The Senate is responsible for creating and amending the laws of a State in conjunction with its House of Representatives. The Senate President, and his Chief of Staff, manage the operations of the Senate including the staff and systems used to support the law making process.

The Senate legislative support system was an integration of various sub-systems using different technologies, many of which date back to mainframe operations of the late 1970’s. The Senate recognized a need to consolidate and modernize to better meet the current and expected requirements. The Senate was faced with a situation where their legacy mainframe systems and antiquated legislative support software were becoming progressively more costly to maintain. Additionally, this was expected to become more costly due to staff retirements and increasing maintenance fees for non-supported legacy software.

After a false start with another vendor, the Senate asked Sogeti to use their expertise to jumpstart the effort. Sogeti played a key role in the successful implementation of the legislative system for its House of Representatives and was in a unique position to leverage that knowledge for the Senate. The solution provides the Senate with an integrated way to manage the process of creating laws.

Given the size of the involved effort, a multi-phased approach spread across a little over 3 years was deemed to be the preferred strategy to deliver the necessary functionality while minimizing risk and operating within the staffing constraints of the client.

This approach required not only development of new applications, but also extensive development of interfaces with legacy applications. Additionally, priorities for development were aligned with expected return on investment rather than overall efficiency of implementation. The specific objectives of Phases 1 and 2 were targeted at supporting bill and amendment drafting, committee processes, and journal publishing.

The solution consisted of an integrated ASP.Net web application along with a suite of Windows applications targeted to support the individual legislative process steps. Additionally, bill and amendment editing tools were provided by integrating into the Ribbon control provided by Microsoft Word. Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services serves as the content repository and Microsoft SQL Server houses all structured data. A standard XML format is used for all bill and amendment content to ensure interoperability with non-Senate legislative systems.

Numerous benefits are expected from Senate legislative system. Staffing requirements needed to accomplish business processes as well staffing requirements for maintenance of the new software are expected to be reduced. Cycle time required to complete targeted steps of the legislative process are expected to decrease due to the introduction of automatic integration. Training requirements will be reduced due to the common look-and-feel of the application modules. Lastly, maintenance and ongoing support is expected to be made easier because of the consistent, flexible, and integrated nature of the solution.