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 programs, and with the present constituents of those programs changing into extra shopper technology-centric, the usage of antiquated expertise programs is archaic and unsustainable. At this level, households anticipate state companies to have a contemporary, environment friendly baby assist system.
The next are some components driving these states to pursue modernization:
- Present programs are developed on mainframe-based programs utilizing an antiquated, scarcely obtainable expertise stack.
- The unavailability of a talented workforce makes these programs 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 deal with and collaborate with households, somewhat than specializing in navigating an ageing system.
To satisfy these ever-increasing citizen expectations to devour state-provided baby assist providers, statewide baby assist programs 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 reduce down on handbook effort.
- Automate routine duties to unencumber time to offer personalised providers and construct relationships with households.
- Empower caseworkers with on-line instruments to collaborate with colleagues and entry information repositories.
Current programs merely will not be capable of present the capabilities wanted to appreciate this family-centered strategy of service supply and should be modernized, instantly.
Each U.S. state is completely different
Core system necessities—reminiscent of new case initiation, offering location and institution providers, imposing orders, dealing with monetary transactions, and so forth.—are mandated by the Office of Federal Child Support Enforcement (OCSE), making many state baby assist enforcement (CSE) programs comparable.
Regardless of this commonality, each baby 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 programs expertise panorama for every state might be a mainframe legacy system with various levels of maturity, portability, reliability and scalability.
States’ current funding in modernizing ancillary programs (e.g., improved doc administration capabilities, internet portals, cellular functions, information warehouses, enhanced location providers, and so forth.) may negate the necessity for modernization for these programs. This, together with the general maturity of CSEs, uninterrupted service necessities, state price range, timing, staffing, and different components mandate a complete modernization strategy to drag in these investments.
IBM Consulting’s Accelerated Incremental Mainframe Modernization
Legacy functions, 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, somewhat than simply translation. Our strategy focuses on enterprise information 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 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 a substitute 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 appreciate their enterprise objectives and ship worth quicker.
The next are a number of the industry-leading methodologies, instruments and belongings utilized by AIMM:
- IBM Garage brings collectively {industry} finest 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 so forth.
- IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM) permits companies to reply to real-time information by making use of automated choices, enabling enterprise customers to develop and keep operational programs 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 functions quicker.
Why IBM Consulting and AWS?
IBM is a Premier Consulting Associate for AWS, with 19,000+ AWS licensed professionals throughout the globe, 16 service validations and 15 AWS competencies—changing into the quickest International 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 International Innovation Associate of the 12 months and the GSI Associate of the 12 months for Latin America, cementing shopper and AWS belief in IBM Consulting as a trusted companion of alternative, in relation to AWS.
AWS has the largest cloud infrastructure providers 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 suppleness of compute. This makes AWS an excellent alternative for federal and state companies trying 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 varied sectors, serving to ship extra responsive providers, digitize their operations, and advance fairness and entry.
For example, IBM Consulting labored with the Division of Kids and Households of a U.S. state to modernize their extremely complicated legacy software programs—comprised of 200 databases and 72 software modules right into a strategic enterprise AWS cloud platform, leading to 200M traces 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 functions, creating standardized DevOps, expertise, and quality-assurance processes whereas modernizing and migrating three legacy functions 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 data supply (leveraging microservices).
- Knowledge migration to the cloud for analytics and insights.
For all these patterns, enterprise practical equivalence is crucial, as detailed beneath.
Leveraging these patterns and our in depth AWS expertise, IBM Consulting has solidified these patterns as accelerators to assist shoppers trying 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 now have 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 functions, and a flexible, integrated application modernization and IT automation platform, enabling states to speed up software modernization, obtain IT automation, scale back threat of software adjustments, create and deploy safe APIs, and scale 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 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 quick advantages for our shoppers, together with offering higher ROI, frontloading the financial savings to energy modernization by reinvestment, and offering a gradual ramp up for states’ human workforce—essential for constructing the talents needed for working a mission-critical workload.
Be taught extra
States and their baby assist enforcement programs 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 current investments.
IBM brings deep child-support {industry} information, modern applied sciences and experience on AWS by 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 baby assist companies modernize their functions and infrastructure with velocity and consistency, so states can keep forward of the curve.
IBM is proud to be a trusted companion of alternative for a lot of states and is keen to assist modernize assist programs designed to take care of the welfare of our most prized asset—our households.
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