Status of State Agency Model (SAM) Project - April 2006

The Successful Partners In Reaching Innovative Technology (SPIRIT) in the Southwest Region:

The SPIRIT consortium is comprised of thirteen Indian Tribal Organizations within the states of Oklahoma and New Mexico, with the Chickasaw Nation as the lead State agency. This consortium is the furthest along, as they began working together prior to the initiation of the SAM project. SPIRIT is in the development phase and has already conducted system demonstrations for the FNS SWRO and HQ. The system is an on-line, web-based system being developed using Microsoft’s .Net Framework suite of software tools and will employ their "Smart Client" architecture. The relational database software for the central operations site will be MS SQL Server 2000. The SPIRIT system is scheduled for roll-out in late 2007.

The Mountain Plains States’ Consortium (MPSC):

The MPSC members are the States of Colorado (lead), Wyoming and Utah. The consortium has completed their planning phase and has contracted with a Quality Assurance firm and issued an Intent to Award for DDI services. The MPSC is currently planning to have a system that will be operated on-line using the Internet as the telecommunications network. It will be a Smart Client, N-tier architecture, with each respective State’s central host containing all of the processing logic and all of the data for that particular MPSC State’s agency. Colorado and Wyoming strategic plans for web based systems had selected .NET as the base for all installations, Utah had selected J2EE. To address this diversion from a common design, the Consortium agreed to utilize a "middleware" solution for Utah that would allow the system to be developed in the .NET environment but operate on J2EE for Utah.

MPSC anticipates beginning their development phase in May of 2006. The final schedule will be negotiated with the DDI and QA contractors at the DDI Initiation Meeting on April 24, 2006. It is anticipated that system implementation will begin in late 2007 or early 2008.

Crossroads in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast Regions:

Crossroads is the only consortium that crosses two FNS regional offices. Members are the States of North Carolina (lead), Alabama, Virginia and West Virginia. Since the SAM project is the first time these WIC State agencies have worked together, they began with a Business Process Reengineering (BPR) phase to identify business rules that could be applied to all four states. Crossroads, which is about to embark on their planning phase, expects to unveil their new system in March 2010.

Back to WIC State Information Systems main page

Back to the Top