The Client:
The mission of the state agency is to generate revenue to support higher education, health and human services, environmental conservation, and economic and business development. Being efficient and effective is critical for the agency to deliver more value to Arizona.
The Challenge:
In the Fall of 2018, executive leadership at the agency set out to execute an ambitious growth plan that called for accelerated introduction of new products, improved transparency and compliance, and enhanced customer service. They quickly realized that the outcomes they were seeking could not be fulfilled by the organization’s legacy technology infrastructure, an underutilized application portfolio, insufficient governance controls, and the constant need to achieve more with tighter budgets.
The client leadership saw the use of cloud services as a sustainable competitive advantage allowing them to leapfrog these issues. They turned to MSS Business Transformation Advisory (MSSBTA) to develop a cloud strategy and roadmap to effectively leverage cloud services, while building the foundational capabilities to manage the cloud services most effectively.
Our Solution:
MSSBTA worked closely with key stakeholders to craft a strategy with broad consensus. A rigorous, data-driven methodology was used to baseline the current state. This included a Capability Maturity Assessment to understand organizational readiness across six key areas: Provisioning & Orchestration, Financial Management, IT Service Management, Security, Operations Management, and Business Service Management.
The consulting team also surveyed all application owners to identify and rank applications and infrastructure components that were best suited for the cloud based on several factors, including complexity, data, criticality, performance, and TCO. Based on these findings and a desired future state, a detailed roadmap was developed that included applications to be moved and the foundational projects to improve organizational readiness.
Once the client was ready to pilot movement to the cloud, MSSBTA assisted in identifying a cloud platform provider and supported moving a few business-critical underperforming applications. MSSBTA worked closely with the cloud platform provider and the client teams to design and build the infrastructure needed, manage cutover, operationalize key processes, and train internal IT resources that would manage the solution in the future.
The Results:
As a result of meticulous planning and execution, the client was able to successfully utilize AWS services to create an instantly scalable, agile, compliant, and secure solution. The client was able to save over $3M in operational expenses over 10 years, which further enables the agency to reach their strategic goals.
Deliverables:
Leadership
Capability Assessments
Business Requirements
Strategic Roadmap
Vendor Selection and
Implementation