Agencies across the Government have legacy IT systems that are increasingly difficult to maintain and upgrade — at least 10 systems are more than 40 years old. In addition to the risk that mission-critical systems could fail because of fragile infrastructure or limited mainframe talent still in the market, legacy systems also consume budgets that are needed to address new mission requirements. According to a Nov. 2017 report from the Partnership for Public Service, 77% of the $85 billion in Federal IT spending planned for 2017 was used to maintain legacy IT investments — leaving few resources for IT modernization. However, the Modernizing Government Technology Act of 2017 allocates $500 million against which agencies can borrow to fund IT modernization projects.
Citizant has the integrated expertise across many IT and management domains to tackle the Government’s difficult IT modernization challenges. These projects require more than just knowledge of obsolete programming languages. Modernizing these systems requires the ability to:
- Document current state IT and legacy systems architecture;
- Conduct gap analysis between the current and desired future state architecture.
- Map and redesign business processes
- Create phased migration and investment plans
- Understand enterprise data sources and targets
- Create new governance plans
- Write and test code using Agile methods as requirements emerge
- Integrate with emerging DevOps processes and capabilities, including CI/CD and automated testing
- Migrate data to new database platforms on in-house or cloud environments
A Holistic, Agile Approach to Modernization
Citizant has two decades of experience in Federal EA at agencies including Department of Homeland Security, Internal Revenue Service, Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, Housing & Urban Development, Securities and Exchange Commission, and Department of the Interior. This long-term involvement with Federal EA enables us to develop solution approaches to modernization that leverage other current and planned IT investments and mesh with future systems development efforts. Our Process Improvement expertise dovetails with EA to produce modernization roadmaps that integrate seamlessly with existing organizational process.
We have developed applications in Waterfall, Agile, and hybrid environments. Our senior software developers are cross-trained and certified in leading legacy, current, and emerging platforms. As a capable partner for system development, modernization, and enhancement, we are often tasked with maintaining the functionality and security of legacy systems, even as we address new user requirements arising from legislation, regulations, or evolving mission and organization priorities.
Citizant currently works with two Federal agencies to modernize their existing case management systems, some of which process hundreds of thousands of cases each year and are heavily paper-based. The goal for each of these agencies is to transition to a fully paperless environment within the next 2-5 years. As part of our work, we lead facilitated sessions with business stakeholders, provide Agile training, develop requirements and user stories, design new business processes, assist with the analysis of technology alternatives, and develop release plans and strategic roadmaps.
Our combined expertise in these important data management, systems engineering, and application development disciplines – provided by a highly mature, integrated small business – allows us to succeed in IT modernization initiatives where smaller boutique firms and large, siloed integrators often fail.