Building Infrastructure Shared Services

Background

The Restructuring and Reform Act mandated that the IRS focus on serving the public. This paved the way for the IRS to modernize its antiquated IT systems. Knowing how important improving the tax system was, Congress allocated $8 billion dollars toward building new business applications and a new infrastructure, making the effort one of the largest civilian technology renovation programs ever to be undertaken. The new infrastructure would need to support billions of transactions each year from millions of people using any one of 100 business applications.

Challenge

For many years the IRS was notorious for building stovepipe systems that only served the needs of a specific business requirement. This resulted in similar functionality being built over and over again which produced an inconsistent delivery of services and a nightmare of disparate solutions to operate and maintain. The IRS sought to remedy this problem though the construction of a shared infrastructure with services made available for all business applications to use.

Services

The Solution

The IRS awarded CSC with a massive contract to modernize their computer systems. CSC tasked STP’s current management with leading the design and development of shared infrastructure. Eighteen STP architects, engineers and developers built custom and COTS services. These services register new users, provision data stores, securely transmit sensitive data, provide assured delivery of transactions across different platforms, and collect audit records for analysis. Through the use of these services, IRS business applications were able to leverage existing investments that were proven to be effective and safe while saving the agency many millions of dollars.