How Mississippi’s revenue department optimized tech without cloud

Unlike similar agencies, the Mississippi Department of Revenue has a peculiar mission with three separate and specific lines of business.

One is expected, as it is responsible for taking in taxes. But the DOR also provides software as a service for the state’s county governments, including for motor vehicles’ titles and tags, as well as serving as the state’s alcoholic beverage control division, which now includes medical marijuana. All told, it collects more than $10 billion in revenue each year.

Having the technology to manage all those disparate business functions and processes could be a headache, especially as some mainframes the state relies on are decades old. But Mississippi has taken various steps to make its tech offerings more streamlined and centralized, including revamping its data centers to reduce its server footprint by more than 20% and converting its mainframe systems to web apps that DOR administers.

It’s taken a lot of hands-on leadership, said Michael DeHaan, the DOR’s chief technology officer, which in itself has represented a shift from the traditional way of doing things.

“When I moved into the CTO position, it was actually a change for how we wanted to approach leadership,” DeHaan said in a recent interview. “A lot of government agencies, they'll have a CTO in place of a [chief information officer]. We have subverted that. Rather, the CIO is the ownership of the business process, while the CTO is the ownership of the technology stack, meaning I lead from the front, they lead from the back, and we optimize for what it is like for the engineer sitting on the keyboard with how we build our architectures.”

DeHaan said DOR went from a “largely dispersed” agency with its mainframe tag and title system and the tax system that also administers liquor both run by the state’s central IT department. Quickly, DOR converted the mainframe tag and title system into a web application that it could administer itself, then took ownership of tax and liquor too.

In doing so, the agency also unified its data management using a platform from Everpure Fusion, an effort that has saved 39.5 hours a day of staff time due to faster application response times and resulted in no downtime. DeHaan said DOR has “flipped the paradigm” to become an agency that does not rely much on others for its technology provisions while enjoying massive revenue growth. He compared that journey to being in the “front seat of that rocket trip flying through growth.”

Meanwhile, DOR has stayed largely on-prem in its operations and still relies on data centers. But the efficiencies it has found in modernization and revamping its applications mean the state services run just the same as they would if they were in the cloud, DeHaan said.

“The whole race to the cloud of 2019, 2020, 2021, everybody got up there and went, ‘Yikes, this is super expensive,’” he said. “They had already refactored their applications and started hosting applications like cloud apps, regardless of where they live. We've actually already been doing that for a while, so while we are hosting like we're running in cloud land, we are actually predominantly on-prem.”

The effort hasn’t been without its challenges, however. An inventory glitch with a new software system that was not compatible with DOR’s delivery system has meant a backlog of deliveries from the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control warehouse and led to some businesses in the state running out of alcohol to sell. Lawmakers tried, and failed, to pass an emergency measure to let businesses bypass the state ABC and buy directly from distributors until the problem is fixed.

DeHaan said any issues that DOR faces, whether it be outages at the DMV or anything else, need to be fixed properly, as the trend of “typical government good enough is not good enough.”

“We are stewards of the citizens, but being citizens ourselves, we take that super personal, and that comes down in every dollar of the budget,” he said.

Some Mississippi agencies may be concerned about recent legislation in the state, which mandated that their operations must all be cloud native by 2027, unless there are budgetary reasons for them to not make the switch. 

“If that sounds scary, it is,” DeHaan said.

But he noted that, given the amount of modernization work DOR has already done, it will not be too big a lift to move everything fully into the cloud and away from on-prem data centers. 

“One of the things that's been great about us is we have put so much effort into modularity and fungibility in our architecture as we've grown up that we can just redeploy over here,” DeHaan said. “I need a lot of money in my budget to be able to accommodate that, but we can have those same service deliveries, whether we're on prem or in the cloud.”