The State of Missouri Scales Automation, Unlocks Time for Innovation

The State of Missouri serves millions of people digitally every year, offering a range of services from motor vehicle registrations and various state licenses to health and social benefits and resident support. These citizen services require significant operational rigor, driven by an IT organization focused on delivering technology with speed, consistency, and efficiency. Before adopting Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, the State of Missouri’s IT landscape was a mix of disparate IT automation products, leading to a sprawling and disconnected environment and a number of resulting pain points. 

For the engineering team, it meant dealing with a variety of tools, a lack of standardization, and an inability to easily share and collaborate on work across the organization. Across departments, critical tasks could take hours or even days to complete manually, increasing the risk of human error and delaying the delivery of services. Recognizing that this approach wasn't sustainable, the state adopted Ansible Automation Platform to centralize automation efforts with a dedicated team to support it. 

As the team began rolling out this platform, certain requirements had to be met. First, the team tackled a widespread concern of how to integrate a sensitive password and certificate  management solutions into the new automation. Instead of creating a new process, they built a custom Ansible Content Collection that connects to their existing secrets repository that includes modules and roles to more securely call sensitive data. They approved and stored this new custom collection in their private automation hub instance – allowing them to organize and control recommended automation assets like this for use across the IT organization. With testing complete, they were ready to use it.   

This readily available custom Ansible Content Collection made a huge impact in their organization, providing other teams with a sense of comfort and overcoming their hesitancy to adopt automation. With this barrier removed, the team could more easily onboard new projects and demonstrate the platform's value.

With Ansible Automation Platform and a burgeoning culture of automation, the State of Missouri realizes tangible results, including: 

• Routine processes that once took hours or days can now be executed reliably within minutes, saving time and enabling higher service quality.
• Automated patching for monthly Windows updates and Cisco network device firmware upgrades, driving greater operational consistency and enabling resources to be used for new projects that expand citizen value.
• Simple playbooks for upgrading more than 2,000 network devices and servers.
• Constructed smart inventory gathering, which pulls data from their Configuration Management Database (CMDB), turning a 90-minute process into a 20-second task.

This shift to automation enables the organization to focus on more innovative and strategic initiatives that directly benefit the state’s operations and end users, improving consistency, reducing human error, and accelerating delivery times for critical tasks. 

This is just the beginning for the State of Missouri. The automation team is continually onboarding new projects and expanding its portfolio, and the next step is to integrate automation directly with their IT Service Management and ServiceNow solutions, making automation a foundational aspect of how IT products are delivered. By building on their initial successes and proving the value of automation, the State of Missouri is cultivating a mindset where automation is seen not as a tool, but as a core driver of innovation.