Although the haunting memories remain startlingly vivid, this year marks the four-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina the country rushed to the aid of the devastated city while crime, destruction and an overall lack of resources catapulted New Orleans into desperation. Nonetheless the city shouldered the tremendous task of reconstructing almost everything—including its IT infrastructure.

Surrounded by overwhelming cataclysm and crippled by increasingly limited resources including damaged hardware and a severe labor shortage, the department began the daunting undertaking of overhauling the city’s infrastructure. This included creating a system that navigates the complicated application process required for Katrina victims to apply for FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program Funds (HMGP), which provided them with money and other aid for rebuilding.

Because the city so desperately needed this funding, the IT department sought a solution that could be quickly and easily implemented while providing agility and flexibility—thus turning to Metastorm and Metastorm DNA® partner CIBER to automate the application process.

Metastorm helped the city automate multiple steps in the process, from ensuring the forms were filled out correctly and the documents were properly managed to routing completed forms to the appropriate processors and approvers. Ultimately the project was an overwhelming success, helping the city submit over 150 applications on behalf of its citizens.

Today the city of New Orleans continues to use Metastorm BPM® in combination with CIBER integration services to automate additional processes like contracts management and cut street permitting. Given the city’s limited resources, these solutions have helped create the efficiency that the city needs—greatly reducing costs associated with manual paper processes while helping to provide the level of agility it needs to fully restore it to the colorful city that it once was.

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