents a year. Now, for the first-time in its 109 year history, the LA County Public Defender’s office is leveraging the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to automate document processing. Using Amazon Textract to extract text, handwriting, and data, and Amazon Comprehend to uncover insights and connections, as well as redact personally identifiable information (PII), the office is saving time and money. Mohammed Al Rawi, the office’s chief information officer (CIO) said, “It would have taken years to get the sufficient number of staff for the data entry.”

Intelligent document processing has made the office far more efficient, reducing manual data entry by 85% on average for documents from three partner agencies. The solution has also allowed the office to process a greater number of documents. This saves the organization time that it can redeploy to other high-value tasks, so its “lawyers can do the lawyering and focus on building the case for their clients,” Al Rawi says.

Digitizing data is the first step to utilizing data to its fullest potential. The Georgia Data Analytics Center (GDAC) has gone beyond digitizing and is now analyzing vast quantities of data to help improve information available to policy-makers, researchers, and Georgians. GDAC created an analytics platform from scratch using AWS services and collaborated with the AWS Data Lab to accelerate this project from design to four months.

State and local governments are entrusted with some of the most sensitive citizen data, and protecting it is a number one priority across the country. With increased connections and information sharing, and increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks, protection of this data is top of mind for public sector customers. To respond to this evolving landscape, the State of Arizona developed an innovative way to enable cybersecurity readiness by securing devices and employees across all state agencies. Additionally, Arizona has expanded these efforts by taking a whole-of-state approach to cybersecurity by providing cybersecurity solutions to all government organizations across the state from schools to cities and counties at no cost to them, and building a true community of collective defense in the process.

These examples are only a few of the innovations led by the 2023 SLG Champions. Across the country, these dedicated public agencies are using cloud based technology to improve services, increase efficiencies, and serve communities.