Accenture Federal Services. US Department of Homeland Security: At a Tipping Point Agile Solutions or Aging Infrastructure?

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1 Accenture Federal Services US Department of Homeland Security: At a Tipping Point Agile Solutions or Aging Infrastructure?

2 Despite our best efforts to stall the process of aging, growing older is a constant we cannot escape this is especially true in technology. Expensive and time-consuming to maintain, legacy systems are often hard to modify and difficult to adapt as new technology is introduced and business functions change. Aging and irrelevant technology affects everyone and can result in substantial obstacles for organizations nowhere is this more evident than at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where accessing accurate data instantly is critical to protecting the nation. DHS is at a tipping point. It can choose to haphazardly address issues arising from antiquated systems, or it can renew legacy IT infrastructure, tackling problems before they become worse, and laying the groundwork for the flexibility and adaptability required for the future. To migrate or to renew? Assuming the answer to the above is the latter, DHS has two options when addressing aging IT systems: legacy migration or legacy renewal. In legacy migration, green screens are replaced with modern, Webbased user interfaces built on top of existing architecture. This avenue provides the option of moving legacy applications off the mainframe and onto newer hardware, but it comes with a catch. This approach is a temporary solution that fails to not only address the underlying issues, but to also provide a long-term sustainable solution. Legacy renewal, on the other hand, leverages new application architectures and addresses fundamental concerns of poor maintainability, scalability and a lack of flexibility. Making the connection: Service-oriented architecture and legacy renewal Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the optimal solution in providing enterprisewide infrastructure capable of supporting multiple systems and lines of business. SOA is an overall approach not a single product, technology or standard to building enterprise applications in a way that provides them with shared access to core pieces of functionality. Decomposing legacy applications Using SOA for legacy renewal allows for controlled migration from the as-is to the to-be platform. If a legacy system becomes too expensive to maintain, for example, service decomposition can be used to separate the system into components or its most basic elements. For example, an organization can extract the rules from the legacy application to an externalized rules engine, then the legacy system can be updated to call on these rules. As budgets and risk permit, additional portions of the legacy application can be decomposed into the SOA. The service decomposition approach to renewal gives CIOs the ability to upgrade the problem portions of the legacy application, while maximizing the value of other legacy components. Sharing components SOA s ability to share components allows for: Reduced costs in application development, maintenance and operations. Multiple applications share the same business services, technical services and middleware components. Easier deployment of new applications. Available services accelerate the building of new applications. Smoother maintenance of applications. As more policy, business logic and processes become centralized in the SOA, the overall number of touches is reduced when application changes are required. Increased selection of third-party application components, which can be licensed and made available across the organization, reducing vendor lock-in. Uncoupling processes A well-executed SOA program can help DHS improve its business process management capabilities. A key aspect of an SOA strategy is to uncouple (or disconnect ) business processes, composed of a sequence of tasks or activities, from technology. Offering greater flexibility, this approach allows DHS to more easily extend, automate and create new business processes processes it can make available as services to other groups, collaborating entities and citizens. By moving business process logic from application code to tools designed to easily modify and extend the process, the IT department can make changes more quickly and cost effectively. The benefits of SOA are far-reaching not only to DHS, but also to its end customer. SOA allows citizens to engage with DHS in an integrated, intimate way and provides an elevated level of service similar to what is expected from commercial websites. 2

3 Overcoming SOA implementation challenges The journey to any destination often comes with roadblocks, forks and checkpoints. CIOs should carefully consider the challenges on the road to successful SOA implementation. Are they insurmountable or mere speed bumps along the way? In many cases, federal IT departments are already overextended simply trying to keep pace with technological changes dictated by federal mandates. Another issue is that, although the rationale behind SOA is simple, implementation is not necessarily so. Choosing from an ever-changing set of new products can be confusing. Connecting best-of-breed products together seamlessly does not come with an easy button, often taking months to integrate, upgrade, enhance or extend if it's even possible at all. An agile, turnkey solution: Accenture Public Service Platform The Accenture Public Service Platform (APSP) is built on SOA principles and guided by open standards, connecting DHS SOA products while minimizing risk. Preconfigured with 50 to 70 percent of the services a public agency requires, all components of this prebuilt SOA-based platform can be easily updated or replaced, enabling agencies to rapidly respond to new requirements in a cost-effective way. Promise into practice APSP s turnkey SOA framework can help DHS: Adopt an enterprise-wide SOA, which will allow DHS to easily deploy information systems that directly serve the agency s mission. Improve citizen services despite decreasing budgets and growing service demands. Position the DHS enterprise to meet its High-Priority Initiatives (HPI) while protecting the investment it has made in legacy applications. Empower DHS internal customers to quickly adapt to policy changes, allowing limited technical resources to remain focused on implementing innovative solutions to save time and money. APSP supports dozens of SOA software products from commercial and open source vendors. This flexibility makes it easy for DHS to seamlessly knit together a serviceoriented capability in a way that leverages the agency s existing investments and protects the new ones. The Accenture Public Service Platform (APSP) Then: Legacy Approach Now: 100% SOA Approach Renewed Composite Applications DHS Legacy Applications Composition Application Composition Application Composition Application (Business logic, workflows, reports, correspondence, etc.) Service Decomposition Rule Set Rules Processes BPM Doc Rule Set ESB Logic App Server Policy Security Report Database ECM/Forms Database Reporting RDBMS APSP Commercial Off-the-Self (COTS) Products Business Services Composite Applications 3

4 Meeting goals, achieving High-Priority Initiatives The Accenture Public Service Platform provides the development and deployment architecture platform to facilitate many of DHS technology, governance and resource management goals. A vendor-neutral platform reduces vendor lock-in and provides a secure enterprise framework for legacy renewal and custom development. APSP is like no other platform available and will help DHS achieve its slated goals with agility and flexibility. DHS Goal 1: Establish secure IT services and capabilities to protect the homeland and enhance the nation s preparedness, mitigation and recovery capabilities. DHS Objectives Optimize IT infrastructure that leverages enterprise capabilities and services. How Accenture Public Service Platform can help achieve DHS High-Priority Initiatives (HPI) APSP plugs into the Enterprise Service Bus to provide a catalog of services for integrating with message queues, security platforms and other commercial and open source middleware capabilities (HPI 11-05). APSP also provides several services and frameworks that are architecturecentric, which provide capabilities such as Effective Dating or Exception Handling. These centralized services allow DHS Technical team to drive compliance and governance. This catalog serves as the basis for Homeland Security Services (HLS) capabilities and will serve as the registry of services for application developers and business users (HPI 11-23). Strengthen cyber security to enable an effective, safe environment for carrying out the DHS missions. APSP s Security Service Layer integrates leading Identity & Access Management (I&AM) products, which provide policy administration. APSP implements a Security Context object that encapsulates this information and makes it available throughout the architecture. This centralized approach lowers provisioning, de-provisioning, maintenance costs and significantly lowers breach risk (HPI 11-04). Establish mission-enabling capabilities as enterprise services to increase effectiveness and improve efficiency across the Department. Moving development to a shared virtual platform will help DHS reduce the different types of middleware and development tooling used. APSP facilitates this migration by providing the Developer s Workbench, a set of tools, unit tests, prototype code and documentation that plug into the developer s integrated development environment (IDE). For more rapid development, several teams can develop sprints at the same time and deploy them to one centralized environment running on APSP. Building applications in this decoupled, distributed fashion using the Agile methodology allows for high-quality, rapid development that is responsive to change (HPI and 11-03). APSP accelerates the development of the SOA architecture because it is pre-tested and readily deployable out of the box. APSP is typically installed in four to six weeks. Custom development of SOA with the same functionality would take nine to twelve months of development and testing (HPI 11-05). The built-in catalog of services and frameworks provides the architectural plumbing so that vendors or internal development teams can focus on providing business functionality and better service to DHS customers. This catalog serves as the basis for any services built and hosted by DHS (HPI 11-23). 4

5 DHS Goal 2: Strengthen and unify DHS ability to share information and services internally and with federal, state, local, tribal, international and private industry partners. DHS Objectives Enhance Identity, Credential and Access Management (ICAM) services to ensure that the right information is shared with the right stakeholders at the right time. Establish an enterprise view of information sharing capabilities to ensure that information is available and actionable. Successfully implement DHS Information Sharing Environment (DSE) to enable effective information sharing that virtually and securely connects mission partners for the protection of the homeland. How Accenture Public Service Platform can help achieve DHS High-Priority Initiatives (HPI) APSP s Security Service Layer provides a security context that encapsulates a user s roles, rights and entitlements. The information in this context can be used in any APSP-based application for access adjudication (HPI 11-04). APSP provides several service layers that centralize and share key middleware information. For example, a rules engine can be configured into APSP and the created rule sets established within would be available to all of the applications running on APSP. These applications can share the same rule sets, resulting in fewer maintenance needs and lower maintenance costs. Additionally, information is more accurate because both systems return the same information, eliminating multiple versions of the truth issues (HPI 11-06). DHS Goal 3: Improve transparency, accountability and efficiencies of services and programs through effective governance and enterprise architecture. DHS Objectives Integrate departmental governance to improve transparency of IT programs and enhance the IT investment decision-making process. Enhance department s smart buying and vendor management capabilities to leverage economies of scale and reduce delivery timeframes. Improve decision support capabilities to ensure that the Department makes informed decisions. How Accenture Public Service Platform can help achieve DHS High-Priority Initiatives (HPI) The nature of sharing and reusing created by SOA-based applications improves transparency of IT programs. Service catalogs, for example, are often maintained by business users and services are often shared across work groups. As a result, the scope of SOA governance extends far beyond that of typical IT governance. APSP includes the eight-step SOA Governance Program that can help guide DHS and its service partners through the implementation of a SOA governance approach for better decision making and IT management (HPI 11-18). APSP provides a vendor neutral integration framework for quickly integrating several different types of capabilities and middleware from open source and commercial vendors. APSP reduces vendor lock-in and will allow DHS to choose the right product and integrate it into the architecture without affecting current applications. Additionally, this feature gives DHS pricing leverage when negotiating with product manufacturers (HPI 11-26). The APSP eight-step SOA Governance Program is a proven methodology for identifying the proper people and processes for IT and services decision making (HPI 11-18). 5

6 DHS Goal 4: Develop and implement a comprehensive approach to IT employee recruitment, development, retention and recognition to ensure excellence in IT delivery across DHS. DHS Objectives Attract high-caliber IT professionals by enhancing recruiting, screening and hiring practices. Retain and develop high-caliber IT professionals through succession planning, defining IT and program management career tracks, implementing staff development programs and establishing a mentorship program. How Accenture Public Service Platform can help achieve DHS High-Priority Initiatives (HPI) APSP and SOA enable the use of modern, commodity technologies based on open standards. As a result, more relevant resources are available in the hiring marketplace and they tend to be less expensive to employ (HPI 11-15). APSP and SOA provide several opportunities for experienced resources to participate in the next wave of technology. During legacy renewal, experienced resources are invaluable in service decomposition, or distilling a system into its component parts. Experienced resources are logical candidates for participating on SOA teams that require a mix of functional and technical knowledge, such as service catalog management (HPI 11-15). Making your move The US Department of Homeland Security is faced with the challenge of selecting an appropriate approach for a more flexible, agile and responsive platform. SOA is the architecture commonly chosen, but making the transition from a legacy system is often fraught with uncertainty. Selecting the right partner and tools for this journey is critical. Accenture s experience, proven approach and preconfigured technology solution can greatly improve the probability of a successful outcome and speed of renewal. Technology waits for no one. How will you keep up? Why Accenture? The Accenture Public Service Platform is the culmination of Accenture s hands-on experience gained delivering thousands of SOA projects all over the world. Our expert team of APSP designers, developers and installers is backed by three global innovation centers dedicated to commercializing emerging trends and capabilities in SOA. With access to more than 3,000 architects with core SOA skills in systems integration and technology, Accenture has the expertise needed to tackle even the toughest DHS challenge. Our industry-leading practices are proven to successfully launch, deliver, accelerate and manage SOA initiatives. Combining the best of software and services, Accenture is ready to help DHS achieve high performance. For more information To discuss Accenture s Public Service Platform and how we can help deliver effective SOA for the US Department of Homeland Security, please contact: Rocky Thurston rocky.thurston@accenturefederal.com Margo Khollman margo.khollman@accenture.com Accenture Federal Services, based in Arlington, VA, a wholly owned subsidiary of Accenture LLP, helps US federal agencies build the government of the future. Visit for information regarding Accenture Federal Services, including our perspectives on agency and cabinet challenges and experience delivering results. Accenture Software combines deep technology acumen with industry knowledge to develop differentiated software products. It offers innovative software-based solutions to enable organizations to meet their business goals and achieve high performance. Its home page is 6

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