Case Studies: Government

The One-Stop of Trumbull, Mahoning, and Columbiana Counties in Ohio helped put job seekers in contact with the public agencies and potential employers that could help them—but its assessment process was time-consuming and expensive. So, the organization turned to OneFlow from Microsoft® Certified Partner Empyra®. One-Stop now provides better and faster service to job seekers while cutting costs by more than U.S.$200,000 per year.

UNESCO—the Paris-based UN organization for Education, Science, and Culture—aims to alleviate poverty by helping people develop new skills. To do this, the organization looks to maximize internal efficiencies. It looked to replace its UNIX/Oracle-based SAP environment, which had come to the end of its life cycle, with an infrastructure based on Windows Server 2003 and supported by Microsoft SQL Server 2005. In addition to maintaining a high level of performance, the new architecture encourages innovation within the IT team. Administrators have eliminated the need for multiple passwords and created a single sign-on, which has improved working practices and security. UNESCO now has a platform to create even more operational efficiencies through business intelligence and analysis services as part of SQL Server 2005.

The Latvian government set an ambitious target of implementing a digital e-signature infrastructure in just nine months, and Microsoft® Services led a project team to deliver the solution for Latvian Post. The government chose Windows Server® 2003 and the Microsoft .NET Framework development system over Oracle. The solution went live in October 2006 for citizens, civil servants, and businesses to use the same smart card to access government and commercial electronic services. The government can now add more transactional e-government services to the infrastructure covering fields such as education and healthcare. It has also closed the gap with neighboring Baltic states, ensuring Latvia stays competitive and meets the demands of the information society.

The Alaska Department of Revenue, Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) Division, managed a multitude of disconnected and continually failing technologies, housing several terabytes of data, with only a six-person IT staff. It needed a new data infrastructure to support its operations, which includes the distribution of between U.S.$500 million and a billion in dividends to approximately 630,000 Alaskans each year. Using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition, the organization’s new data warehouse contains 15 million images of historical and current documents, and has the ability to scale to support the roughly 3 million images added each year. After deployment, the PFD Division was able to integrate disparate technologies, increase infrastructure reliability and scalability, greatly improve operations and IT efficiency, and will ultimately save hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.