About the Engagement
After New York’s five super storms in 2012, the state created a temporary agency to distribute 4.4 billion dollars in federal funds to homeowners, small businesses, and municipalities. From the start, technology served as the foundation for this nascent disaster recovery organization. With continually shifting policies, strategies, and goals, the Information Technology (IT) team was forced to create a complex set of applications for processing, analyzing, reporting, and storing critical data and documents for dozens of programs.
Business Problem
The clients’ technology solutions and processes were developed quickly, and in silos because they needed to immediately begin releasing funds/benefits. Therefore, the client sought a partner who could re-engineer the complex architecture of dozens of disparate systems that needed to be maintained or rearchitected.
Challenges
A consistent challenge across the agency was a lack of centralized strategies, techniques, and frameworks which presented unique complexities. Examples of these include varying customer service and support strategies for both staff and applications, varying frameworks and processes (or the lack thereof) resulting in missing quality assurance and quality control procedures for critical applications and departments, and inconsistent monitoring and maintenance of software through the software development lifecycle.
Project Impacts and Outcomes
The engagement team provided technology strategy and execution services support to the client’s Chief Information Officer, which included the following:
- Current-state and future-state IT organizational assessment to determine and implement technology change management initiatives to improve technology delivery.
- Future-state business architecture to help determine future-state IT organizational capabilities, roles and responsibilities and staffing plans.
- Portfolio and project management support, including software architecture and design, business requirements development, testing and release management support.
- Comprehensive training modules to create structure and internal capabilities in technology delivery for project managers, business analysts, and developers.
Through the engagement team’s strategy and execution support, the client’s IT team has significantly improved its service delivery capabilities, including on-time delivery of projects and improved customer service. This work has helped train and empower the client’s IT team to be more customer-centric and improve delivery of services.