Project Brief

The State of Alaska knew that it had to upgrade its legacy financial, payroll, and human resources systems long before hiring COBOL programmers to support them became almost impossible. State planners also knew the change would be a massive and costly undertaking, a years-long effort that would require detailed planning and execution. In the end, a project team of 40-50 staff and consultants, and scores more agency staff, successfully implemented the Integrated Resource Information System, or IRIS. The new system resolved decades-long inefficiencies and significantly reduced manual processes and brought State systems into the 21st century.

In partnership with ISG One (isg-one.com), Wostmann provided independent project oversight, project management, and quality assurance for the project, monitoring the implementation by the product vendor, assessing risks, and analyzing impacts of project risks and issues. Wostmann worked closely with stakeholders and users from 15 departments and divisions, planning and coordinating testing, and serving as change management facilitators for State users.

IRIS has more than 15,000 regular users, who engage with over 300 processes and workflows. All finance, budgeting, payroll and human resource functions are done within the IRIS platform, providing transparency and standardization.

Deliverables include quality assurance reports, Executive Committee reports, risk register, integration schedules with 15 external entities (design, development, functional and user acceptance testing), test plans, onsite user acceptance testing support, and test execution tracking.

A portal is available for vendors to view payments, respond to solicitations online, submit invoices electronically, view tax information, and manage account information.