The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) envisions a cloud-based Enterprise Case Management (ECM) platform to collect and analyze data, catalog issues and potential solutions to accomplish its mission. The 60 legacy case management systems in use result in significant amount of redundancy and overlap in the data; and the maintenance on multiple legacy systems with numerous languages, and different structures is costly.
The purpose of this acquisition is to support Information Technology (IT) Application Development (AD) to deliver a cloud-based ECM platform that contains a Portfolio of case management Solutions/Products capable of supporting issue-resolution across all IRS’ Lines of Businesses (LOBs) utilizing IT Enterprise Program Management Office’s (EPMO’s) ECM Program’s (hereafter referred to ECM Program’s) selected Commercial Off the Shelf Software (COTS) development platform, currently Pega. The ECM Portfolio of Solutions/Products shall give every authorized IRS employee the ability to see the entire range of issues and communications with an entity, quickly resolve concerns cost effectively, and give visibility to responsible managers. This comprehensive strategy shall enhance taxpayer service, modernize business processes, and improve the efficiency of IRS operations. This contract does not include any new development activities which are covered under ECM Solution Integration Services (SIS) which supports IT EPMO ECM Program.
ECM Portfolio’s Solutions/Products are envisioned to comprise data-driven applications and services that allows for the facilitated sharing of case data and the disposition of cases across multiple user communities and organizational functions. The Business and IT organizations shall partner to meet their objectives to define the direction and delivery of case management for the enterprise and consolidate their processes.
The partnership shall engage all Business Owners by LOB, to identify, standardized and simplify their combined business processes within the LOB into Operational Value Streams (OVS). The Business and IT shall jointly with the OVS’s Business Owners identify every legacy case management system involved in their OVS along with the system’s capabilities and/or data contained within them. The Business and IT will partner to initiate the creation of a Portfolio Epic for the OVS in the ECM Portfolio Backlog and determine its initial sequencing/prioritization based on business and IT considerations including decommissioning.
The IRS organization supports modern frameworks, standardization, and enterprise cloud capabilities, and is seeking to use agile development methodologies for Portfolios of Solutions/Products across the agency. IRS leaders have embraced a more modern, agile pace of innovation and development of new Solutions/Products in an agile fashion to achieve an organizational shift to a more modern technological approach to application development.
To this end, the IRS is looking to adopt an Agile methodology that assist IRS Business and IT organizations to partner in meeting their objectives. Although, Agile is widely known in the software development community; the Agile tools and methods mentioned above are based on findings at www.agilemanifesto.org, however, the IRS needs a configurable and scalable Agile framework that is widely known in the software community, contains best practices to enable the delivery of innovative solutions/products and services faster, more predictably, and with higher quality. To meet this need, ECM has adopted the Scale Agile Framework (SAFe) https://www.scaledagileframework.com as outlined in Figure 1. ECM Portfolio’s Solutions/Products shall utilize the IRS’ tailored Enterprise Life Cycle (ELC) Agile Path based on SAFe is shown and outlined below in Section C.1.2, Figure 3. (Note: The use of the terms “portfolio” vs. “program”, “development value stream” vs. “project” are based ECM Program following Software Development Lifecycle methodology of using “Agile” vs. “Waterfall”).
