Scaling government innovation: How Massachusetts delivers digital services with certainty.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Executive Office of Technology Services and Security (EOTSS) sought to accelerate its digital transformation initiatives while maintaining the operational excellence that its residents depend on. Last Call Media’s embedded Secure, Scalable, and Reliable (SSR) engineering team became an integral part of Massachusetts’ technical capacity. Our team enabled multiple agencies to launch ambitious projects with confidence while maintaining 99.9% component availability across SSR-managed infrastructure.

The Massachusetts Executive Office of Technology Services and Security (EOTSS) coordinates digital transformation across the state government, serving over 7 million residents through dozens of agencies and hundreds of digital services. This requires infrastructure that can support everything from housing analytics to multi-agency chatbot systems, while maintaining enterprise-grade security and compliance.

Massachusetts had ambitious digital transformation goals that required expanding its technical capacity strategically. They needed experienced engineers who could integrate immediately with existing teams and workflows.

Key objectives included:

• Scale technical capacity rapidly to support multiple concurrent digital initiatives
• Maintain operational excellence while launching new resident-facing services
• Build robust data infrastructure supporting evidence-based policy decisions across agencies
• Implement enterprise monitoring, providing visibility across complex multi-agency systems
• Enable cross-agency collaboration through shared technical platforms and expertise

Massachusetts faced the scaling challenges common to ambitious digital transformation initiatives:

Technical capacity constraints

Launching multiple high-priority initiatives simultaneously required specialized expertise in areas like data engineering, infrastructure automation, and enterprise monitoring, which existing teams would need to supplement.

Multi-agency coordination

Different agencies had varying technical maturity levels and requirements, needing solutions that could work across diverse environments while maintaining security and compliance standards.

Data infrastructure complexity

Supporting evidence-based policy decisions required sophisticated analytics capabilities handling sensitive data like housing information while ensuring privacy protection and regulatory compliance.

Operational visibility

As digital services expanded across agencies, leadership needed comprehensive monitoring and alerting systems to maintain oversight of performance and reliability across the entire ecosystem. 

Deployment infrastructure reliability

Additionally, Massachusetts required dependable deployment infrastructure for web and information systems, ensuring that new features and updates could be rolled out consistently across multiple agencies without disrupting critical resident-facing services.

Innovation at government scale

The Commonwealth needed to balance rapid innovation with the stability and security requirements of mission-critical government services serving millions of residents.

Last Call Media’s SSR team integrated directly with Massachusetts technical leadership to expand capacity across critical areas, bringing specialized expertise while adapting to existing workflows and governance structures.

Operational foundation that enables innovation

The SSR team’s daily operations ensure that Massachusetts has the stable foundation needed for strategic initiatives. 
 

Daily Operations:

• 99.99% component availability achieved through proactive monitoring and rapid incident response across SSR-managed systems
• Security remediation and compliance, addressing security findings and strengthening automated compliance checks across environments
• Infrastructure optimization, including network migrations (Transit Gateway), resource management, and system modernization
• Access management and streamlining workflows for version control, CRM, and cloud infrastructure platforms using Infrastructure as Code

Note: Metric reflects availability of monitored infrastructure components under SSR management, excluding third-party/provider outages.

Cross-agency operational support

The SSR approach integrates operational excellence with strategic project delivery, ensuring Massachusetts can innovate rapidly while maintaining reliability. This model demonstrates how embedded technical partnerships can simultaneously maintain existing systems and enable new capabilities.

• MyMassGov infrastructure: Managing technical backbone for 500,000+ monthly users while implementing access request integrations through enterprise systems and DOL modernization initiatives
• Data team operations: Maintaining automated pipelines, optimizing integrations between analytics platforms and data warehouses, and implementing Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) in the enterprise data platform through Infrastructure as Code.
• Seamless Engagement team support: Scaling multi-agency chatbot infrastructure and deploying automated conversation evaluation systems
• Routine maintenance: Completing network infrastructure migrations with comprehensive risk mitigation and enhanced monitoring

Embedded technical partnership

Our engineering team works as an extension of Massachusetts’ technical organization.LCM members participate in Architecture Working Groups, collaborate on technical roadmaps, and follow state governance processes. This embedded model offers immediate technical capacity without the overhead typically associated with traditional consulting engagements.
 

Strategic project delivery

With operational excellence as their foundation, the SSR team delivered strategic projects that drive innovation. Two examples:
 

Example 1: Building scalable housing data analytics for EOHLC

Massachusetts needed to modernize its approach to analyzing housing data, data that supports evidence-based policy decisions affecting thousands of residents in emergency housing situations. Our data engineering specialists collaborated with the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities (EOHLC) and the Mass Data Office to develop a comprehensive analytics infrastructure.

Key technical implementations included:

• Automated data pipeline processing for 10,838+ housing data files covering 20,000+ residents
• Secure PII handling protocols ensuring HIPAA compliance for sensitive housing information
• Real-time analytics dashboard enabling policy teams to track housing trends and outcomes
• Data integration and visualization capabilities that enabled policy-makers to draw new conclusions from housing data that hadn’t previously been analyzed in this way

The infrastructure now processes thousands of housing records daily, providing EOHLC leadership with unprecedented visibility into the effectiveness of the housing program and enabling rapid policy adjustments based on real-world data.

Example 2: Enterprise monitoring and observability implementation

To maintain oversight of expanding digital services, Massachusetts needed comprehensive monitoring across its multi-agency technical ecosystem. Our infrastructure specialists implemented an enterprise-grade observability platform to provide real-time insights across all critical systems.

Technical achievements included:

• Enterprise monitoring and observability platform implementation covering 100% of critical Mass Digital infrastructure
• Custom dashboard development providing executive-level visibility into system performance
• Automated alerting systems enabling sub-24-hour response to potential issues
• Synthetic monitoring ensuring 99.9% availability tracking for SSR-managed infrastructure components

This monitoring infrastructure now provides Massachusetts leadership with real-time visibility into digital service performance, enabling proactive management and ensuring reliable service delivery for millions of residents.

Security and compliance integration

All technical work adheres to Commonwealth security standards, with automated compliance monitoring, secrets management, and comprehensive security auditing integrated into every project delivery.
 

Last Call delivered measurable impact across Massachusetts’ digital transformation initiatives:

Operational excellence

• 99.9% uptime maintained across all critical government digital services
• Sub-24-hour response time for infrastructure issues with proactive monitoring that prevents problems before they impact residents
• Zero unplanned outages during major system deployments

Innovation enablement

• Successful launch of housing data analytics platform enabling EOHLC to process 20,000+ resident records with real-time policy insights
• Enterprise monitoring deployment providing visibility across 100% of critical Mass Digital infrastructure
• MyMassGov portal supports maintaining service for 500,000+ monthly users during continuous feature development
• Cross-agency technical collaboration enabling coordinated digital initiatives across multiple state departments

Infrastructure and Security

• 100% Commonwealth security compliance maintained across all technical implementations
• Automated compliance monitoring preventing security issues from reaching production environments
• Infrastructure as Code implementations enabling rapid, consistent deployments across agencies
• Cost optimization through improved resource management and monitoring

Ready to scale your digital transformation with embedded engineering expertise? Contact Last Call Media to discuss how our specialized technical teams can accelerate your mission-critical initiatives while maintaining operational excellence.