Montana Governor's Office centralizes regulatory work across 13 agencies
In January 2021, the State of Montana issued Executive Order 1-2021 creating a Red-Tape Relief Advisory Council to implement regulatory reform. The council, made up of Governor Greg Gianforte, Lieutenant Governor Kristen Juras and representatives from 13 state-wide agencies, aimed to simplify compliance and ease regulatory burdens on the state’s small businesses, farmers and ranchers.
This led the Red-Tape Relief taskforce to look for ways to leverage the latest in technology for this monumental undertaking. The taskforce identified Esper’s suite of modern workflow and policy management tools as the best solution for these critical processes.
Esper and the Montana Office of the Governor partnered in September of 2021 with the joint goal of digitizing and centralizing this regulatory work. Esper is able to bring all necessary policies into a single, cloud-based platform and structure all of this data to identify policies in need of review.
Automating critical processes for the Red-Tape Relief initiative
Montana agency users will be able to easily search through all of their regulations, laws and policy documents—and collaboratively draft amendments and repeals from the same platform.
Another key component of Esper’s software was it gave the Governor’s Office the ability to create a standardized workflow for all 13 agencies under the Governor’s jurisdiction. A major goal of the Red-Tape Relief initiative was empowering the agencies to draft regulations in an easier to understand and comply with manner. Esper’s software allowed each agency to work off of a standardized workflow to seamlessly flag burdensome regulations for the Governor’s Office to review.
This partnership tackles the Governor’s Office’s immediate red-tape relief needs while also giving them a scalable and responsive SaaS platform to automate additional critical processes in the future.
By leveraging Esper’s policy management system, the 13 state-wide agencies can now seamlessly identify:
- Excessive, outdated and unnecessary regulations
- Regulations that are especially burdensome to farmers, ranchers and business owners
- Regulations that disproportionately impact small businesses
- Appropriate quantitative and qualitative metrics to measure implementation of regulatory reform within each agency
Frequently Asked Questions
Esper’s Regulation & Code Management module is a platform that moves rulemaking and regulatory drafting out of disconnected tools (spreadsheets, emails, shared drives) and into a unified, auditable workflow. It supports collaborative drafting, version control, automated publishing, compliance deadlines, and AI-powered search across your regulations. Esper
Esper is primarily targeted at government agencies (state, local, regulatory bodies) that must manage, publish, and enforce rules, codes, or regulations. It helps modernize the regulatory process in a transparent, auditable fashion.
Some of the core features include:
- Collaborative drafting with versioning and redlines
- Workflow and approval routing (assign owners, set deadlines, send reminders)
- Automated publishing in appropriate formats
- AI-enabled search to quickly find portions of regulations with citation support
- Task management and visibility into bottlenecks
Esper maintains all drafts, redlines, and versions within a single system. That ensures every change is tracked, auditable, and tied to the appropriate approval steps, so stakeholders can always see “who changed what when.”
Every rulemaking task (e.g. drafting, review, public comment, approval) is assigned an owner and due date. The system sends reminders, tracks overdue items, and makes bottlenecks visible so leadership can intervene.
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