Collaboration with the IRS on CICD Pipeline Recognized with “Diversity in DevOps” Award
CHANTILLY, VA, Nov. 3, 2020 – The DevOps World 2020 Conference, hosted by CloudBees, Inc., honored a collaboration between Citizant and the Internal Revenue Service with the “Diverstity in DevOps” award as part of the CloudBees Innovation Awards presented on September 24, 2020.
These awards honor companies that achieve outstanding business results and return value to their organizations providing DevOps solutions. The Diversity in DevOps award recognizes Citizant and the IRS for implementing diversity and inclusion practices within their DevOps community and adopting practices that empower and celebrate team members to spur innovation and stronger business outcomes.
Citizant and the IRS built a team that encourages and values diversity in ethnicity, culture, age, skills, and perspectives during their DevOps project. In early 2020, the team collaborated to develop the patent-pending Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CICD) Template Framework™, which provides intelligent flexibility and fault-tolerance by automatically configuring the pipeline for different development stacks and operating environments – making it easier to offer a true Pipeline as a Service (PaaS) capability.
“To set the stage for effective change management, we solicited and honored the diversity of opinions and perspectives among developers, product owners, operations, and security teams,” said Amin Qazi, IRS Technical Advisor. “By fully understanding the expectations and priorities of all stakeholders, we were able to empower project teams to focus on creating business logic and adding features, rather than worrying about the technical intricacies of DevOps.” “To come up with an elegant, workable solution to this challenge, we sought to understand the cultural dimensions, mindset, and inherent biases of the IRS project teams,” said Rupesh Kumar, Citizant’s Chief Architect for the IRS CICD Pipeline. “While large enterprises partition their organizations for good reasons, we worked diligently across the agency to bridge the silos by collaborating and participating in active listening.”
A Collaboration to Build the CICD Template Framework™
Citizant and the IRS have collaborated since 2014 to establish the IRS DevOps Center of Excellence. Citizant engineered a fully automated CICD pipeline, using CloudBees as the pipeline orchestrator, to allow software developers to build, test, and deliver capabilities in hours, rather than weeks as required under traditional build/test methods. Citizant and the IRS have successfully on-boarded more than 100 mission-critical IRS applications to the CICD pipeline in the past two years, saving IRS project teams an estimated 24,000 person-hours.
Citizant and the IRS partnered to create a patent-pending innovation called the CICD Template Framework. Using CloudBees CI, the framework allows application development teams to populate a Jenkinsfile with details about their project’s technology stack, source code, and build tools. The CICD pipeline automatically maps these application/build settings to the correct environment configurations for containerized or non-containerized deployment to any on-prem or cloud environment. The CICD Template Framework ensures a fault-tolerant marriage between Development and Operations – the true goal of DevOps.
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About the Internal Revenue Service
The IRS is a bureau of the Department of the Treasury and one of the world’s most efficient tax administrators. The IRS’s mission is to provide America’s taxpayers top-quality service by helping them understand and meet their tax responsibilities and enforce the law with integrity and fairness to all. In partnership with Congress, the Service’s role is to help the large majority of compliant taxpayers with the tax law, while ensuring that the minority who are unwilling to comply pay their fair share. In the 2017 fiscal year, the IRS processed more than 245 million returns and collected more than $3.4 trillion in gross revenue, spending 34 cents for every $100 it collected.
About Citizant, Inc.
Citizant designs and delivers smarter, leaner business and IT transformation solutions for the U.S. government. The company employs leading experts in Agile transformation, DevSecOps automation, enterprise data management, process improvement, and program management. Citizant invests in mature business practices to ensure delivery excellence. Its Civilian Business Unit was recently appraised at Maturity Level 3 for both CMMI® Development and Services Version 2.0, making Citizant the 4th company worldwide to achieve this distinction. The company is also certified in ISO 9001:2015 for Talent Acquisition, ISO 20000-1:2018 for Shared Services, and ISO 27001:2013 for Information Security. Citizant is headquartered in Chantilly, Va., with employees supporting government customers in 26 states and Puerto Rico. Follow Citizant on LinkedIn and Twitter.
About CloudBees
CloudBees, the enterprise software delivery company, provides the industry’s leading DevOps technology platform. CloudBees enables developers to focus on what they do best: Build stuff that matters while providing peace of mind to management with powerful risk mitigation, compliance, and governance tools. Used by many of the Fortune 100, CloudBees is helping thousands of companies harness the power of continuous everything and gets them on the fastest path from a great idea, to great software, to amazing customer experiences, to being a business that changes lives. Follow CloudBees on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
Media Contacts
For Citizant:
Christine Brown
cbrown@citizant.com
(703) 687-1676
For CloudBees
Sydney Holmquist
PAN Communications
cloudbees@pancomm.com
(407) 734-7327