City of Los Angeles Turns to Novell to Get Employees the Information and Tools They Need to Do the Job

The City of Los Angeles Information Technology Agency has launched an initial rollout of a Novell® Nsure™ secure identity management solution to better serve its 3.7 million residents. The agency chose Novell for its proven portal and identity management services, which ensure that the information and tools employees need to do their jobs are delivered securely, quickly, and accurately, wherever the employee might be. Novell's cross-platform approach helped the city integrate its heterogeneous network, making management easier and reducing costs while providing City of Los Angeles residents better service. With Novell as the backbone of its network infrastructure, the City of Los Angeles is well positioned to expand eGovernment services to the city's residents.

The City of Los Angeles Information Technology Agency (ITA), the city's technology arm and standards-making body, tests and implements new technologies for more than 40 city agencies and departments, helping the city's 42,000 employees better serve Los Angeles' 3.7 million residents. While the size of Los Angeles creates special challenges, the nature of the challenges is similar to that faced by city administrations everywhere looking to improve their eGovernment capabilities. Historically, multiple departments and agencies have tended to run on different sets of core data, creating a difficult environment to administer. Applications have been added to the system on an ad hoc basis, without real integration. The ITA needed a unified source of network information to permit a single point of administration and security for the network.

Beyond simplifying the network, the ITA needed to offer its mobile employees and remote offices secure, anytime, anywhere access to internal applications, information and tools. It wanted to increase security throughout its infrastructure with single sign-on for all Web-based applications. In addition, ITA was looking for a solution to grant new employees immediate access to network and business related resources, while also providing an equally automated process to revoke access upon employee termination. Finally, the ITA sought an open-standards solution, enabling them to leverage their existing token-based authentication environment. With these multiple business challenges, the ITA turned to a comprehensive Novell solution that included identity management, portal, security, integration, and messaging components.

"The reliability, scalability and security of Novell's technology brought order to our infrastructure," said Kirk Yamamoto, ITA senior systems analyst. "We have complete confidence in the Novell solution."

Novell provides a comprehensive solution
In partnership with Novell ConsultingSM, the ITA Portal Team launched its portal initiative. Tapping Novell Portal Services technology, the ITA has created a secure employee portal where city employees can securely access virtual communities, chat rooms, calendar information, e-mail, files, helpdesk support, city services and more. Novell eDirectory™ and Novell DirXML® enabled the ITA to link its different systems and create a comprehensive view into a centralized directory, allowing a single employee identity for all Web applications. ITA has currently implemented the Novell portal as a pilot. The powerful combination of Novell eDirectory and DirXML will make adding or changing basic information about an employee easy and quick, since it automatically replicates the information across all key applications. When new employees are hired, they will automatically be provided with the resources they need to be productive-e-mail account, phone number, workforce ID and portal access-while access for terminated employees will be immediately revoked, preventing unhappy employees from wreaking havoc on the system.

The ITA has wrapped a security blanket around the entire systems with Novell iChain®, a Web security solution that supports several types of authentication methods, including smart cards and token authentication. When users request access to the portal, iChain retrieves the appropriate user credentials, authenticates users through eDirectory, and grants or denies access. Finally, the ITA has also integrated Novell GroupWise® into the portal, offering employees anytime, anywhere access to e-mail, calendaring, scheduling and other collaboration tools.

"A city the size of Los Angeles faces daunting challenges in managing information flow for such a huge constituency," said Chris Stone, vice chairman, Office of the CEO, Novell. "Getting the right information to the right people - and only the right people - was a real challenge. Novell provided the secure identity management and systems integration Los Angeles sought, with the high levels of scalability and security they required. Thanks to Novell's open-standards based approach, the City of Los Angeles now has an incredibly solid foundation, but with great flexibility build in, on which to build out eGovernment services."

"We are very pleased with the results of the Novell solution thus far," said Bob Gillette, the ITA Information Systems manager. "The maturity and reliability of eDirectory, the ease of administration of GroupWise, and the rock-solid security of iChain are unbeatable."

For more about Novell's solutions in the eGovernment sector, please visit http://www.novell.com/industries/government/.