Solution Brief

IBM Software
Government

Leveraging 20th century

technology in 21st
century government
Modernize government to revitalize investments,
reduce spending, and facilitate smarter services

Highlights

Align strategic and nancial goals with a

future-state roadmap

Revitalize and rationalize existing application portfolios to help increase exibility

Bridge organizational silos from decision

making through delivery and optimize
team agility

In these times of rapid innovation, more effective government requires

investment to leverage technological advancements that can deliver nextgeneration services in a more efficient and transparent way. Investing to
modernize government runs counter to conventional wisdom in a harsh
economic climate that prompts mandates to slash budgets, but the
increased need for government services across an expanding portfolio of
processes and programs has made it unavoidable.
One of the biggest inhibitors to improving performance is the ability to
assess the value of investments made 5, 10, or 15 years ago. For the past
several decades, governments around the world have spent trillions of
dollars on technology. Aging systems can inhibit integration, extensibility,
and productivity, and may carry higher maintenance costs when compared to more modern hardware and software investments. But often the
business processes and data that drive the agencys business are embedded
in the system. Finding a way to holistically analyze legacy assets to assess
costs, skills requirements, benets, and alternatives is the rst step
towards modernizing government.
On the road to modernization, governments need to understand which
assets are mission critical, determine where duplication exists and where
assets are underutilized or unnecessary, and determine the true value of
their portfolio.
It is clear that governments must focus on best practices that streamline
both costs and processes to make assets more productive and efficient and
deliver services to citizens more affordably.

Solution Brief

IBM Software
Government

Optimize your applications, people,

team, and infrastructure investments

Increase exibility by revitalizing and

rationalizing existing application
portfolios

Governments face a spectrum of complex options, from sunsetting their entire system and building a new replacement, to
continuing to use old technology as is with high maintenance
costs. Typically, devising an optimal strategy for modernization
requires striking the right balance across all domains on when
to retire, modernize, or extend legacy systems or when to leave
them alone.

Government 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 start
modernizing. With shrinking budgets comes a greater scrutiny
of portfolio investments, making it critical to align IT activities
and investments with business goals and objectives. Most
organizations do not proactively manage their IT application
portfolio, and incomplete, outdated, or inaccurate information
on the application portfolio elements expose development and
maintenance projects to delays and cost overruns. In 2010
alone, the US federal government spent close to $80 billion
to support its widely dispersed assets, and over the last decade
has 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

IBM Rational enterprise modernization solutions present

a broad portfolio of offerings and services to help government
agencies proactively plan and manage change, save dollars, and
build a smarter foundation for future investments. We focus on
four primary areas to help improve our clients business value in
todays tough economic climate: applications, people, teams and
infrastructure.

Understanding the impact and cost of change to the IT system

is difficult without an inventory of application assets, including
characteristics such as cost, complexity, usage patterns, and
associations to existing business processes. Creating a blueprint
of the IT environment helps an agency get a complete picture
of what they have in their application inventory, whether their
IT implementations align with the business mission, how and
if these applications can be reused, and how to be smart in
maintaining and extending these critical applications.

Case Study: APIS IT

To support upcoming national elections, Croatias Agency for
Information Systems and Information Technologies Support
(APIS IT) needed to develop a Web 2.0based 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 qualied, registered
individuals vote. The solution identies security vulnerabilities prior
to the solution going live, helping IT to identify and correct any
security issues that could otherwise impact the elections.

Solution Brief

IBM Software
Government

Manage the technical and nancial

impacts of change

This multidimensional perspective provides a powerful

capital planning and investment control function to help you
rationalize your application portfolio and infrastructure, better
align it to business and regulatory requirements, and capitalize
on complexity.

Decoding complex IT environments is critical to managing

transformation and aligning IT investments with the strategic
needs of the business. However, many organizations lack the
processes and tooling to continually assess and evaluate their
IT portfolio based on balanced business and technical ROI
criteria, and most cannot identify a denitive future state
blueprint and roadmap they are working towards.

The IBM Rational business planning solutions can help you:

IBM solutions can provide you with the intelligence on your

applications that you need to make better business decisions
using an integrated enterprise architecture and portfolio management solution to help you analyze cross-platform applications. You can achieve greater understanding of the mission
critical applications that consume a majority of your IT budget
and also leverage your existing assets.

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 Oriented

Architecture
IBM Rational software can help government agencies
develop a strategy for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
that emphasizes the reuse of the best practices, development
processes, and existing applications that are running their
organization today. A cohesive and exible set of application
architecture, implementation, and asset management solutions
can help you to identify and repurpose existing assets for reuse
and position the organization to respond more quickly to the
needs of the citizens.

IBM Rational Asset Analyzer software can help you assess the
impact and risk of proposed changes and the business rules that
drive decisions by gaining insight into relationships within and
among existing applications, especially COBOL and PL/I, their
use of IBM DB2, and their runtime contexts (IBM CICS,
IBM IMS and Batch).

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, and
deploy high-quality SOA applications for CICS, IMS, and the
IBM WebSphere Application Server platforms. Combined
with Rational Asset Analyzer software and IBM Rational Asset
Manager software, it can help you analyze application assets
more effectively and share reusable artifacts. Consequently,
your organization can more efficiently identify, manage, and
govern the design, development, release, and consumption of
services as part of their service oriented architecture and other
reuse initiatives. With ability to catalogue, organize, reuse,

We managed to greatly improve the enduser experience and increase productivity,

all without sacricing application security
and reliability.
Robert Stanko, Division Manager, APIS IT

Solution Brief

IBM Software
Government

IBM provides an integrated set of development tools to help

drive successful legacy interface transformation, to help ensure
that user productivity gains can be driven by business needs
and put to use quickly. With IBM Rational Host Access
Transformation Services (HATS) software, you can quickly
transform your traditional green screen applications into intuitive web, portlet, rich client, or mobile device user interfaces.

manage, and report on any type of asset, organizations can

govern the use of a variety of development assets across their
distributed environment, driving collaboration and economies
of 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.

Bring it together with the enterprise

modernization for developers
The enterprise modernization solution for developers provides
a modern, integrated, productive platform for integrated
collaboration, change management, source code management,
analysis, development, and unit test. This environment can
meet the needs of developers accustomed to an integrated,
visual, automated development platform.

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 businesses. 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.

Government agencies must reduce tool support costs and at the

same time move to modern platforms, implement with more
modern languages, and deploy tools for their cross-platform
application development. IBM application transformation tools
and services help you understand the current root-causes of
issues and propose a roadmap to help you migrate from older
languages and expensive tools to modern development platforms, languages, databases and tools.

User interface modernization

Government agencies are under increasing pressure
to create easy-to-use services for citizens while also retaining
employees and keeping training costs low. A user interface
modernization solution offers a low risk and low cost approach
to web-enable or service-enable existing green screen applications, helping agencies provide a range of appealing, more
intuitive user interfaces to increase productivity and boost
employee and constituent satisfaction. This approach can
deliver immediate business valuesuch as reduced training
time for new employeeswhile also buying time for more
extensive modernization efforts later.

IBM Rational software can you help increase exibility by

revitalizing existing application portfolios:

Cut high maintenance costs of applications through consolidation and insight

Increase business agility and reduce complexity by leveraging
proven assets
Reduce license and support costs by migrating aging applications to modern platforms
Reduce project risk and cost by focusing on quality across the
software life cycle

Solution Brief

IBM Software
Government

Boost productivity and accelerate

innovation in a modern development
environment

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), an
open, modern business language that helps you to extend existing applications and develop new applications using a highly
productive, abstract language in a modern development
environment.

Government 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 on
modern Eclipse-based tools that allow teams to develop and
maintain enterprise applications spanning multiple platforms,
languages, and technologies. Although the traditional mainframe environment has provided consistent tooling for decades,
the current approach of isolated developers, tooling, and
processes for the different platforms and programming languages that are necessary to complete a typical, multitiered
application project can be limiting.

Optimize team agility as you bridge

organizational silos
Many government agencies are hindered by islands
of development, each with different tools, processes, and team
infrastructures 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 modern
software tools to the degree necessary to increase the efficiency
and overall effectiveness of individuals and teams responsible
for application maintenance and modernization projects.

Were looking to move as many existing

systems and services as possible to the web
to make it easy for our citizens to interact
with the city.

IBMs Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution

helps improve communication across disparate IT teams
regardless of skills, programming language, or technology
platform. CLM is a unied and collaborative software delivery
approach 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 provide
an audit trail of changes across the software life cycle to prevent
application failures and help meet increasingly stringent regulatory requirements. IBM provides cross platform application
CLM that is inclusive of the mainframe developer.

A system analyst for the city

Migrating to a modern development environment based on

solid best practices and processes adds value through higher
productivity, is more attractive for new developers, has the
ability to offload some development MIPS, integrates with
complete application life-cycle tools, and can help overcome
skills attrition around legacy languages. Implementing a
more modern development can generate 22 - 37 percent
improvement in developer productivity, reduce host CPU usage
50 - 80 percent with workstation syntax checking, and attract
new talent with modern tools and processes.3

CLM helps organizations deploy new, common team infrastructure for source control, change management, and build
that can empower your team with integrated collaboration,
process automation, and reporting to help achieve improved
communication, higher quality, informed decision-making,
and more automated, transparent and predictable software
development.

Solution Brief

IBM Software
Government

IBM offers dynamic infrastructure solutions that can help

improve services, reduces costs and manages risk while helping
you thrive in todays fast paced world. IBM Rational software
can help you:

Government agencies are riddled with projects that span

multiple business units, have inexible architectures and broken
processes, and struggle with realities of intellectual property
rights and regulatory compliance mandates. To address the
requirements of government agencies to manage projects
and manage traceability of development artifacts across a
collaborative software development life cycle, Rational offers
IBM Rational Team Concert (RTC) software. RTC is based
on the Jazz open development environment, a scalable,
extensible team collaboration platform that supports globally
distributed teams and showcases the future of systems and
software delivery. We support a community at Jazz.net where
you can participate in the development of Jazz-based products
from IBM, directly impact the delivery of capabilities in these
products, and experiment with leading age milestone drivers
that are currently in development.

Reduce MIPS costs and improve performance with the latest

compilation 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 unit

testing
With most government agencies, the challenge to increase productivity is often hindered by test delays caused by dependencies on the operations team. IBM Rational Developer for
System z Unit Test software provides a low-cost develop,
build, test environment for mainframe applications. The
IBM Rational Developer for System z Unit Test feature can
greatly enhance the way organizations develop, maintain and
test mainframe applications. The new Rational Developer for
System z Unit Test feature helps:

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 247 to citizens and
other government organizations within the country, they hoped to
meet the mandates of the e-Europe initiative and increase convenience for the agencys end users. Overall, the IBM solution helped
boost the performance, availability, and security of the government
agencys mainframe environment.

Improve system utilization by leveraging

hardware capabilities
Many government agencies want to optimize application
performance on existing hardware; however they have backlevel compilers or are not fully using optimization to reduce
capital expenses. In todays tight times, when an agency needs to
defer capital expense, it is important to get the most out of the
existing infrastructure.

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 workbench
offerings

Solution Brief

IBM Software
Government

Increase
flexibility

Boost
productivity

Optimize
business agility

Increase
system utilization

Integrate
Applications

Empower
People

Unify
Teams

Exploit
Infrastructure

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

Why IBM?

IBM recognizes that only you can build a modernization

roadmap that best ts your organizations needs. No two
agencies will have the same set of constraints or application
portfolios. Some will want to rapidly modernize in the shortest
possible time, while others may wish to slowly integrate modernization into current projects, stretching their modernization
roadmap over several years. Whatever path you choose,
IBM offers the tools, best practices, and industry expertise you
need to cost-effectively and incrementally evolve your core
applications, skills, and development teams toward new architectures and technologies.

To maximize productivity and see signicant positive results,

government agencies must address all four areas of application,
people, teams, and infrastructure. It means nding ways to
leverage existing assets more effectively, rather than assuming
that wholesale rebuild and replace approaches are the only
option. It means looking across the enterprise, across different
platforms, geographies, and technologies, and plotting a clear,
executable course towards reduced costs, improved productivity,
and agility, while concentrating efforts on applications that are
most important to the organizations business objectives.

Start today

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

With a comprehensive portfolio of leading services, tooling and

skills to support the entire enterprise modernization life cycle,
IBM can help you rein in maintenance costs and extend the life,
exibility and value of your applications. Best of all, the money
you save can be put to better use for the business.

For more information

To learn more about IBM Rational solutions for enterprise
modernization, contact your IBM sales representative or
IBM Business Partner, or visit:
ibm.com/software/rational/solutions/em/
Copyright IBM Corporation 2011

To learn more about modernization solutions for the

IBM System z platform, visit:

IBM Corporation
Software Group
Route 100
Somers, NY 10589
U.S.A.

ibm.com/software/rational/solutions/em/systems/z/

To learn more about modernization solutions for the IBM i

platform, visit:

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May 2011
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1

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

www.cio.gov/documents/25-Point-Implementation-Plan-to-ReformFederal%20IT.pdf

Aggregation of results from a productivity study conducted by

IBM System z customers.

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