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Innovation in action:
Office 365 for email in GETS
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Ensuring IT innovation finds its way into GETS service offerings is a priority. Not only in the future, but right now.
We acted on it just last week, striking a new agreement with Microsoft to provide Office 365 for Government cloud email service to our GETS agency partners. It's a plain example of capitalizing on emerging technology to serve the state's needs in new and better ways. We've expressed a commitment to making that part of the GETS service delivery model. With Office 365 for Government, we're doing it.
Soon you will hear the operational details and then the email transition plans from the GETS team. You'll learn how agencies can take advantage of other Office 365 options like Lync instant messaging, cloud-powered Office suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) and more. For now, I wanted simply to announce cloud email and all its advantages are coming to GETS. It signals healthy development, both for email services themselves and the way GETS is administered.
Among the building blocks for an ever stronger enterprise IT services program, listening to and acting on agencies' interests are foundational. You've heard that from GTA repeatedly in the last six months as we've talked about incorporating multisourcing service integration (MSI) into GETS. I hope you'll be encouraged by the Office 365 discussion leading up to last week's agreement. We mean to make this kind of collaboration a standard part of the way we do business with you, and for you.
You made clear cloud email might fit your agencies' evolving business needs. A number of GETS agency representatives further made a significant time commitment in helping GTA investigate Office 365 for Government as a possible solution. Across the full slate of GETS full-service agencies, CIOs and technical leads were vocal in helping hammer out what was needed to make this service beneficial for the state's IT enterprise.
We worked together. We pooled our collective IT insights -- your agencies' know-how along with GTA's. I'm convinced we arrived at an even better solution on the strength of that collaboration. It took some doing, true. Engaging agency partners, in this instance and in all that's afoot with our Services Integration Initiative, is an active and not passive process. Hard work, and it benefits us all.
Thank you for your ongoing support.
Calvin Rhodes
State Chief Information Officer
GTA Executive Director
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Engaging the market to meet agencies' IT service needs
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In June GTA issued two requests for proposal (RFP) as part of broader preparations for introducing multiple IT service providers into the GETS program's service delivery model. An RFP for a multisourcing service integrator was released, as was an RFP for hosted contact center services. A third is in the works. This one will address other managed network services (MNS) including voice, local area network (LAN) and wide area network (WAN).
All tie to larger efforts to ensure GETS continues to bring IT service offerings to state agencies well suited to their business needs. And, to ensure flexibility and readiness for innovation, so GETS services evolve in step with the changing IT landscape.
A new tactic guiding this work involves separating IT service coordination from service execution in GETS. Coordination is to be handled by a new service provider called a multisourcing service integrator (MSI). The MSI will promote standards, processes and operating level agreements to guide performance of GETS service providers.
While far from the culmination of the work, the RFPs issued and anticipated represent significant and intensive collaboration among GTA and GETS agency partners. This collaboration is deliberate and intended to promote service offerings tightly aligned to agencies' needs. Review of RFP responses and eventual selection of providers lie ahead. Providers for these MSI and MNS services are expected to be in place and serving GETS agencies by July 2015.
See details of these procurement activities on the Georgia Procurement Registry site.
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Grinding through the remaining stages of transformation work
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Server consolidation (SCON) work can be tedious, taxing, time-consuming and tormenting. A test of will, even. So why do GETS agencies put themselves through it? The payoffs (e.g., improved application performance, more secure data and systems) make it, well, more tolerable.
SCON remains the biggest target in what's left to accomplish of transformation work. Both DBHDD and GBI are scheduled to consolidate servers at the state's North Atlanta Data Center later this summer. GTA and IBM are coordinating revised schedules right now with a number of other agencies where server consolidation work will get to the nitty-gritty as this year proceeds and into 2015.
Among other ongoing transformation projects, the accelerated progress on the Windows 7 upgrade continues its pace with a goal of having up-to-date operating systems in place across all GETS PCs within the next several weeks. File services work has made gains, with a steady advance in June at DHS in particular. And email migrations have moved forward recently at DPH and DBHDD, where finishing touches are being put on upgrading from the GroupWise email system to Outlook. |
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Agency sites on Georgia.gov being made mobile-ready
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The Division of Child Support Services (DCSS) within Georgia's Department of Human Services (DHS) knows its website is a crucial link in providing services to Georgia citizens. And, DCSS understands the site needs to be mobile-friendly. That's because out of all traffic to the division's website, more than half comes via visitors on mobile devices including phones and tablets.
GTA's GeorgiaGov Interactive team also recognizes mobile-ready is increasingly important to users of the many state agency sites hosted on the Georgia.gov platform it manages. To accommodate that trend, the Interactive team is actively converting state sites using responsive design. That's an approach readying a site to display in a readable, accessible format regardless of the type of device (PC, tablet, phone) used by a site visitor. Site content remains the same, while ensuring a suitable display format for all visitors.
In June several key DHS websites, the DCSS site among them, were made mobile-ready by the GeorgiaGov Interactive team. The DHS agency site was addressed, as were sites for the Division of Aging Services and the Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS). The DFCS site sees more than 40 percent mobile traffic. A number of other sites have been converted including the State Board of Workers' Compensation (SBWC) and the Department of Natural Resources Environmental Protection Division (EPD).
A look at any of these sites on a phone or tablet will illustrate the benefits responsive design brings for visual clarity and ease of site use.
In the coming months the GeorgiaGov Interactive team will work with additional agencies to convert their Georgia.gov sites to mobile-friendly format. It's a key step in promoting a positive experience for the many Georgians who look to the Georgia.gov websites when they seek state services.
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- GTA offers project management courses, most of them at no charge, to state of Georgia employees. As a registered educational provider with the Project Management Institute, GTA can offer participants professional development units (PDU) or educational contact hours for all courses, which satisfy PMP® educational certification requirements. Some courses also count as educational requirements for the state of Georgia Project Manager Certification program. Learn more about GTA's professional development program in project management, see a course schedule and find out how to register for courses, all on GTA's website. Email questions to GTA's Enterprise Portfolio Management Office at epmo@gta.ga.gov.
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