Case Studies

New York Department of Health Architecture & Requirements Management Case Study

The New York Department of Health (NYDOH) enlisted the help of Confiance to document and analyze enterprise architecture artifacts to support ongoing initiatives for business and IT transformation.

Using the Medicaid IT & Technical Architecture (MITA) as the selected framework to foster the integrated business and IT transformation, Confiance used the existing documentation and procedures to develop the process, application information and organization models of the current state stove-piped systems to integrate with the MITA framework.

The Challenge

NYDOH had the task of taking on numerous business and IT transformation initiatives to support the requirements of a new Medicaid system, support procurement of a new data warehouse vendor, capture expert knowledge of staff nearing retirement, create training resources, support the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and identify and drive process improvement.

"We set a very high bar with our business and IT transformation goals and needed a partner that not only understood our needs, but was experienced enough to overcome the typical challenges associated with our existing infrastructure," explained the Department of Health. "Confiance was able to come in and assess our situation and provide a detailed plan on how to achieve our goals using proven best practices."

The Solution

Confiance started by taking all the standards-based architectural views from the analysis process and developed and managed a repository which consisted of 700 process models, 500 data warehouse models for 16 subject areas, 120 application system models, 150 organization and role objects, 65 database objects with 2,700 tables and 950 report objects. Based on this data, Confiance took a three pronged approach to address the unique requirements of NYDOH:

• Developed standard-based architectural artifacts in an enterprise repository that could be used by all vendors to understand detailed requirements, while also positioning these requirements to be developed into executed process and services initiatives
• By using integrated process, data, application and organization views all knowledge from staff members was captured in architectural views for use in training
• By combining the MITA framework and BPA platform, NYDOH was able to clearly define process, organization, application, data and roles in a multi-tier architecture that could be used in a standardized and repeatable manner

The Result

As a result of managing the architectural documentation in a single integrated enterprise repository the NYDOH has been able to manage the creation and governance of all architectural artifacts, establish a standards-based organization and implement a proven technology platform that will support the NYDOH for the next 10 years and beyond. Key benefits included:

• The ability to develop business friendly architectural views that were understood by both NYDOH and its vendors to promote executable processes and services – resulting in reduced costs and timing to develop and implement the Medicaid system
• The ability to retain the knowledge of its retiring staff, while at the same increasing productivity by training future employees and vendors through the same architecture portal
• Providing NYDOH with a true enterprise architecture repository that allows everyone from the business and IT teams to have a common language – enabling NYDOS to identify and estimate the impact of change on people, processes and technology from a scope, time, effort and cost perspective
• Allowing NYDOH to improve its operations through qualitative and quantitative improvements