I don’t think anyone should be too surprised to see what is being discussed in this issue of MOVE Magazine. While a great understatement, COVID-19 has had an unprecedented impact on our world. It remains in the forefront of our daily lives. If we’ve learned anything over the past eight months working through the challenges of operating in an uncertain pandemic, it’s the importance of being flexible and being able to adapt to an ever-changing world, finding new ways to get things done.

As we’ve all heard during the AAMVA administrator calls, there has been much innovative thought going on in our community as well as a willingness to move quickly in implementing solutions that may have previously been unthinkable.

For many of us, prior to the pandemic, it would have been unthinkable to have a large number of our employees working remotely. Yet, today, there are a number of jurisdictions that have at least a portion of their workforce teleworking, and others are considering it. For those still working in offices, much has changed with new procedures, supplies and social distancing to protect employees and customers. These changes require us all to rethink how we manage our workforce and all the change our employees and customers have been or will be experiencing.

As this issue of MOVE illustrates, AAMVA members are working to address short- and long-term change. Among numerous other challenges, workforce management must now address the challenges of employees meeting their work responsibilities and the demands of their homes and families. Organizational change management is more important than ever, as most are making significant changes in operations more frequently and in greater scope than ever before. It is not business as usual. For some of us, change is directly impacting us personally.

One obvious example is the new standard of video conferencing. It has been impressive to see how quickly our association and jurisdictions have adopted remote meetings. From my vantage point, it seems we are all doing a tremendous job with these new communication tools, as evidenced by a successful Annual Membership session and Combined Standing Committees meeting. While we have been unable to personally network, there doesn’t seem to have been any loss in productivity.

All member jurisdictions have effectively resumed serving their residents, and AAMVA continues to support its membership. The flow of information and ideas to help members perform their job betters in the midst of a pandemic is better than ever via the administrators’ meetings and the Conference Session Series Webinars. New best-practice documents, such as the recently released Edition 2 of the License Plate Standard and DL/ID Card Design Standard (2020), have not been impeded by the new work environment. More documents are on the way!

In the coming year, our Board of Directors and AAMVA staff are working on some exciting innovations to further improve safety on our roadways while continuing to deal with COVID-19. I’ll highlight two: State-to-State Verification Service will soon have the capability to share driver history records between participating jurisdictions, one step further in the fight to keep unsafe drivers off the road, and the transition to cloud-based information technology will make AAMVA’s network even more efficient and secure. In addition, our extremely dedicated AAMVA committees and working groups remain hard at work on new additions to our already robust library of solutions and best practices to help you navigate challenges we all face. It is going to be a great year!

– Mike Dixon

2020–2021 AAMVA Chair of the Board