20140116 Tim Willoughby and James Fogarty FOSS in Local Government

Editor's Notes

• #13: This question was added based on collaborator input. Andrew Aitken of the Olliance Group very interested in Public Sector AdoptionPossible Panel Q’s…..Dries: Acquia’s present experience with GovernmentTim O’Reilly: Dedicated to Gov 2.0Larry: customers we can't mentionJim: Business unit the size of Europe doing Federal work. NSA wrote SELinux security regime; international adoption is huge
• #32: We ran workshops at which business processes were mapped out. Our first provider let us down in that they became uncontactable! We then moved to Provident CRM for Reporting using Kreports which allows you to write almost any report that you want, and a Support Contract with them that we have had occasion to use a couple of times in helping us to redesign our architecture as we scaled up..SugarCRM Community Edition certainly proved the concept to us. HC was to have a limited lifespan of two years – it ended up being one year as a result of a government decision.
• #33: We used CE as we had little time and were completely unsure about budgets. We had to move fast and following a meeting with Clint Oram of SugarCRM we felt that for the immediate future that CE would meet our immediate needs.As I said the HC was due to run for two years but ended up being run for just one year. Its agility and low cost were perfect for our situation and now that the programmes we have been running are to cease we are not left with expensive licences.Being quick and easy to install and use was critical to us. The go-live of 01 Jan 2012 was non-negotiable.Sugar’s ability to run different business processes on the same infrastructure was an added advantage and indeed for the future this may be expanded by Local Authorities in Ireland as new shared services are rolled out e.g. payroll, accounts payable, treasury management.We have also found that Sugar is more than just a CRM. It can manage customers, processes, scanned documents, workflow, catalogues, calendars and is the one place to go to for information e.g. we are currently adapting it to capturing details about who does what in local government, where they are, their contact details, what project groups/committees they sit on etc.One of our programmes is the NPPR..started 2009…we had been using BMC which raised tickets for each ‘incident’ but there was no relationship between the tickets. Sugar has allowed us to capture all customer interaction in the one customer case.Sugar to us has been utterly mouldable, like a piece of jello. Sugar didn’t restrict the number of agents we could use and we ramped up rapidly to 280 within 2 months. Sugar facilitated this rapid scale-up in operations.Points about going from 0 to 280 agents from an estimated max of 120.863k unique records.
• #35: Definition of Day 1 processes up front was key. These processes evolved over time…planning and plans quote Eisenhower…This diagram shows the minimum processes that we needed to have on day 1 (01 Jan 2012).Over the following six months as processes were added and they matured, the support overhead for Sugar became negligible, i.e. just adding, changing and removing users.
• #36: This is an example of a drill-down process, how we logged correspondence.These and many other processes would have been workshopped with Provident CRM, a Sugar partner.From October 2011 to Christmas we ran workshops and the cost of this was our real implementation cost. There was also however a people overhead as we made the household charge priority #1 in the LGMA and everyone had to drop what they were doing to make sure this work got completed. The cost of this was the impact of work elsewhere being delayed.
• #37: This was the minimum infrastructure that we had to have available on Day 1. We have found system performance to be great. Sugar is resilient with no impact in response times as our data and users grew.OTHER SLIDE FROM SEAMUS CROWLEY
• #38: This is where we are now. Shared service for smaller scale requirements of LA’s. An internal, secure option with sensitive citizen data (Patriot Act). If requirements continue to scale we would have to look at purchasing a suitable version of Sugar i.e. corporate or enterprise editions. Expect to need to have a conversation with Provident CRM about this in the future.The ‘load balancer’ covering the web servers is an F5 cluster of physical load balancers that is installed in both of our hosting locations.The NFS file store associated with them is to accommodate the working folders within the SugarCRM folder on the load balanced web servers, i.e the Cache folder holds any files you download, attach or upload, so any attachments from emails sent into the system appear here. These folders  have to be shared between all the Web servers to ensure that, no matter what server you are load-balanced to, you see all files, attachments, etc.The Active Directory DCs mentioned allow us to setup LDAP authentication from SugarCRM to the AD DCs based on a group membership within AD. All members of that group would be allowed to log onto SugarCRM with their AD password. This ensures there is no issues around local SugarCRM accounts & passwords.MySQL Server 1 handles all writes to the database so it is the Master DB. A physical server was specified for this role that could, with RAM & HDD expansion, far exceed the projected performance requirements of the DB.MySQL Server 2 would handle all queries & Reports. In addition, if workload demanded it, an additional read-only server could be deployed to split the Query service from the Reporting service.The DR site was assigned a cold status to ensure that the decision to bring DR on line was taken explicitly & that the MySQL server would be changed from Read-Only to Read-Write and would hence become the Master DB.The access from LAs to the site was across the Gov Network Inter-Agency service & was therefore already semi-secured (i.e. Gov Dept/Agency only access). The use of HTTPS then ensures an additional level of security. In addition, only IP ranges from participating LAs would be allowed through the firewall to the service.
• #39: Other sides from Rhoda.10,000 e-mails per month excl letters and emails.
• #41: These are the responses to the records that were created i.e. having to send someone a letter, e-mail, to call them, queries as a result of credit card payments etc.
• #44: Try to do as much out-of-the-box as possible at the start if you need to get up-and-running quickly. Add functionality incrementally as and when you need it. For example we initially locked-down the desktop for our own agents but after a number of weeks as people got used to it (and these were people who would never have used a CRM before…) we allowed them to customise their own view of the data. We started with absolutely no data and it built up rapidly – Sugar allowed us to learn as we went along.Sugar gives us a single view of the customers as we would have had people who has to pay all three of our charges , HC, NPPR and PoW.