Government IT Builds Business Applications with Microsoft
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Building Government Business Applications with Microsoft Dynamics 365
Gaining efficiency, cost savings, and agility from unexpected sources
Agencies and departments at all levels of government—federal, state, or local—are tasked with delivering an array of services and support to a variety of constituent groups and internal stakeholders.
Like everything in the digital age, today’s government services need to be faster, more responsive, and more efficient in the delivery of the essential services government staff and constituents depend on. Already, a number of organizations across government have explored and are implementing low-code, rapid application development solutions to address myriad real-world challenges, including:
- Planning mission and workforce readiness for the military and national security agencies
- Ensuring veterans receive benefits
- Corrections management, pretrial management, and probation management
- Managing government benefits and assistance coordination
- Managing student retention in education
- Coordinating care for people with developmental disabilities
Yet, unlike their private sector counterparts, delivering on the promise of better and faster service or more effective management is much more challenging for government IT, since they must play by a different set of rules—under much different circumstances—to meet evolving expectations in a rapidly changing digital landscape.
So, when traditional developers and technical decision makers evaluate technologies for building government business applications, they’re looking for solutions that can help shorten time-to-value by eliminating time-consuming and resource-intensive coding. At the same time, they also need out-of-the-box enterprise scalability, reduced maintenance, and enhanced agility for business users—and they need it all to fit neatly within their allotted budgets.
Custom development is time-consuming and resource-intensive
App developers and IT leaders working in government agencies face a host of unique challenges in their quest to modernize systems and processes that, in some cases, have been in place for decades.
The push for more contemporary apps and automation of business processes often centers on:
- Creating systems with intuitive, cross-platform user interfaces for effortless data entry and validation
- Complex business logic to better manage people, places, and things
- Process automation to eliminate manual data management
- Integration and coordination with external systems through web services
Meanwhile, every app must also include analytics and business intelligence capabilities for insight into an agency’s performance and be able to scale to meet projected needs in the future. And what government initiative would be complete without stringent standards for document management and granular, role-based security to protect extremely sensitive information?
While many developers have the tendency to immediately turn their attention to custom-coding new apps and solutions to meet specific business purposes or projected needs, that approach comes with a high cost—both in time and in resources.
Already, many agencies and departments spend as much as 95% of their IT budgets just maintaining legacy systems, leaving little money available for new solution development. And developing anything from scratch—especially apps that meet government compliance requirements such as FedRAMP, CJIS, DoD SRG and others—can take months or years to complete, which means that by the time it’s done, the entire project may be outdated.
That’s assuming the project is even completed, of course. Failure rates often exceed 45% for big-budget government projects, as competing political agendas, outdated contractor hiring practices, unrealistic timelines, and a number of other factors conspire to create a treacherous solution development environment.
Speed, scale, and security with Microsoft Cloud and Dynamics 365
For many people the middle ground between sticking with the status quo and pursuing a custom development path is Microsoft Dynamics 365. Government agencies are using Dynamics 365’s comprehensive tools, capabilities, and scale to rapidly—and efficiently—develop custom business apps.
Dynamics 365 replaces the traditional “all code” approach to building line-of-business (LOB) applications. Available as a Software as a Service (SaaS), the Microsoft platform features a comprehensive collection of easily configurable and customizable apps spanning marketing, sales, customer service, operations, finance, and even human resources. The platform provides a framework that includes a modern user interface, along with an app and process designer module to accommodate diverse user demands and accelerate business process workflows to simplify app development and deployment.
These tools enable developers to quickly and effortlessly create responsively designed applications accessible on any screen, from any device without writing code. And with native integration with ubiquitous Microsoft Office 365 applications—Word, Excel, Outlook, and others—it’s easier than ever to produce intuitive, familiar user experiences that lead to high adoption and use rates.
For the instances when configuration and personalization isn’t enough, business applications built on Dynamics 365 can be extended and integrated with external systems through a rich Software Development Kit (SDK). And with Microsoft Azure integration, any app can be extended to solve complex scenarios that exceed the abilities of no code/low code solutions.
Learn more about Dynamics 365 for rapid application development with our library of how-to videos at https://aka.ms/dyn365ap.
Dynamics 365 is an ideal solution for budget- and security-minded development pros aiming to modernize the outdated government applications of the past.
Stronger compliance and DevOps capabilities with Dynamics 365
As security and compliance become increasingly more important topics in the government IT space, developers need tools and systems that are ready-made to meet evolving regulations and industry demands.
Dynamics 365 offers a Government Community Cloud for United States federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial government entities called Dynamics 365 Government. This service currently has a FedRAMP Moderate Provisional ATO (P-ATO) through the FedRAMP Joint Advisory Board (JAB) as well as multiple Federal Agency ATOs. The platform is also already in process for FedRAMP High and the plan is to target DISA Impact Level 4 in 2018 as announced at the Microsoft Government Cloud Forum.
Support for DevOps
Beyond security and compliance, greater business agility and efficiency continue to dominate the conversation around “must-haves” in the IT field these days, and government IT is no different.
By applying DevOps practices to a no code/low code solution, such as Dynamics 365, you can increase your agility and efficiencies, while still having the kind of granular change management typically associated with an “all code” approach. You do not need to compromise by choosing between either no code/low code or DevOps with Dynamics 365. Many tools are available for Dynamics 365 to enable change management (through source control), continuous integration (CI) (through build automation), continuous delivery (CD) (through deployment automation), and test automation. All staples of effective DevOps. These tools do not dictate which technologies to use to drive the DevOps process, but you become even more productive with them using Microsoft’s premier DevOps platform, Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). Learn more about how to enable Dynamics 365 DevOps practices with VSTS by visiting https://github.com/devkeydet/dyn365-ce-devops.
Government demand for better administration and delivery of essential services will never dissipate. Custom building new features and applications is too slow and expensive to be a viable or scalable approach in the future. Instead, government agencies hoping to keep pace with their constituents’ evolving expectations should take advantage of integrated, cloud-based solutions from a technology pioneer like Microsoft to dramatically accelerate line-of-business application planning and development, reduce costs, and give the people what they want.
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