Martin's Story

Martin is Marie's go-to guy in IT.

The Rules of the Game

One of the first groups Marie had brought to the table was IT. Any proposal that demanded significant changes to the existing infrastructure would need much more extensive reviews and approvals, which clearly made the IT requirements potential deal-breakers.

Martin was an IT professional with years of experience that had provided him with a clear understanding of all the elements that made an application work well within the government IT infrastructure. In consultation with Marie and the WorkDynamics analyst, he quickly detailed IT's requirements that the software be:

  • Scalable to support not only the current number of agents, but also a healthy amount of growth over the next few years.

  • Responsive, with metrics to demonstrate that user response times are within the level required of all government applications.

  • Centralized to allow multiple offices to work together on the same items.

  • Web-accessible to comply with an overarching government direction that all new applications must have a web interface.

  • Use a standard, supported database system in a way that provides data concurrency and integrity when used by multiple people.

  • Provide a System Maintenance Interface that would allow the assigned IT Applications Specialist to perform standard system maintenance tasks such as backup and recovery, upgrades, managing configuration data, overseeing access control and other similar housekeeping tasks.

Investigating ccmMercury

First, Martin checked ccmMercury's Technical Specs to see if the software would run at their office. Next, Martin worked with the IT records management and security officers to include their requirements that the software solution:

  • Be able to store and retrieve correspondence information from within the standard government records management repository.

  • Be able to segregate sensitive information in its own area to enable maximum use of access controls.

  • Use the government's standard PKI encryption and digital signature capabilities.

  • Provide user authentication, multiple security access levels, field-level access control, group-based access inheritance and rolebased access control.

  • Be able to immediately suspend a given user, totally removing any access.

  • Provide audit trail capabilities.

Despite the long list of requirements, with IT acronyms everywhere, Martin was impressed (and Marie was relieved) as the WorkDynamics analyst ticked every checkbox as COMPLIANT. As the analyst explained, "We didn't get to be the leader in this business by jousting with IT all the time - these are simply the rules of the game."

Martin Now

Martin now has happy clients who have a tool that allows them to work more efficiently. He easily adds new user accounts and maintains the system and has a good understanding of how his clients use ccmMercury to get the job done.

Yes, they had come a long way!