Data-Driven Government: Lessons from Michigan's DMV | Podcast

The DMV is the universal symbol of government inefficiency. Long lines, frustrated customers, overworked staff, broken kiosks. For most people, a trip to the DMV means clearing your schedule and accepting that a chunk of your day is gone.

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In Michigan, that changed.

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On this episode of In Pursuit, host Mike Vichich sits down with Jocelyn Benson, Michigan's Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate. Jocelyn came to the role not as a career politician but as a civil rights advocate, law school dean, and educator with a deep commitment to data-driven decision making. During her tenure as Secretary of State, she transformed Michigan's DMV from one of the most maligned government agencies in the state into a national model for efficiency. She moved election security from 34th in the country to second. And she did it in a divided government, often with less money than her predecessors spent.

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Watch the full episode here.

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Start by Seeing It Yourself

When Jocelyn took office, she did something most agency heads never do. In her first 100 days, she visited all 131 Secretary of State branches across every county in Michigan. She brought a form to fill out, took notes, talked to employees, and kept binders on every branch throughout her tenure.

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"You can't fix what you can't see. I started by just getting my arms around everything and saying, how did we get here? Lifting up the hood. What do we need to do to really clean this up?"

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What she found was sobering. Mothers sitting on the floor in branches with young children, waiting hours to renew a license. Auto dealers, among the most frequent customers, never knowing how long they would be away from their business. Employees who had never met a Secretary of State before she walked in. Branch workers with no water at their desks, while executives in the central office ate cake at theirs.

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The problems were not primarily about funding. They were about neglect. No one had demanded better, so no one had delivered better.

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Define the Goal First, Then Work Backward

Before changing anything operationally, Jocelyn did something that sounds simple but is rarer than it should be in government: she defined a clear, measurable goal.

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For the DMV, the goal was wait times down. For elections, it was voter turnout up. Two words each. Everything else flowed from there.

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"We had a very clear goal, which in my view was wait times down, voter turnout up. That was it. And building on a strategy to accomplish those two things."

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That clarity came out of annual two-day strategic planning sessions that she ran every January throughout her tenure. She brought in national experts, former secretaries of state from other states, and thought leaders from across sectors. They threw everything on the table, organized it, and let the overarching goals emerge from the conversation rather than imposing them from the top down.

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She later learned that her agency was the only one in Michigan state government running strategic planning sessions with a documented strategic plan. Her reaction: how does any agency track progress toward a goal it has never defined?

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Fix the Culture Before Fixing the Process

One of the most important early decisions Jocelyn made was recognizing that operational transformation required cultural transformation first. The two could not be separated.

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She eliminated all part-time, temporary, and seasonal branch employees and moved everyone to full-time status with healthcare. She gave every branch employee a water bottle, a small gesture that signaled something larger: this administration cares about the people doing the work.

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She tracked overtime every single week. If anyone was staying past 5:30, it was a red flag that something in the system needed fixing, not a sign that employees needed to work harder.

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"We treated our employees better, both in sort of when they're on the job and giving them that clarity and fair compensation when they're off. And that was enough to get everyone as a team working effectively to make this new model work."

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The incentive structures available in government are limited. You cannot give someone employee of the month recognition under civil service regulations. You cannot offer performance bonuses in the traditional sense. So Jocelyn redefined the incentive: a better-run agency meant employees got home on time, worked in a functional environment, and felt valued. That turned out to be enough.

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Move the Most Frequent Transaction Online

With the culture stabilizing, the operational work began. Jocelyn asked a simple question: what is the most frequent transaction people come into a branch for? The answer was title transactions. Her response was equally simple: move it online.

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Doing so required passing legislation in a Republican-led legislature. The process took six to eight months from drafting the law through implementation. But the political lift was minimal because the goal was not controversial. Nobody wanted to spend more time at the DMV.

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She set a concrete target: flip the ratio from 75% of transactions happening in branches to 70% happening outside. Then she tracked progress relentlessly.

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"We had that goal. And then we're like, okay, how do we get there? Take the most frequent transaction and move it out."

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One thing she underestimated was the education piece. Even before the title transaction change, roughly half the people coming into branches did not need to be there. They could have done their transaction online. Getting the public to change their behavior required its own strategy, separate from the technology work.

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Kiosks: A Procurement Model Worth Studying

The self-service kiosk program is one of the most instructive parts of Jocelyn's tenure from a procurement standpoint. The approach she took is a useful model for any government agency thinking about technology partnerships.

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Rather than paying upfront for kiosks, she structured the contract so that the vendor's revenue came entirely from transaction fees. The vendor only got paid when customers actually used the machines. That single structure created a powerful alignment of incentives: the vendor had every reason to put working machines in high-traffic locations and keep them maintained.

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"By putting the burden of profit on the company, by saying you don't get paid unless you deliver, and after customers are actually using your product, that's when the payment kicks in, that was really key to creating an incentive for the company to put working machines in places that they knew would be meeting foot traffic."

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She also required in the contract that any broken kiosk be repaired within 24 hours. The machines send an automatic alert when they go down. Someone on her team tracks the status of every kiosk in the state in real time. Before this model, 30 to 40 percent of the self-service stations in branches were broken at any given time because no one had the bandwidth to fix them.

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The lesson for government procurement: vendor incentives matter as much as vendor selection. A well-structured contract can do more to ensure performance than the most rigorous RFP process.

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Do Not Reinvent the Wheel

Before building anything new, Jocelyn's team looked at what every other state's DMV was already doing. They looked at banks. They looked at energy companies. They brought best practices from the private sector into a government context rather than treating government as a unique problem requiring a unique solution.

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"You don't ever have to recreate the wheel. Before we did anything, we worked to look at what every one of the other states' DMVs was doing to try to solve a lot of these problems. Success breeds success. If a vendor is having success in one place, that was the best selling point to bring it to Michigan."

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The kiosk program itself cost nothing upfront because Indiana was already running the same model. Michigan did not need to build a new system. It needed to adopt a proven one.

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For vendors selling into government, this is an important insight. A track record in similar jurisdictions is not just a nice-to-have in your proposal. It is often the deciding factor in whether a government buyer feels confident enough to move forward.

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One Size Does Not Fit All

Not everything worked. The greeter model, placing a dedicated employee at the entrance of every branch to direct customers and reduce confusion, proved effective in high-traffic urban offices but unnecessary and inefficient in smaller rural branches.

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"What is going to work in a high traffic office in Livonia or Troy is not what a customer in Alpena needs or Escanaba. We quickly had to shift when we thought one statewide idea could work and realize that one size fits all solutions may not be needed or welcome or useful."

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Jocelyn's response was to create an Office of Continuous Innovation, a small team of four or five people whose entire job was to track how things were playing out at the local level, collect feedback from branch managers and regional leads, and surface what was working and what was not. They ran surveys and qualitative interviews and reported directly to her.

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The lesson is one that applies to any large-scale government technology or service initiative: build the feedback loop into the model from the beginning, not as an afterthought.

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From the DMV to the Governor's Race

The same operating philosophy that drove the DMV transformation is now shaping Jocelyn's campaign for governor. Her stated pillars are costs down, wages up, and rights protected. Two words each, just like before.

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Her vision for Michigan in 2034 includes high-speed rail connecting Detroit, Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, and Traverse City, a clean energy transition that drives down costs while creating jobs, and a state where the majority of young people graduating from Michigan's universities choose to stay and build their careers here.

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"We have all the ingredients from our natural resources to our international borders to our history of manufacturing and investing in new industries to our incredible research institutions. We've got everything we need to be that place in eight years. It just needs all of us working together to harness it."

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Whether or not you agree with her politics, the operating model she brings to government is worth paying attention to. Visit every branch. Define the goal in two words. Fix the culture before the process. Build vendor incentives that align with outcomes. Track everything. And never stop looking for what is not working.

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This post is based on a recent episode of In Pursuit, featuring Jocelyn Benson, Michigan Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate. Watch the full episode for more on election security, strategic planning in government, and her vision for Michigan's clean energy future.

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