A budget-constrained state government may be the last place you’d expect to find a top-to-bottom digital transformation that ranges from citizen-facing services all the way to the underlying network. Louisiana, however, is well on its way to such a transformation.
The Louisiana Enterprise Architecture (EA) project is modernizing and standardizing IT services across the state’s 16 government agencies, leveraging a best-of-breed technology strategy that includes software-defined data centers, service-oriented architecture, and single sign-on for state citizens as well as government employees.
From Hodgepodge to Service-Oriented Architecture
The project began in 2014 and focused initially on improving the state’s Medicaid Eligibility and Enrollment System for nearly 1.5 million Medicaid recipients.
It soon became clear, however, that the new architecture could provide benefit across the entire state government. “The deputy CIO challenged us at the eleventh hour to look at other solutions,” explained Mike Allison, Chief Technology Officer at State of Louisiana.
Transforming the dated Medicare and Medicaid enrollment system became a springboard for a new architecture – a move that the state desperately needed, as the preexisting technology was a mess. According to Matthew Vince, Director of Project Management at Louisiana Office of Technology Services (OTS), the starting point for the EA project was “not Agile, lots of building from scratch, lots of logins.”
The solution was to implement service-oriented architecture (SOA), an approach to organizing diverse technology resources to provide a set of flexible services that multiple agencies could leverage. These citizen and employee-facing services, in fact, were the unifying principle across the architecture.
Read the entire article at https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/08/29/digital-transformation-at-the-state-of-louisiana-from-data-center-to-the-citizen/.
Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, CA Technologies, Chef Software, Software AG, and VMware are Intellyx customers. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: bluepoint951.
