Category: government

At this year’s AWS re:Invent, our annual user conference, we featured various customers to speak to the public sector audience in attendance. The morning was kicked off by Teresa Carlson, who you heard from in our first blog, and then three of our customers took to the stage to address their challenges, and how they used AWS to help achieve their mission.

Have you ever felt like you have been given an impossible challenge?

Nicole McNeill, CFO and VP of Corporate Services for the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC) was tasked to cut the business cycle in half with no budget dollars allocated and no history or proven techniques to pull from. She and her team did it, because they had no choice. In order to survive, they needed to evolve.

The Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC) is an independent, not-for-profit corporation funded by all Ontario municipalities. Their role is to accurately value and classify all properties in Ontario according to the Assessment Act and regulations established by the Ontario Government. They are the largest assessment jurisdiction in North America, assessing and classifying more than five million properties with an estimated total value of $2.2 trillion.

Back in 2013, they launched a new strategic plan with bold goals to do more with less, and drive efficiency and effectiveness for the citizens they serve. Their goals were built around trying to save $20 million and provide better public services. And they had just four years to do it.

Getting started

Their IT landscape consisted of a staff of 160 people with a $30 million budget. They were paralyzed at times with the “lights on” and “care-and-feeding” of existing infrastructure.  Only five percent of their resources and time were spent on innovation, and 95% was focused on run and build. There was a fear of failure and desire for certainty that drove an anti-culture for change. The systems either worked or predictably didn’t work, and the existing IT systems worked around it. The greatest challenges and greatest opportunities were often left unsolved.

Innovation and evolution through cloud became more obvious and necessary for their own survival. This prompted their first experiment.

To improve their customer-facing portal for over five million property owners in Ontario, a handful of IT staff set up an AWS account using a purchasing card at an average of $50 to $100 per month.  They believed they could do it faster and better than they ever had before.

They turned to AWS and built an architecture that was open source, cloud, and secure.

And the results?

Within only three months, they had achieved over 75% savings, they had over 200 user accounts, two million inquiries, and a privacy-by-design framework. Based on that success, they made an executive-level commitment to the cloud. They started on the journey to 100% cloud, zero-owned infrastructure, on-demand, and aimed to dramatically lower IT costs.

The journey continues

With the first success under their belt, the next challenge was to cut the business cycle in half. At the time, their data was decentralized with multiple evaluation platforms causing painful system performance at times. It took 40 hours to value 80,000 properties, whereas, they needed to value all five million properties in four hours.

Therefore, they worked toward what they called the “one version of the truth.”

In order to get to this one version of the truth, MPAC wanted to re-architect their platforms. With any experiment, they faced a few challenges but found solutions to overcome them.

• Challenge: One data warehouse for data integrity and to enhance speed—Solution: Amazon RedShift.
• Challenge: One service-enabled evaluation engine—Solution: Open source components running on Amazon EC2.
• Challenge: Meet privacy statutes—Solution: AWS approved by legal counsel and internal privacy commissioner.
• Challenge: Monitor speed and performance—Solution: AWS CloudWatch, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto Scaling.

The moral of the story

MPAC worked hard on their strategic journey. To overcome their challenges and achieve their mission, it was the responsibility of the leadership to encourage experimentation and embrace failure. With little budget and little time, they still demanded innovation.

This innovation led them to become a business-value IT team that worked 5000% faster at one-tenth of the cost.  They took the work out of running IT, and instead became consumers of services.

When faced with the impossible, MPAC learned three main lessons.

1. Encourage experimentation
2. Cut time
3. Cut budget

Scarcity creates demand, demand creates innovation, and with innovation you can achieve the seemingly impossible.

To learn more about MPAC, their mission, and how AWS helped them achieve it, watch this video of Nicole McNeill addressing the public sector team at AWS re:Invent.

Watch the full MPAC Case Study here.

A post by Teresa Carlson, Vice President of Amazon Web Services Worldwide Public Sector

I am thrilled to welcome you to Amazon Web Services’ “Innovating in the Public Sector” blog! This blog is all about you, our public sector customers, and will be your place for all public sector-specific content.

I’ve had the pleasure of traveling to many parts of the world – from Singapore to Bahrain to Sao Paulo to all over the U.S – to meet with local and national government agencies, educational institutions, and nonprofit organizations. I kept hearing a lot of the same challenges, needs, and best practices that could be leveraged all over the world, so we decided to dedicate this space to sharing what we’ve learned with you.

Government, education, and nonprofits are faced with unique challenges, requirements, and missions. We want to bring you the latest content on the topics that matter most to you. From security to criminal justice to educational research, each week our dedicated team covering national, regional, and local government, education, and nonprofits will share insights with you.

By using the cloud, our customers are paving the way for innovation and making the world a better place. Some examples include:

• Operating the mars.jpl.nasa.gov website on AWS allowed NASA/JPL’s Mars Curiosity Mission to broadcast their message to the world without building this infrastructure themselves.
• The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) relies on open collaboration and public-private partnership with AWS to fill in the gaps of knowledge they need to fulfill their mission and adapt to change.
• University of Notre Dame started with pilot projects, lowering its operational costs by 40% and now operates with a cloud-first strategy.
• Ivy Tech Community College runs petabyte-scale data warehouse and analytics on AWS to provide services to help their students succeed.
•  By using AWS, the Stanford Archaeology Center researchers have easy access to vital data and have a system for ensuring that data used in collaborative efforts is accurate and up to date.

Cloud computing changing the game in the public sector

Cloud is becoming the new normal around the world. Currently we have 2,000+ government agencies, 5,000+ educational institutions, and 17,500+ nonprofit organizations changing the game with the AWS Cloud.

Whether it is for development and testing, enterprise applications, high-performance computing, storage, disaster recovery, web, mobile, and social apps, virtual desktops, or data center migrations, government agencies, education institutions, and nonprofits are using AWS to help achieve their missions.

Also, we have a strong and growing community of partner companies that offer a wide range of products and services on the AWS platform to address virtually any use case.

Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining your own data centers and servers, organizations can acquire technology such as compute power, storage, databases, and other services on an as-needed basis (similar to how consumers flip a switch to turn on lights in their home and the power company sends electricity).

Working together to bring you the resources you need, on the topics you care about

Check out the video from our public sector breakfast at this year’s AWS re:Invent where I share the AWS public sector footprint around the world, the partners who make it possible in an industry moving in the right direction for cloud, and the latest customer innovations using these technologies.

From the City on a Cloud, #smartisbeautiful, and the latest data sets released, hear about the innovative ideas driven in the public sector below.

• #smartisbeautiful. We are working to encourage girls and women to pursue computer science and working with our university partners to create computer science organizations for the women on their campuses.
• Latest Data Sets. We host a selection of public data sets that demonstrate the power of open data on the cloud. These are accessible at no cost, and drive new businesses, accelerate research, and improve lives. By hosting key public data sets, AWS can enable more innovation, more quickly, creating additional opportunities for public good.
• City on a Cloud. From healthcare to utilities and from transit to city planning, local and regional governments are embracing innovation.  Take a look at what these agencies and their partners are doing to move government forward on behalf of their citizens.

As we begin to publish content weekly, I am reminded that great projects has to start with great partnerships, so we want to understand how we can better serve you. Reach out to us at aws-wwps-blog@amazon.com with questions or comments.

And receive the latest updates from AWS government and education by following us on Twitter at @AWS_Gov and @AWS_Edu.