Modernizing Human Capital Data for a Federal Department with 250,000+ Employees
Overview
Our client approached us with the challenge of modernizing the way they stored highly sensitive personnel data for their entire organization.
We knew the problem required careful consideration of technology that not only met current needs, but could also enable the organization to derive critical data insights far into the future. They had over 250,000 employee records housed in an outdated, legacy traditional on-premises datacenter that needed to be replaced with a cloud-based architecture.
Our Approach
This challenge required us to bring our vendor-independent evaluation approach to the table, where we conducted a thorough current state assessment that uncovered the client’s legacy pain, their vision for the future, and their appetite for change. We then used acquisition best practices, technology expertise, and solution architecture skillsets to help the Department select an entirely new human capital data environment, including cloud selection (AWS vs Azure), managed database selection (Oracle to Postgres), and reporting/analytics selection (OBIEE to Tableau). We also created the migration plan and project managed the full implementation, which included a comprehensive test strategy to test, verify, and validate a department-wide initiative to migrate human capital to the cloud.
Results
RiverNorth’s project management tools, productivity enablers, and experienced personnel saved the client $3.2M on estimated cloud implementation costs.
Our team also reduced total cost of ownership by 50% with increased access to data, self-service capabilities for personnel, and identifying new capabilities that could be achieved with their existing technology.
When we joined the project, the prior project team was six months behind schedule, with 11 technical documents required for acquisition approval. Within two months, we developed all the necessary documentation, wrote functional and system requirements, and architected a framework for Alternatives Analysis. This allowed the team to advance six months ahead of schedule on a three-year project plan. We also identified three document templates (System Engineering Plan, Quality Assurance Plan, and Configuration Management Plan) with duplicative sections, which we combined into a new planning document to reduce client review cycles by 60%.
Through our testing processes and management, the systems cutover with zero missed requirements, defects, or degradation of performance (this included 60+ data interchanges from On-prem to cloud with no data loss or inaccuracies).
$3.2M saved by our client
50% reduction in cost of ownership
60% fewer review cycles
ZERO missed requirements, defects, or degradation of performance