The finalists for WashingtonExec’s Pinnacle Awards were announced Oct. 13, and we’ll be highlighting some of them until the event takes place virtually Dec. 8.
Next is Cloud Government Executive of the Year finalist Subramanian Muniasamy, who’s chief technology officer at the Maryland Department of Human Services. Here, he talks career turning points, key achievements, learning from failures and more.
What key achievements did you have in 2020/2021?
As the leader of Maryland’s Total Human Services Integrated Network program, I’m proud to have been part of the successful cloud deployment of more than 40 Maryland state applications over the last three years. While many states are struggling to modernize their systems and stay on top of policy and program changes, we have been able to simultaneously develop new core systems and migrate all applications into our new MD THINK cloud platform.
Maryland is the first state to develop such a cloud platform as MD THINK, which is hosting critical health and human services applications delivering programs such as health care, SNAP, child welfare, adult protective services, etc. The pandemic showed the critical need for cloud-based applications to enable a modernized government workforce.
In 2020, agency offices were closed for COVID-19, and many operations were impacted by the shutdown and shift to remote work. The MD THINK applications, because they were modernized web-based applications and could be accessed from portable devices, continued to be developed and deployed even during this period, which was a significant win for Maryland and demonstrates the value of the new systems.
The child welfare and adult services applications were implemented statewide during this period, as well as a provider portal for management of providers. Additionally, the eligibility and enrollment application, which manages Maryland’s SNAP, cash assistance and medical assistance eligibility, was also successfully deployed in 2021. Most recently, the new application supporting Maryland’s child support program was piloted.
What has made you successful in your current role?
A combination of several factors, including but not limited to, robust domain expertise from 20 years of experience implementing similar projects in the government space, strong network of skilled personnel, support of state leadership and an appetite for risk.
However, the key driver of success has been unconventional strategic approaches to solving problems. A couple of illustrative examples are below:
- Building a technical project leadership team at MD THINK: Traditionally, large IT projects in the public sector are delivered by professional services vendors contracted by a government agency with agency program managers providing management and oversight. This model has often resulted in failed IT projects, cost overruns and/or delayed implementations. I adopted an atypical approach where I hired technical leaders and domain experts directly into the State’s MD THINK leadership team, and they, in turn, became directly accountable for delivery of the respective applications and functions.
- Hiring and managing agile teams of IT resources: I pioneered a team acquisition model that allows the state to quickly and directly onboard skilled resources in various functional categories, organize them into agile Scrum teams, where they can be managed directly by state management. At MD THINK, this allowed us to acquire up to 450 resources within a very short time, and organize them into about 50 agile scrum teams. This created a structure where there was much more effective control on the work product of the teams, which enhanced visibility and enhanced speed to delivery.
What was a turning point of inflection point in your career?
There have actually been two major inflection points in my career as a technology leader in the public sector health and human services space.
I was invited to rescue a challenged application implementation at Maryland’s state-based health care exchange. The success of exchanges was of great significance in 2013 and there was significant negative public attention around the exchange. Accepting this project was a significant undertaking.
Through the hard work of a dedicated team, I was able to lead the turnaround of the system within a year. Following the launch of the successful system in 2014, I was invited by Maryland leadership to lead IT programs in the semi-autonomous exchange agency as its chief information officer.
This opportunity allowed me to initiate several new technological directions in the agency including a full overhaul of the technology architecture to transition it from a proprietary solution stack to an open source architecture.
There were other initiatives, too, that I was able to implement such as direct integration of the application system with the Medicaid service providers and development of a customer relationship management solution on Salesforce.
The second inflection point was when I was invited to lead the implementation of MD THINK at the Maryland Department of Human Services. This was one of the most ambitious technological projects ever undertaken in a state, and it was a great honor to have been asked to lead it.
It was a great challenge to develop the strategic roadmap for MD THINK, forge the interagency relationships, establish the MD THINK solution train structure within the scaled agile framework, navigate the complicated state and federal funding systems, and manage to successfully deliver three major applications and migrate three external agency’s applications to the MD THINK platform.
What are you most proud of having been a part of in your current organization?
Within a short period of time, Maryland has built a world-class development and cloud implementation team within a state agency, a major state technology infrastructure project. The applications developed and maintained by MD THINK deliver services to more than 2 million Marylanders.
Besides the intrinsic reward of being able to directly impact the lives of Maryland citizens through modern application systems and a state-of-the-art cloud services platform, I am also very grateful for having been part of a pioneering cloud-based program that is a template for other large-scale government implementations.
We were able to overcome multiple challenges, including complex procurement processes, large-scale workforce training efforts, space and parking limitations, etc., but by maintaining the focus on delivery, we were able to overcome each and every challenge.
I am honored that our MD THINK teams were recently recognized by the Capability Maturity Model Integration Institute. The program was successfully appraised for CMMI Level 3 for both development and services, which makes MD THINK the first program in the nation to successfully undergo multimodal appraisal under the new CMMI version 2.0.
What are your primary focus areas going forward, and why are those so important to the future of the nation?
There are several key areas within government IT that will likely attract central focus in the coming years.
One of the major focus areas would be identification and removal of duplicative processes across applications, which places additional burden on customers and staff. This will require integration of common workflows across applications, sometimes owned and managed by multiple agencies. Digital workers (robotic process automation) open a new avenue of automation and workflow standardization.
The end goal would be to ensure that a customer does not have to provide the same information to different programs or different agencies and that staff working with customers have all the relevant information at their fingertips.
Another major area of attention would be the security of data. There have been several high-profile data breaches in the recent months, which has placed government IT leaders on high alert, especially ones that are the custodians of personal identifiable information, protected health information and tax-related data. Cloud and data security are a major focus, and we’re continually asking what else we can do to secure our data and our systems.
What’s one key thing you learned from a failure you had?
There are several lessons learned, but a crucial one is to avoid long latency periods involved in project iterations, whether it is at the conceptual decision-making stage, or at the procurement of software and services, and implementation stages. It is important to have realistic yet ambitious milestones to work towards, in the absence of which, it is easy to lose track of project progress and ultimately, run the risk of a schedule overrun. The momentum of the project must be sustained through every phase.
What’s the biggest professional risk you’ve ever taken?
When MD THINK was initiated, I set a very ambitious timeline for modernization of the applications to ensure there will be enough administrative impetus to fuel the initiative and that the project does not spend any more taxpayer dollars than necessary.
This approach had risks inherent to implementing a large IT program within a complex government agency, and as the accountable official, much of that risk was directly owned by me. Many similar implementations of state child welfare or eligibility systems have failed.
However, any program such as MD THINK would require an appropriate amount of risk tolerance, and I was not hesitant in accepting the risk as one that was commensurate with the rewards that the outcome of the project would generate. I am happy that as a team, we have been able to efficiently manage and mitigate the risks such that the overall project delivery has been successful and transformational for Maryland.