IBM SoftwareGovernment

Solution Brief

Leveraging 20th centurytechnology in 21stcentury governmentModernize government to revitalize investments,reduce spending, and facilitate smarter services

Highlights● Align strategic and financial goals with a

future-state roadmap

● Revitalize and rationalize existing applica-

tion portfolios to help increase flexibility

● Bridge organizational silos from decision

making through delivery and optimize

team agility

In these times of rapid innovation, more effective government requiresinvestment to leverage technological advancements that can deliver next-generation services in a more efficient and transparent way. Investing tomodernize government runs counter to conventional wisdom in a harsheconomic climate that prompts mandates to slash budgets, but theincreased need for government services across an expanding portfolio ofprocesses and programs has made it unavoidable.

One of the biggest inhibitors to improving performance is the ability toassess the value of investments made 5, 10, or 15 years ago. For the pastseveral decades, governments around the world have spent trillions ofdollars on technology. Aging systems can inhibit integration, extensibility,and productivity, and may carry higher maintenance costs when com-pared to more modern hardware and software investments. But often thebusiness processes and data that drive the agency’s business are embeddedin the system. Finding a way to holistically analyze legacy assets to assesscosts, skills requirements, benefits, and alternatives is the first steptowards modernizing government.

On the road to modernization, governments need to understand whichassets are mission critical, determine where duplication exists and whereassets are underutilized or unnecessary, and determine the true value oftheir portfolio.

It is clear that governments must focus on best practices that streamlineboth costs and processes to make assets more productive and efficient anddeliver services to citizens more affordably.

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IBM Software Solution BriefGovernment

Optimize your applications, people,team, and infrastructure investmentsGovernments face a spectrum of complex options, from sun-setting their entire system and building a new replacement, tocontinuing to use old technology as is with high maintenancecosts. Typically, devising an optimal strategy for modernizationrequires striking the right balance across all domains on whento retire, modernize, or extend legacy systems or when to leavethem alone.

IBM® Rational® enterprise modernization solutions present a broad portfolio of offerings and services to help governmentagencies proactively plan and manage change, save dollars, andbuild a smarter foundation for future investments. We focus onfour primary areas to help improve our clients’ business value intoday’s tough economic climate: applications, people, teams andinfrastructure.

Case Study: APIS IT

To support upcoming national elections, Croatia’s Agency for

Information Systems and Information Technologies Support

(APIS IT) needed to develop a Web 2.0–based application that

could be used to provide voters living abroad with the ability to vote.

The new solution had to function within an existing IT architecture,

and security and accuracy were essential to ensure the credibility

of election results. Using IBM Rational, APIS replaced several

separate applications and a lot of paperwork with an integral

Web 2.0 solution that integrates voter registration throughout the

election process to help ensure that only qualified, registered

individuals vote. The solution identifies security vulnerabilities prior

to the solution going live, helping IT to identify and correct any

security issues that could otherwise impact the elections.

Increase flexibility by revitalizing andrationalizing existing applicationportfoliosGovernment agencies have hundreds, and often thousands, of applications in their portfolio and without good control of these software assets it is difficult to know where to startmodernizing. With shrinking budgets comes a greater scrutinyof portfolio investments, making it critical to align IT activitiesand investments with business goals and objectives. Most organizations do not proactively manage their IT applicationportfolio, and incomplete, outdated, or inaccurate informationon the application portfolio elements expose development andmaintenance projects to delays and cost overruns. In 2010alone, the US federal government spent close to $80 billion to support its widely dispersed assets, and over the last decadehas spent more than $600 billion on IT. Eighty nine percent of infrastructure spending was reported as maintenance and 63 percent of mission spending was reported as maintenance.1,2

Understanding the impact and cost of change to the IT systemis difficult without an inventory of application assets, includingcharacteristics such as cost, complexity, usage patterns, and associations to existing business processes. Creating a blueprintof the IT environment helps an agency get a complete pictureof what they have in their application inventory, whether theirIT implementations align with the business mission, how and if these applications can be reused, and how to be smart inmaintaining and extending these critical applications.

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IBM Software Solution BriefGovernment

Manage the technical and financialimpacts of changeDecoding complex IT environments is critical to managingtransformation and aligning IT investments with the strategicneeds of the business. However, many organizations lack theprocesses and tooling to continually assess and evaluate their IT portfolio based on balanced business and technical ROI criteria, and most cannot identify a definitive future state blueprint and roadmap they are working towards.

IBM solutions can provide you with the intelligence on yourapplications that you need to make better business decisionsusing an integrated enterprise architecture and portfolio man-agement solution to help you analyze cross-platform applica-tions. You can achieve greater understanding of the missioncritical applications that consume a majority of your IT budgetand also leverage your existing assets.

IBM Rational Asset Analyzer software can help you assess theimpact and risk of proposed changes and the business rules thatdrive decisions by gaining insight into relationships within andamong existing applications, especially COBOL and PL/I, theiruse of IBM DB2®, and their runtime contexts (IBM CICS®,IBM IMS™ and Batch).

“We managed to greatly improve the end-user experience and increase productivity, all without sacrificing application securityand reliability.”

—Robert Stanko, Division Manager, APIS IT

This multidimensional perspective provides a powerful capital planning and investment control function to help yourationalize your application portfolio and infrastructure, betteralign it to business and regulatory requirements, and capitalizeon complexity.

The IBM Rational business planning solutions can help you:

● Make faster, better-informed strategic and tactical decisions● Prioritize IT investments to support business goals● Improve risk management of organizational transformation● Turn strategy into execution and measure the results

Move towards a Service OrientedArchitectureIBM Rational software can help government agencies develop a strategy for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that emphasizes the reuse of the best practices, developmentprocesses, and existing applications that are running theirorganization today. A cohesive and flexible set of applicationarchitecture, implementation, and asset management solutionscan help you to identify and repurpose existing assets for reuseand position the organization to respond more quickly to theneeds of the citizens.

IBM Rational Developer for System z® software is a modern,integrated cross-platform development environment which can help you to rapidly design, construct, assemble, test, anddeploy high-quality SOA applications for CICS, IMS, and theIBM WebSphere® Application Server platforms. Combinedwith Rational Asset Analyzer software and IBM Rational AssetManager software, it can help you analyze application assetsmore effectively and share reusable artifacts. Consequently,your organization can more efficiently identify, manage, andgovern the design, development, release, and consumption ofservices as part of their service oriented architecture and otherreuse initiatives. With ability to catalogue, organize, reuse,

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IBM Software Solution BriefGovernment

manage, and report on any type of asset, organizations can govern the use of a variety of development assets across theirdistributed environment, driving collaboration and economiesof scale with these best practices.

With a services oriented approach that leverages existing application assets, you can lower your maintenance costs,reduce time to market, improve business alignments for growth,and limit risk.

Case Study: A US city

To reduce costs, improve efficiency and drive economic growth, a

US city sought to adopt web services for its residents and busi-

nesses. By migrating to the Enterprise Generation Language (EGL)

with IBM Rational Developer for System z software, the city could

adapt 90 percent of its applications as web services and quickly

develop new features.

User interface modernizationGovernment agencies are under increasing pressure to create easy-to-use services for citizens while also retainingemployees and keeping training costs low. A user interfacemodernization solution offers a low risk and low cost approachto web-enable or service-enable existing green screen applica-tions, helping agencies provide a range of appealing, more intuitive user interfaces to increase productivity and boostemployee and constituent satisfaction. This approach candeliver immediate business value—such as reduced trainingtime for new employees—while also buying time for moreextensive modernization efforts later.

IBM provides an integrated set of development tools to helpdrive successful legacy interface transformation, to help ensurethat user productivity gains can be driven by business needs and put to use quickly. With IBM Rational Host AccessTransformation Services (HATS) software, you can quicklytransform your traditional green screen applications into intu-itive web, portlet, rich client, or mobile device user interfaces.

Bring it together with the enterprisemodernization for developersThe enterprise modernization solution for developers providesa modern, integrated, productive platform for integrated collaboration, change management, source code management,analysis, development, and unit test. This environment canmeet the needs of developers accustomed to an integrated,visual, automated development platform.

Government agencies must reduce tool support costs and at thesame time move to modern platforms, implement with moremodern languages, and deploy tools for their cross-platformapplication development. IBM application transformation toolsand services help you understand the current root-causes ofissues and propose a roadmap to help you migrate from olderlanguages and expensive tools to modern development plat-forms, languages, databases and tools.

IBM Rational software can you help increase flexibility by revitalizing existing application portfolios:

● Cut high maintenance costs of applications through consoli-dation and insight

● Increase business agility and reduce complexity by leveragingproven assets

● Reduce license and support costs by migrating aging applica-tions to modern platforms

● Reduce project risk and cost by focusing on quality across thesoftware life cycle

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IBM Software Solution BriefGovernment

Boost productivity and accelerateinnovation in a modern developmentenvironmentGovernment agencies need to increase development staff productivity as well as to attract new employees.IBM Rational solutions help you establish comprehensive,cross-platform integrated development environments based onmodern Eclipse-based tools that allow teams to develop andmaintain enterprise applications spanning multiple platforms,languages, and technologies. Although the traditional main-frame environment has provided consistent tooling for decades,the current approach of isolated developers, tooling, andprocesses for the different platforms and programming lan-guages that are necessary to complete a typical, multitieredapplication project can be limiting.

“We’re looking to move as many existing systems and services as possible to the web to make it easy for our citizens to interactwith the city.”

—A system analyst for the city

Migrating to a modern development environment based onsolid best practices and processes adds value through higherproductivity, is more attractive for new developers, has the ability to off load some development MIPS, integrates withcomplete application life-cycle tools, and can help overcomeskills attrition around legacy languages. Implementing a more modern development can generate 22 - 37 percentimprovement in developer productivity, reduce host CPU usage50 - 80 percent with workstation syntax checking, and attractnew talent with modern tools and processes.3

To address the needs of government agencies to build modern,cross-platform applications with both existing and new staff,Rational offers Enterprise Generation Language (EGL), anopen, modern business language that helps you to extend exist-ing applications and develop new applications using a highlyproductive, abstract language in a modern development environment.

Optimize team agility as you bridgeorganizational silosMany government agencies are hindered by “islands” of development, each with different tools, processes, and teaminfrastructures that do not support real-time collaboration or integrated, comprehensive oversight. To reduce team infrastructure costs, government agencies must enable agile,multiplatform and cross-agency collaboration and governance.Thus far, most organizations have been slow to adopt modernsoftware tools to the degree necessary to increase the efficiencyand overall effectiveness of individuals and teams responsiblefor application maintenance and modernization projects.

IBM’s Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutionhelps improve communication across disparate IT teamsregardless of skills, programming language, or technology platform. CLM is a unified and collaborative software deliveryapproach providing a consistent process paradigm and common toolset to help reduce cost, minimize risk exposure,and improve development agility. The solution can help organizations ensure that the right versions of the right applications are available at all times, and that they can providean audit trail of changes across the software life cycle to preventapplication failures and help meet increasingly stringent regula-tory requirements. IBM provides cross platform applicationCLM that is inclusive of the mainframe developer.

CLM helps organizations deploy new, common team infra-structure for source control, change management, and buildthat can empower your team with integrated collaboration,process automation, and reporting to help achieve improvedcommunication, higher quality, informed decision-making, and more automated, transparent and predictable softwaredevelopment.

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IBM Software Solution BriefGovernment

Government agencies are riddled with projects that span multiple business units, have inflexible architectures and brokenprocesses, and struggle with realities of intellectual propertyrights and regulatory compliance mandates. To address therequirements of government agencies to manage projects and manage traceability of development artifacts across a collaborative software development life cycle, Rational offersIBM Rational Team Concert™ (RTC) software. RTC is basedon the Jazz™ open development environment, a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform that supports globallydistributed teams and showcases the future of systems and software delivery. We support a community at Jazz.net whereyou can participate in the development of Jazz-based productsfrom IBM, directly impact the delivery of capabilities in theseproducts, and experiment with leading age milestone driversthat are currently in development.

A European government agency

To save costs and avoid redeveloping all of its legacy applications,

this European government agency needed a solution to web-enable

its current applications, comply with strict security guidelines and

provide the framework for an on-demand business environment.

By making services and applications available 24×7 to citizens and

other government organizations within the country, they hoped to

meet the mandates of the e-Europe initiative and increase conven-

ience for the agency’s end users. Overall, the IBM solution helped

boost the performance, availability, and security of the government

agency’s mainframe environment.

Improve system utilization by leveraginghardware capabilitiesMany government agencies want to optimize application performance on existing hardware; however they have back-level compilers or are not fully using optimization to reducecapital expenses. In today’s tight times, when an agency needs todefer capital expense, it is important to get the most out of theexisting infrastructure.

IBM offers dynamic infrastructure solutions that can helpimprove services, reduces costs and manages risk while helpingyou thrive in today’s fast paced world. IBM Rational softwarecan help you:

● Reduce MIPS costs and improve performance with the latestcompilation technology.

● Lower startup costs with an affordable and dynamic infrastructure for development and test.

● Provision software delivery services leveraging cloud computing.

Improve mainframe capacity for unittestingWith most government agencies, the challenge to increase pro-ductivity is often hindered by test delays caused by dependen-cies on the operations team. IBM Rational Developer forSystem z Unit Test software provides a low-cost develop, build, test environment for mainframe applications. TheIBM Rational Developer for System z Unit Test feature cangreatly enhance the way organizations develop, maintain andtest mainframe applications. The new Rational Developer forSystem z Unit Test feature helps:

● Eliminate the cost differentials between distributed and existing mainframe-based development environments

● Liberate developers to rapidly prototype new applications● Build and test new IBM System z applications virtually

anytime● Make it easily accessible to a wider range of mainframe

developers and testers● Leverage a more modern and agile team workbench that

accelerates delivery of new workloads spanning multiple platforms

● Free up mainframe development MIPS for production capacity

● Experience MIPS savings with our integrated workbenchofferings

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IBM Software Solution BriefGovernment

Increaseflexibility

Boostproductivity

Optimizebusiness agility

Increasesystem utilization

IntegrateApplications

EmpowerPeople

UnifyTeams

ExploitInfrastructure

Modernizing government can help revitalize investments, reduce spending, and facilitate smarter government services

Why IBM?To maximize productivity and see significant positive results,government agencies must address all four areas of application,people, teams, and infrastructure. It means finding ways toleverage existing assets more effectively, rather than assumingthat wholesale rebuild and replace approaches are the onlyoption. It means looking across the enterprise, across differentplatforms, geographies, and technologies, and plotting a clear,executable course towards reduced costs, improved productivity,and agility, while concentrating efforts on applications that aremost important to the organization’s business objectives.

IBM Rational solutions help organizations approach modern-ization challenges in new, more cost-effective and practical waysthat holistically consider the application portfolio and mainte-nance, as well as the critical importance of the people, teams,and infrastructure that support those assets.

IBM recognizes that only you can build a modernizationroadmap that best fits your organization’s needs. No two agencies will have the same set of constraints or applicationportfolios. Some will want to rapidly modernize in the shortestpossible time, while others may wish to slowly integrate mod-ernization into current projects, stretching their modernizationroadmap over several years. Whatever path you choose,IBM offers the tools, best practices, and industry expertise youneed to cost-effectively and incrementally evolve your coreapplications, skills, and development teams toward new archi-tectures and technologies.

Start todayWith a comprehensive portfolio of leading services, tooling andskills to support the entire enterprise modernization life cycle,IBM can help you rein in maintenance costs and extend the life,flexibility and value of your applications. Best of all, the moneyyou save can be put to better use for the business.

Please Recycle

For more informationTo learn more about IBM Rational solutions for enterprisemodernization, contact your IBM sales representative orIBM Business Partner, or visit:ibm.com/software/rational/solutions/em/

To learn more about modernization solutions for theIBM System z platform, visit: ibm.com/software/rational/solutions/em/systems/z/

To learn more about modernization solutions for the IBM iplatform, visit:ibm.com/software/rational/solutions/em/systems/i/

Additionally, financing solutions from IBM Global Financingcan enable effective cash management, protection from tech-nology obsolescence, improved total cost of ownership andreturn on investment. Also, our Global Asset Recovery Serviceshelp address environmental concerns with new, more energy-efficient solutions. For more information on IBM GlobalFinancing, visit: ibm.com/financing

IBM Professional ServicesAn experienced worldwide staff of professional services consult-ants supports IBM Rational enterprise modernization solutions.We can implement solutions and support your staff throughoutthe entire application modernization life cycle from initialanalysis, through design and development, and extending intodelivery and ongoing management.

© Copyright IBM Corporation 2011

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Produced in the United States of AmericaMay 2011All Rights Reserved

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1 http://it.usaspending.gov/content/analysis

2 www.cio.gov/documents/25-Point-Implementation-Plan-to-Reform-

Federal%20IT.pdf

3 Aggregation of results from a productivity study conducted by IBM System z customers.

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