Our client is one of US’s largest public defender offices, providing legal representation and advocacy free of cost to people facing charges in criminal, family, and immigration courts. Having almost doubled in size over the past five years, the client’s IT capabilities hadn’t kept up with the new scale of the organization. This had been exacerbated by the sudden shift to remote work due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Executive Director saw the need for transformation across all aspects of IT and wanted to think strategically to ensure the change would serve the organization for years to come. Recognizing that achieving this vision would require additional expertise, she asked Anoteros to lead the development of a three-year strategy for IT.

We assembled a team comprising infrastructure and IT service delivery experts and quickly went to work assessing the current state of IT. Through meeting with IT staff, analyzing the network and systems, and conducting an IT satisfaction survey with leaders across the organization, we were able to identify the areas of issue and opportunity. We guided IT and executive leadership on a series of decisions that established the future principles under which IT would operate, for example, making an intentional decision to use cloud-based vs. on-premise services wherever possible, and deciding to optimize the use of the client’s existing investment in the Microsoft environment. We then applied these principles as we formulated recommendations for the future state. We developed a pragmatic roadmap for transforming the organization’s network, security, and data center infrastructure that prioritized increasing security and resiliency. In parallel, we developed recommendations on organization and role design for the IT department, identified areas for skill development, and outlined opportunities for service management process improvements.

IT and executive leadership were thrilled that they had a clear strategy for IT for the first time ever, with a pragmatic roadmap to implement the changes over the next three years and associated expense forecasts to build into the organization’s budget. The client asked us to continue providing support for implementation, for both specialized infrastructure expertise and ‘virtual CIO’ services to guide solution selection decisions and ensure the implementation remains on track.