CAI application management services for mission-critical systems
Challenge
A state Department of Financial Services (DFS) is made up of over a dozen divisions, several specialized offices, and 2,000 employees. It is responsible for managing a $91 billion budget and supporting the finance and accounting of the state’s public agencies, local governments, community entities, and state employees.
DFS was struggling with the difficult budget decisions that come with public sector modernization. It needed to balance the work of running day-to-day operations, including the necessary support for aging legacy systems, with a strategy for the future. In other words, the agency needed to fit digital transformation into its business and IT plans.
A critical part of its digital transformation journey was the implementation of a new statewide financial system. Without it, the state would miss opportunities for efficiency and growth, forgo the chance to improve employee skills and bypass the known benefits of leveraging cloud computing. During all this, it faced the very real risk of losing essential institutional knowledge that comes with an aging workforce.
After developing its vision for the future and a roadmap for getting there, the state needed a partner it could trust to assist with and eventually take over the support for the legacy financial system while the new system was put in place. This partner would have to efficiently capture the institutional knowledge of the legacy system and related IT processes and effectively transfer that knowledge to their resources in a short period of time. Though DFS staff knew how to manage the legacy financial system to produce high-quality work and was skeptical about finding a team that could fulfill its expectations. They knew doing so would allow them to redirect human and financial resources to strategic initiatives.
Solution
In preparation for a multi-year implementation of its new financial system, DFS contracted CAI to maintain and support its portfolio of legacy systems, including mainframe applications. CAI dedicated a team of specialists to perform application management services for its mission-critical systems.
CAI used its proven application management transition process to implement all the required support resources, processes, and tools within the required timeframe. The CAI application knowledge transfer process fully captured the knowledge of the current team and subject matter experts and developed careful knowledge management processes to properly maintain the knowledge.
CAI worked with DFS to create a formal service delivery framework that defines all the controls and processes used to meet the application management requirements. This is a living document that can be updated by both parties at any time. To consistently test the efficacy of the service delivery framework, CAI solicits and reports on client satisfaction each month and communicates immediately with DFS when additional or modified service delivery controls or processes are required.
During the transition process, CAI customized its standard application management methodology and toolset to include DFS’s specific process requirements. CAI also created processes to track and report on application knowledge transfer, team member proficiency level attainment, team performance, and financial management.
Results
After the transition was complete, the CAI support team began recording all work efforts and time spent on those efforts in its IT service management (ITSM) tool. This provides DFS full visibility into what the CAI team and each team member is doing, why they are doing it, how much time they are spending on it, as well as service level agreement (SLA) performance and trend analysis. DFS and CAI developed a detailed plan to address both planned and unplanned work and produced performance management metrics to demonstrate SLA performance and trend analysis.
With these measures and 100 percent SLA achievement, DFS now has the proficiency and transparency it needs to trust an outside team with the important day-to-day work of supporting the state’s current financial system, so it can focus its core team on the future.
