Propylon Legislative Solutions Enable Montana Code Annotated Mainframe Migration Project Award

HELENA, Mont. - May 9, 2017 - PRLog -- The project was awarded for excellence in innovative technology at the 2016 Montana Government IT Conference in December. The award sought to recognize and honour innovation and excellence in the use of information technology in state government.

Background
The Montana Legislature's technology infrastructure for the MCA was dated, over-complicated, and a number of the tools used to support the update and publishing of the MCA had become obsolete. Many of the systems had been in place since the 1970s and were no longer working efficiently. A number of the experts that supported these aging systems had retired in recent years, increasing the risk that an outage to the legacy systems would have major impact. All of these factors created the risk that a catastrophic failure could occur at a critical time in the legislative calendar when MCA publications were being produced.

About the project
To support their mission of alleviating risks, improving process efficiency, and maintaining accuracy, Propylon worked with the Montana LSD team to provide a solution that offered significant advancements to Montana's core systems. The key objectives of the project were to migrate the MCA data, business processes and automation layers off the mainframe, implement a robust platform to efficiently manage the MCA, provide a set of tools that improve efficiency, and ensure the new technology platform significantly reduces the learning curve for new users.

Focus on quality
Propylon teams successfully converted the Montana laws into a professional content management system and built a suite of legislative enterprise applications to help manage the content update workflows and publishing processes. Features include new content dashboards with role-based access for users, and tools to ensure that the MCA is handled with the intricate care it merits. A key component in the success of this project lay in paying meticulous attention to quality, both in the programming of the migration system and in its final execution. The data was successfully transformed to XML and stored in the new legislative workbench (LWB). The solution was customized to ensure that the applications meet current and future needs in supporting the complex process of managing legislation updates.

Propylon's Vice President of Technical Architecture, Kieran Fitzpatrick, said:

"Migrating the MCA data into the LWB platform allowed us to work with the Montana state team to create greater end-user value through the addition of a modern enterprise application platform. Going forward, we will work together to provide a consolidated and shared legislative content management system."

Source:
Propylon Inc.
Related links
http://www.propylon.com