StateScoop: Louisiana kicks off motor vehicle agency IT modernization with agile

StateScoop reports that Louisiana is taking a piecemeal approach to modernizing the aging systems used by the Office of Motor Vehicles (OMV).

James Alt, an enterprise application architect who has been with the state for less than a year, says the agency is using agile methods to perform some of the work in-house, starting with bite-size achievable chunks.

From the article:

First, Alt said, they will replace a sales tax table currently sitting “on an old Lotus Notes database” with something API-driven that will allow users to easily pull up the expected tax rate for a transaction. That project is expected to be completed within two months, he said.

Next, they’ll redesign the system for tracking miscellaneous receipts — billing for inspection stickers, things like that, Alt said. That project is expected to take about six months — OTS is still gathering requirements from OMV, which is a big part of why an agile approach is thought to be superior.

“We’ve seen plenty of times at the state where we’ve kicked off projects and the development team goes off and does their thing and not necessarily coming back with something that solves the problem,” Alt said. “So we want to make sure we’re working with OMV from day one and getting exactly what they need.”

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