With 68% of child support enforcement (CSE) systems aging, most state companies are at present modernizing them or making ready to modernize. Greater than 20% of families and children are supported by these techniques, and with the present constituents of those techniques changing into extra client technology-centric, the usage of antiquated expertise techniques is archaic and unsustainable. At this level, households count on state companies to have a contemporary, environment friendly little one assist system.
The next are some components driving these states to pursue modernization:
- Present techniques are developed on mainframe-based techniques utilizing an antiquated, scarcely accessible expertise stack.
- The unavailability of a talented workforce makes these techniques costly to function, handle and improve.
- Youngster assist packages are specializing in pioneering a brand new, holistic and family-focused supply perspective to make households really feel included, listened to and empowered.
- Modernization will free caseworkers’ time to give attention to and collaborate with households, fairly than specializing in navigating an ageing system.
To meet these ever-increasing citizen expectations to eat state-provided little one assist providers, statewide little one assist techniques want do the next:
- Empower households to get assist when, the place and the way they want it, together with digital and real-time communications.
- Present fast and clear providers to ease stress and frustration in occasions of want.
- Be intuitive, user-friendly and minimize down on handbook effort.
- Automate routine duties to liberate time to supply personalised providers and construct relationships with households.
- Empower caseworkers with on-line instruments to collaborate with colleagues and entry information repositories.
Current techniques merely will not be capable of present the capabilities wanted to comprehend this family-centered strategy of service supply and should be modernized, instantly.
Each U.S. state is totally different
Core system necessities—comparable to new case initiation, offering location and institution providers, implementing orders, dealing with monetary transactions, and many others.—are mandated by the Office of Federal Child Support Enforcement (OCSE), making many state little one assist enforcement (CSE) techniques related.
Regardless of this commonality, each little one assist group is exclusive, and every wants a tailor-made modernization strategy that helps its imaginative and prescient and understands the truth “on the bottom.” For instance, the core techniques expertise panorama for every state could possibly be a mainframe legacy system with various levels of maturity, portability, reliability and scalability.
States’ present funding in modernizing ancillary techniques (e.g., improved doc administration capabilities, internet portals, cellular purposes, information warehouses, enhanced location providers, and many others.) may negate the necessity for modernization for these techniques. This, together with the general maturity of CSEs, uninterrupted service necessities, state finances, timing, staffing, and different components mandate a complete modernization strategy to drag in these investments.
IBM Consulting’s Accelerated Incremental Mainframe Modernization
Legacy purposes, whereas being the present crown jewels of states’ IT ecosystems, hinder enterprise agility and are costly and complex, subsequently making any rebuild, refactor or integration makes an attempt dangerous.
IBM Consulting’s pioneering Accelerated Incremental Mainframe Modernization (AIMM) strategy focuses on legacy modernization with a lens of incremental transformation, fairly than simply translation. Our strategy focuses on enterprise information domain-centric initiatives that may ship worth within the quick time period and create a growth ecosystem conducive to incremental optimization—as an alternative of a dangerous big-bang software and infrastructure replace.
As highlighted within the graphic beneath, AIMM’s strategy focuses on beginning with a enterprise and expertise map alongside the client-specific IT ecosystems, as an alternative of solely a code conversion.
This helps us create a shopper journey with the co-existence of legacy and incrementally migrated performance to the brand new digital core, ultimately strangulating and sunsetting the legacy platforms.
The strategy leverages IBM’s zOS connectors, permitting us to shift the main target from software to information, transfer mainframe information in mainframe format into cloud storage (with close to real-time, bidirectional information sync), and leverage new and trendy cloud information administration providers. With its confirmed instruments and processes, AIMM meets shoppers the place they’re within the legacy modernization journey, analyzing (auto-scan) legacy code, extracting enterprise guidelines, changing it to trendy language, deploying it to any cloud, and managing expertise for transformational enterprise outcomes. Finally, this helps states to comprehend their enterprise targets and ship worth quicker.
The next are a few of the industry-leading methodologies, instruments and belongings utilized by AIMM:
- IBM Garage brings collectively {industry} greatest practices, technical experience and information, shopper collaboration and partnership, cloud service suppliers, and the IBM Consulting groups to ship accelerated outcomes.
- IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator (ICCA) recommends shopper journeys with out deep engineering information, masking execution and modernization steps that take a workload from a supply to a cloud vacation spot.
- IBM Asset Evaluation Renovation Catalyst (AARC) routinely extracts the foundations from the COBOL software supply code and generates a information mannequin, which is then deployed right into a guidelines engine like IBM Operational Decision Manager, Pega, and many others.
- IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM) allows companies to reply to real-time information by making use of automated choices, enabling enterprise customers to develop and preserve operational techniques choice logic.
- IBM’s open-source automated workflows present cross-cloud, AI-powered software program designed to speed up software modernization with pre-integrated information, automation and safety capabilities, enabling enterprise and IT groups to construct and modernize purposes quicker.
Why IBM Consulting and AWS?
IBM is a Premier Consulting Accomplice for AWS, with 19,000+ AWS licensed professionals throughout the globe, 16 service validations and 15 AWS competencies—changing into the quickest World GSI to safe extra AWS competencies and certifications amongst High-16 AWS Premier GSI’s inside 18 months. At re:Invent 2022, IBM Consulting was awarded the World Innovation Accomplice of the Yr and the GSI Accomplice of the Yr for Latin America, cementing shopper and AWS belief in IBM Consulting as a trusted companion of selection, in the case of AWS.
AWS has the most important cloud infrastructure providers vendor market share worldwide, averaging round 33% as of This fall 2022. AWS offers AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, a versatile, pay-as-you-go pricing mannequin, reliability, FedRAMP compliance and suppleness of compute. This makes AWS a fantastic selection for federal and state companies seeking to obtain operational efficiencies and innovate on demand to advance their mission throughout the nation.
As extra states are discovering new methods to leverage mainframes as a part of their modernization technique with hybrid cloud, IBM is main the best way and working with state and local governments throughout numerous sectors, serving to ship extra responsive providers, digitize their operations, and advance fairness and entry.
For example, IBM Consulting labored with the Division of Youngsters and Households of a U.S. state to modernize their extremely complicated legacy software techniques—comprised of 200 databases and 72 software modules right into a strategic enterprise AWS cloud platform, leading to 200M strains of Java code.
Leveraging IBM Garage Method for cloud, IBM Consulting groups executed a confirmed factory-based strategy (course of, expertise, instruments) to do the next:
- Ship throughput and consistency in migration and rationalization.
- Standardize on a core set of platforms, infrastructure and instruments throughout environments—spanning a number of companies and repair suppliers.
- Empower finish customers with self-service catalog administration.
This resulted in a 50% discount in annual working prices, bettering software response time by 3.5x, benefiting end-user expertise, and shifting the state to a “pay-as-you-go” mannequin for a decreased upfront dedication.
In 2022, IBM Consulting leveraged AIMM and labored with one other main U.S. metropolis company serving 19M residents. They led the modernization and migration of 29 user-facing purposes, growing standardized DevOps, expertise, and quality-assurance processes whereas modernizing and migrating three legacy purposes to AWS by Q1 2023.
The IBM and AWS partnership can speed up your CSE modernization journey
For a state contemplating modernizing the legacy mainframe system, IBM recommends the mix of a number of of the next patterns:
- Migration to AWS with no/minimal code adjustments with middleware emulator.
- Migration to AWS with refactoring (auto-refactoring of code to Java/.Web).
- Rearchitecting and modernizing with new channels of knowledge supply (leveraging microservices).
- Knowledge migration to the cloud for analytics and insights.
For all these patterns, enterprise practical equivalence is important, as detailed beneath.
Leveraging these patterns and our intensive AWS expertise, IBM Consulting has solidified these patterns as accelerators to assist shoppers seeking to migrate to AWS. Beneath is a high-level schematic.
At AWS re:Invent 2022, IBM shared five hybrid application modernization patterns, full with reference architectures for DevOps/API Life cycles, demos and making the IBM Z Cloud Modernization stack accessible on AWS Market. As well as, we’ve developed reference architectures for deploying IBM Mainframe z/OS on AWS with IBM ZD&T, an AWS native development environment reference architecture for modernizing z/OS purposes, and a flexible, integrated application modernization and IT automation platform, enabling states to speed up software modernization, obtain IT automation, cut back threat of software adjustments, create and deploy safe APIs, and cut back the necessity for specialised expertise.
For code refactoring—along with home-grown instruments and third-party instruments—IBM is coaching its sources on AWS Blue Age (a latest AWS acquisition) and specializing in simplifying and optimizing the modernization journey by automating nearly all of the code-refactoring course of.
This strategy has yielded instant advantages for our shoppers, together with offering higher ROI, frontloading the financial savings to energy modernization by means of reinvestment, and offering a gradual ramp up for states’ human workforce—important for constructing the abilities obligatory for working a mission-critical workload.
Study extra
States and their little one assist enforcement techniques want a expertise companion that’s dedicated to listening and understanding the truth of the place the state is on the modernization journey. They want a companion that may work in tandem with a state to tailor an strategy that helps its imaginative and prescient, constraints and present investments.
IBM brings deep child-support {industry} information, modern applied sciences and experience on AWS by means of a novel mixture of IBM Consulting, software program and as-a-service capabilities. From idea to scale, our end-to-end options and confirmed strategies assist little one assist companies modernize their purposes and infrastructure with pace and consistency, so states can keep forward of the curve.
IBM is proud to be a trusted companion of selection for a lot of states and is raring to assist modernize assist techniques designed to take care of the welfare of our most prized asset—our households.
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