Government Authority migrates to Dynamics 365 and speeds up the delivery of customizations

Government entities have a reputation for being slow to modernize.

But for our customer – a government authority responsible for growing the trades industries and blue-collar job opportunities – the vision of the leadership team was clear: to invest in technology and transform the way their employees engage with end-users, constituents, and customers.

For example, the authority gives out millions of dollars to training organizations every year. Streamlining processes would make it easier to serve customers as well as track and report on investment to central government.

To deliver on these aims, the authority’s IT services partner put in place an ambitious plan to transform their infrastructure and core systems, including their Dynamics 365 set-up.

The first objective was to implement a DevOps framework and migrate Dynamics 365 from an on-premises installation to the Cloud. This would enable the organization to offer new functionality faster – such as self-service portals and business intelligence dashboards – that would radically improve the employee and customer experience.

For example, the authority’s call center receives thousands of calls per day. Providing call center staff with an immediate 360 view of customers would make it easier to deal with requests, support apprentices and employers, coordinate trades programs and more.

The organization had multiple “peripheral” systems, like the phone and marketing systems, feeding into Dynamics 365, which meant cleaning up data and harmonizing business processes was a key part of the migration program.

“Moving to the Cloud was a fundamental stepping stone to digital transformation, and the deployment went really smoothly. This had a lot to do with the fact that we had robust, resilient tests that were automated. It gave us the ability to move things quickly.”
Senior IT Consultant

With the migration complete, our customer has moved from larger Dynamics 365 deployments every 2 months to a much more flexible release program that delivers customizations every 1 to 3 weeks. Automation also makes it easier and less resource intensive to cover Microsoft’s bi-annual D365 releases.