“Agencies haven’t been asked to do more with less for a while now. They’ve been asked to do everything with nothing.” Budgets shrink. Staff shrink. The number of people who need a license renewed, a grant reviewed, or an inspection scheduled doesn’t shrink at all. Say that in almost any other industry and it sounds absurd. In SLED, it’s just Tuesday.
Here are the key takeaways from our recent conversation with Kate Visconti from Five to Flow on doing more with less in state and local government:
The Smallest Agencies Carry the Biggest Load
The offices absorbing the most pressure are often the smallest ones: environmental commissions, licensing boards, parks and rec departments. Enormous public-facing mandates, almost no dedicated IT support. There’s no one down the hall who can build them a system. There’s barely someone who can fix their printer.
It’s a volunteer sign-up sheet tracked in a spreadsheet nobody updates in real time. It’s an event approval that takes three email chains and two weeks to get a yes. It’s inspection scheduling done over the phone, with the details on a sticky note that may or may not survive the day.
That was the starting point for the Keep Arkansas Beautiful Commission, a small state agency under the Department of Parks, Heritage, and Tourism. Volunteer sign-ups came through JotForm submissions someone sorted by hand. Inventory lived in spreadsheets. Event approvals moved at the speed of whoever happened to check their email that day. Vectr Solutions centralized the volunteer data, automated the event workflows, and connected JotForm directly into their operations instead of leaving it as a form that dumps into an inbox. The result wasn’t flashy. Staff got their time back.
The Tool Is Rarely the Problem
The tool is almost never the real point of failure. The failure is that nobody examines the process before deploying something, and nobody builds trust at the people level before asking a team to abandon the spreadsheet they’ve relied on for years.
Skip that step, and the digital tool doesn’t replace the paper process. It sits alongside it. The spreadsheet doesn’t go away. It just gets a digital roommate. And there’s a specific moment we watch for on almost every implementation: staff have been running a manual workaround for so long they’ve genuinely forgotten it’s a workaround. They call it “how we do this.”
Productivity Purgatory Is a Mission Delivery Crisis
Start with people, and the picture is a workforce that’s genuinely mission-driven and genuinely cognitively overloaded. There’s a concept called attention residue: when a morning starts with triaging a spreadsheet, then a JotForm inbox, then a voicemail queue, nobody actually clears their head enough to think strategically about anything.
Only about a quarter of workers are able to manage systemic distractions well enough to reach a consistent flow state. The other three out of four are stuck in what Kate calls productivity purgatory: constantly busy, never actually in the zone. For an agency managing a growing backlog with fewer staff, that’s not an abstract wellness problem. That’s a mission delivery crisis.
Skepticism Toward New Tools Is Earned
A lot of agencies run on a “this is how we’ve always done it” culture, and that isn’t stubbornness. It’s survival. These are staff who’ve watched systems come and go, who’ve been asked to adopt tools that made their jobs harder instead of easier. The skepticism toward new technology is earned, and acknowledging that openly, instead of treating it as resistance to be overcome, is step one.
Digitizing a Broken Process Just Makes It Look Modern
This is where implementation money gets wasted more than anywhere else. Agencies deploy Salesforce on top of a broken process, and the process never actually gets examined. It just gets digitized. A three-week paper approval workflow becomes a three-week digital approval workflow. Expensive furniture nobody sits in.
There’s also a specific failure mode we call the Secret Deployment: leadership rolls out a new system, tells almost no one, and announces it on go-live day. It’s the equivalent of a spouse reorganizing the entire kitchen while you’re on vacation, then expecting you to make coffee normally on Monday morning. The most common thing agency staff say in the first week after a go-live with no change management isn’t “this doesn’t work.” It’s “nobody told us this was happening.”
Salesforce Isn’t Starting From a Blank Canvas
A lot of people hear “Salesforce” and think sales pipelines. The reality is Salesforce has spent years building capabilities specifically for state and local government. If an agency manages licenses, permits, and inspections, there’s a solution for that. If it runs grant programs, there’s a solution built around the entire grant lifecycle. If teams manage constituent cases, field inspections, volunteers, events, or community programs, that capability already exists.
The point isn’t that every agency needs every one of those. It’s that nobody is starting from scratch. They’re configuring proven capabilities to fit the way the agency actually operates, which is what helps organizations deliver value faster and lowers the risk that comes with large technology projects.
And because those capabilities live on one platform, they stop operating in isolation. The same constituent who applies for a permit might later open a case, receive a proactive update, schedule an inspection, or join a community program. Instead of that information scattered across five systems, staff get one connected view of the people they serve.
Efficiency Is a Loaded Word
That connected data is also what makes AI worth the conversation. Once licensing, case management, inspections, grants, and citizen engagement operate together, Agentforce can start helping with the repetitive work: reviewing submissions, routing requests, preparing case summaries, scheduling field work, answering common constituent questions. It isn’t replacing public servants. It’s giving people back time for the work that actually requires their expertise.
But “efficiency” is a loaded word in this context. Staff hear “we’re making this more efficient” and half assume layoffs, the other half assume they’re about to do three people’s jobs instead of one. The question that actually lands isn’t about efficiency at all. It’s what someone gets to do with the time it gives back. More hours for the strategic work they were hired for. Leaving at five instead of seven. An actual lunch break. That’s the version of this that means something to a person, not a spreadsheet.
Change Management Paid for Later, With Interest
Skipped change management isn’t change management saved. It’s change management paid for later, with interest. When staff don’t trust a system, they don’t use it. The workaround becomes the new process, and now staff are spending thousands of hours manually doing what the system was built to automate.
The SLED-specific risk goes beyond adoption numbers. A bad implementation costs turnover, and institutional knowledge in these agencies is genuinely irreplaceable. Recruiting for these roles is already hard. That’s a compounding loss, not a one-time hit.
The Champion Network Changes the Story
Nobody sat down and took a class on how to use TikTok. It’s addictive because it was built with human behavior in mind from day one, not bolted on as an afterthought. Change management works the same way. It isn’t just measuring how ready people are for a new tool. It’s building the tool itself so that adoption is designed in, not something an agency is praying happens after go-live.
That’s why the Champion Network belongs in the design process itself, not bolted on as a change management tactic after the fact. Deploy Field Service for inspectors without talking to the field service reps first, and a technician gets routed to a job they don’t have the skill set for, then spends four hours on the phone with the help desk sorting out what should have been a five-minute fix. Build the champion network from the start, and the inspector who’s been with the agency twelve years becomes the credibility bridge for everyone else on the team. Nobody imposed a tool on them. They helped build it.
That’s the difference between an implementation that stalls at 30 percent adoption and one that crosses 80 percent.
Conclusion
None of the five core elements, people, culture, process, technology, and analytics, work in isolation. A technology purchase alone can’t fix a people problem. When a team is already cognitively overloaded and demoralized, a shiny new CRM doesn’t feel like relief. It feels like a shiny new cage.
The agencies that get this right don’t start with the platform. They start by asking where their people are actually losing time, get the process right before building on top of it, and protect the change management budget even when it’s the easiest line item to cut. The implementation cost is the smaller number. The adoption failure cost is the one that haunts the next three fiscal years.
If your agency is trying to figure out where the real time is going, or has already deployed Salesforce and is watching staff route around it, we can help. We bring the SLED delivery experience and the Prosci-based change management practice needed to build systems people actually trust enough to use. And if the gap is on the people and readiness side before technology even enters the conversation, Kate Visconti and the team at Five to Flow offer organizational wellness diagnostics and the Wellness Wave to help agencies understand where their people actually stand.
Visit vectrsolutions.com and fivetoflow.com to connect with our teams!
