With 68% of child support enforcement (CSE) systems aging, most state companies are at the moment modernizing them or getting ready to modernize. Greater than 20% of families and children are supported by these methods, and with the present constituents of those methods changing into extra shopper technology-centric, using antiquated expertise methods is archaic and unsustainable. At this level, households anticipate state companies to have a contemporary, environment friendly youngster help system.
The next are some elements driving these states to pursue modernization:
- Present methods are developed on mainframe-based methods utilizing an antiquated, scarcely obtainable expertise stack.
- The unavailability of a talented workforce makes these methods costly to function, handle and improve.
- Youngster help applications 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 concentrate on and collaborate with households, relatively than specializing in navigating an getting older system.
To meet these ever-increasing citizen expectations to devour state-provided youngster help companies, statewide youngster help methods 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 companies to ease stress and frustration in instances of want.
- Be intuitive, user-friendly and minimize down on guide effort.
- Automate routine duties to unlock time to supply personalised companies and construct relationships with households.
- Empower caseworkers with on-line instruments to collaborate with colleagues and entry information repositories.
Present methods merely will not be capable of present the capabilities wanted to comprehend this family-centered strategy of service supply and have to be modernized, instantly.
Each U.S. state is totally different
Core system necessities—similar to new case initiation, offering location and institution companies, imposing orders, dealing with monetary transactions, and so on.—are mandated by the Office of Federal Child Support Enforcement (OCSE), making many state youngster help enforcement (CSE) methods related.
Regardless of this commonality, each youngster help 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 methods expertise panorama for every state might be a mainframe legacy system with various levels of maturity, portability, reliability and scalability.
States’ present funding in modernizing ancillary methods (e.g., improved doc administration capabilities, internet portals, cell purposes, knowledge warehouses, enhanced location companies, and so on.) would possibly negate the necessity for modernization for these methods. This, together with the general maturity of CSEs, uninterrupted service necessities, state price range, timing, staffing, and different elements mandate a complete modernization strategy to tug 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, due to this fact 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, relatively than simply translation. Our strategy focuses on enterprise knowledge domain-centric initiatives that may ship worth within the brief time period and create a improvement ecosystem conducive to incremental optimization—as a substitute of a dangerous big-bang utility and infrastructure replace.
As highlighted within the graphic under, AIMM’s strategy focuses on beginning with a enterprise and expertise map alongside the client-specific IT ecosystems, as a substitute of solely a code conversion.
This helps us create a consumer 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 utility to knowledge, transfer mainframe knowledge in mainframe format into cloud storage (with close to real-time, bidirectional knowledge sync), and leverage new and fashionable cloud knowledge administration companies. With its confirmed instruments and processes, AIMM meets purchasers the place they’re within the legacy modernization journey, analyzing (auto-scan) legacy code, extracting enterprise guidelines, changing it to fashionable language, deploying it to any cloud, and managing expertise for transformational enterprise outcomes. Finally, this helps states to comprehend their enterprise objectives and ship worth quicker.
The next are a few of the industry-leading methodologies, instruments and property utilized by AIMM:
- IBM Garage brings collectively {industry} greatest practices, technical experience and information, consumer collaboration and partnership, cloud service suppliers, and the IBM Consulting groups to ship accelerated outcomes.
- IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator (ICCA) recommends consumer journeys with out deep engineering information, protecting 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 principles from the COBOL utility supply code and generates a information mannequin, which is then deployed right into a guidelines engine like IBM Operational Decision Manager, Pega, and so on.
- IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM) permits companies to answer real-time knowledge by making use of automated selections, enabling enterprise customers to develop and preserve operational methods determination logic.
- IBM’s open-source automated workflows present cross-cloud, AI-powered software program designed to speed up utility modernization with pre-integrated knowledge, 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 Prime-16 AWS Premier GSI’s inside 18 months. At re:Invent 2022, IBM Consulting was awarded the World Innovation Accomplice of the 12 months and the GSI Accomplice of the 12 months for Latin America, cementing consumer and AWS belief in IBM Consulting as a trusted companion of selection, in the case of AWS.
AWS has the most important cloud infrastructure companies vendor market share worldwide, averaging round 33% as of This fall 2022. AWS supplies AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, a versatile, pay-as-you-go pricing mannequin, reliability, FedRAMP compliance and adaptability of compute. This makes AWS an ideal 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 way in which and working with state and local governments throughout numerous sectors, serving to ship extra responsive companies, 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 utility methods—comprised of 200 databases and 72 utility 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 utility response time by 3.5x, benefiting end-user expertise, and shifting the state to a “pay-as-you-go” mannequin for a lowered 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 modifications with middleware emulator.
- Migration to AWS with refactoring (auto-refactoring of code to Java/.Web).
- Rearchitecting and modernizing with new channels of data supply (leveraging microservices).
- Knowledge migration to the cloud for analytics and insights.
For all these patterns, enterprise practical equivalence is crucial, as detailed under.
Leveraging these patterns and our intensive AWS expertise, IBM Consulting has solidified these patterns as accelerators to assist purchasers 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 obtainable on AWS Market. As well as, we’ve got 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 utility modernization, obtain IT automation, cut back threat of utility modifications, 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 assets on AWS Blue Age (a current AWS acquisition) and specializing in simplifying and optimizing the modernization journey by automating the vast majority of the code-refactoring course of.
This strategy has yielded speedy advantages for our purchasers, 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—essential for constructing the abilities vital for working a mission-critical workload.
Be taught extra
States and their youngster help enforcement methods 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 can 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 singular mixture of IBM Consulting, software program and as-a-service capabilities. From idea to scale, our end-to-end options and confirmed strategies assist youngster help companies modernize their purposes and infrastructure with velocity 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 keen to assist modernize help methods designed to take care of the welfare of our most prized asset—our households.
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