The ongoing threat of the pandemic has had the whole country grappling with how to continue safely providing services to community members. Tribal governments have an even a bigger hurdle. Providing safe, secure, and needed services to tribal members remains paramount, but how can they continue to provide services when their enrollment, family services, and court offices have to close due to safety measures?
The solution to this challenge is portal technology for tribes. The pandemic only accelerated the need for this tool, which enables remote engagement with members to ensure the continuity of vital services. Tribes benefit from a 24/7 web-based portal designed to enhance member experience and elevate member and case management for unmatched cross-departmental collaboration.
As a longtime technology provider for tribes, Arctic IT leverages the power of portal functionality available with the Microsoft platform products. A few years back, our team developed the Tribal Platforms® software solution, which operates on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and empowers tribal governments to manage their enrollment, family services, distribution payments and more utilizing a member master database.
Today, web portal advancements in the Microsoft Power Platform, which is natively integrated with Dynamics 365, allowed the Arctic IT team to quickly and efficiently build a member-facing Community Engagement Portal for Tribal Platforms that revolutionizes the way governments operate. This portal is configurable with a low / no-code platform to fit your community design.
The Community Engagement Portal provides both Tribal members and government staff tremendous benefit and value:
- Members can conveniently submit requests or apply for programs from home
- In-person visits to the government office are optional
- Members located in other geographic areas away from the Community can still engage
- Government staff can respond to requests quickly and efficiently replying through the Portal if additional information is required
- Member can upload supporting documents and files as needed
- Access is secure and available 24/7
Enrollment staff benefit from improved member data accuracy, as members can interact with their personal member record anytime, anywhere, on any device. The Portal is highly extensible, enabling authorized staff to add online forms to improve member engagement.
Family and Child Services staff benefit as members can review their personal information, review service and program eligibility requirements, and submit Requests for Service from home. Community members can track the status of their requests from the Portal without the need to come to the office. Tribal staff can continue to engage and provide services remotely to the community members who most need help.
How are data security and confidentiality provided with portal technology?
In the Tribal Platforms Community Engagement Portal, each member must register to gain access. Tribal government staff can send an invitation to a member on their preferred email address. Members are required to have a valid email address to connect to the portal. If the email is associated to a supported identity partner such as Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter, the member email is associated with a “contact” or “member” record in Tribal Platforms Enrollment. It is highly recommended that members setup their email with multi-factor authentication (MFA) to ensure security and integrity on their account.
Once registered, a member is assigned a “security role” which permits them to view ONLY their data and records. Think of the account you setup with a bank or an insurance provider. After you log in, you can only see your requests and your profile information.
Cross-department collaboration in Tribal Platforms
The tribal government provides services most efficiently when they all have access to the most current, accurate data when it is needed. The Tribal Platforms Community Engagement Portal is a step to improve this efficiency by assisting members to keep their personal information up to date. Additionally, the first department to interact with a member can update their personal information. Once completed, the member data is available to other departments immediately.
Privacy is a high priority, and the Tribal Platforms solution is designed from the ground up to protect your personal information and requested services. Even after you submit a request for service, the records or forms you fill out and submit are visible ONLY to the Tribal government staff who have permissions to view the data.
For example, Enrollment staff have access to your Member profile change requests and apply updates to make sure your member data is accurate. Conversely, Enrollment staff are not permitted to view any Family or Child Service requests you submit. Your personal information is protected and only visible to those who are permitted to view the individual member profile data.
The security roles also assist staff to enforce cross-department data visibility and process policies within Tribal Platforms. Specific fields or records can be hidden as appropriate to maintain personal privacy. Policy rules can be defined to support ensure benefits are provided to only those members that are eligible. These rules are configurable to support each department as appropriate. Arctic IT works with each client to identify these policies and ensure they are configured properly within the system.
Security at the highest level with Microsoft Cyber Defense Operations Center
In addition to the security and privacy rules applied in the platform, tribal data sovereignty is also maintained in the cloud-hosted environments where the data is stored. Data encryption is applied to assure no data is compromised in the databases or when viewed on the member device (laptop, phone, tablet). To support the security policies as part of the subscription, Microsoft provides a Cyber Defense Operations Center team of 3,500+ cybersecurity professionals who are working around the clock to protect user data from malicious activity. In fact, Microsoft invests $1 billion annually into cybersecurity to maintain compliance and a high level of trust in the government sector. The combined team of Arctic IT and Microsoft work with you to apply the most current security and policy best practices to protect your data.
Community Engagement Portal in action
To learn more about the capabilities of the Tribal Platforms portal, you can view the following video recording to get a high-level overview of the capabilities within the portal.
If you’re interested in learning more or receiving a live demo of this solution, please reach out today at [email protected]. We look forward to helping you improve your Tribal Government operations and member engagement through portal technology.
By Bryan Schmidt, Principal Solution Architect at Arctic IT