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RECIPIENT: Michigan E-mail Consolidation Project
After years of scrambling to meet increasing messaging expectations, Michigan found itself in the same situation many states face: aging infrastructure and a complex maze of solutions that impeded communication and resulted in unnecessarily high costs. Through the E-mail Consolidation Project, MDIT enabled strategic priorities, brought stakeholders together, defined a common messaging platform and implemented a cost effective solution. Dividends of the investment include:
Solving this dilemma required an understanding of the departmental business value of e-mail as well as development of a strategy supporting specific needs, while maintaining an enterprise focus. By showing the alignment to business priorities outlined in the Governor's Cabinet Action Plan, and collaborating early, MDIT developed its approach with the benefit of agency support. The system was thereby understood as "mission-critical" and designed with statewide guidelines including redundancy, disaster recovery provisions and a 100Mb mailbox default. "Leveraging our technology assets through commonization has been critical to the success of our e-mail consolidation project. Beyond the cost savings that this effort has generated, we're finding that our technology planning is now more closely aligned with statewide business priorities of our agencies. It has been a foundational element in our governor's efforts to transform state government into a collaborative enterprise." Teri Takai, Director and Chief Information Officer, Department of Information Technology, State of Michigan
The first hurdle was addressing security issues and the more "public facing" aspects. A unified gateway was developed to present a common e-mail "identity" to external entities, to create a "single-point" filter protection from SPAM and virus attacks, and to allow the predominant platforms to seamlessly co-exist.
The next phase enhanced support levels by moving from over 40 down to two of the most widely used e-mail solutions. During 2003, over 700 servers were upgraded or standardized. Although still aging and geographically dispersed, field technicians and clients alike now know exactly what they are dealing with in the event of an outage.
As MDIT rolls out the final phase of this project, physical migration of e-mail systems are moving into a 24X7 enterprise solution. Some 35,000 e-mail users have already been successfully migrated. The e-mail systems are now hosted in the state's premiere hosting center where support is carried out with increased discipline and rigorous processes. At the same time, e-mail support staff has been reduced by half and the hardware requirements have been decreased by nearly 90 percent.
NOMINATIONS: Click on the link to download program submission.
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