Continued Review of the Tax Systems Modernization of the Internal Revenue Service Final Report (1996) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
2. Systems and Software Development
2. Systems and Software Development
Pages 18-37
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From page 18... ...
is much needed, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) does not currently have a development organization capable of meeting the difficult challenge.
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From page 19... ...
The IRS developed, during this committee's tenure, a business vision that stated concisely the overall goals of the modernization effort and a set of operational requirements derived from the needs of end users. For example, the Service Center Organization Study (SCOS)
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From page 20... ...
, Electronic Filing (ELF}, Telephone Filing (TeleFile}}, all of which would generate the same "electronic tax return" and forward those data to central computer systems for storage. Similarly, a collection of end-user applications would retrieve tax data from the central databases and process them according to business needs, with the central databases being updated as necessary.
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From page 21... ...
However, the committee believes that the IRS's "plan" for guiding system evolution is deficient in some key aspects. Specifically, the committee believes that the following are missing or insufficient: An enterprise-wide systems architecture sufficient to support future systems; · Enterprise-wide data models and standards; · A plan for creating and evolving the technical infrastructure (telecommunications, standards, personnel training, workstations, and so on)
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From page 22... ...
Part of the rationale for the committee's previous recommendation for an architects office was to help build the skills and experience needed in the IRS to develop TSM successfully. The intent was to encourage formation of a cadre of very experienced technical developers, capable of both handling the tough problems ancl, over time, teaching others how to handle them.
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From page 23... ...
Again, to its credit the IRS reacted by hosting a job fair aimed at hiring up to 50 experienced software developers, computer scientists, simulation modelers, security architects, and other key experienced technical people. Although more than 30 individuals were hired, the IRS did not fill all of the open positions.
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From page 24... ...
As the IRS begins to deploy applications to support its vision, it is important to deploy the supporting infrastructure, which includes computer hardware and software, telecommunications equipment, air conditioning, support staff, and so on. Given the size of the IRS, such an infrastructure is extremely costly and will take a long time to deploy.
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From page 25... ...
In contrast, the hardware infrastructure needed to execute ICP will cost more than $560 million, if roughly $10,000 per ICP seat is assumed.5 The large difference in development and equipment costs must be understood clearly by both the IRS and its oversight organizations in order to discuss what TSM ''needs" on a yearly basis. Here again, the committee urges the IRS to connect every TSM project to the overall goals and to show clearly how a given project supports one or more of the goals before obligating a large amount of deployment resources.
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From page 26... ...
However, this assembly of documents is by no means complete, concise, or used widely by the almost 2,000 IRS developers and their contractors. For example, the Corporate Data Model covers taxpayer data that are used by the IRS enterprise to process tax returns.
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From page 27... ...
This necessitates very short delay times on all ~ On Alone 26, 1995, the Architecture/Software Subcommittee of the committee met with IRS representatives in Dallas. The express purpose of the meeting was to provide the IRS with an opportunity to present the committee with any aciclitional materials relative to architecture and software development of which the agency felt the committee should be awarea 9 Internal Revenue Service.
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From page 28... ...
4° Internal Revenue Service.
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From page 29... ...
is to design, model, prototype, refine, and manage the delivery of a standards-compliant, architecture-based technical infrastructure that will support the production environment in achieving the business vision and objectives of the service. This is being accomplished by supporting near term efforts within the context of the infrastructure vision.
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From page 30... ...
DEVELOPING A SOLUTION Current Development Activities Given that there appears to be no concise architectural description or consistent use of standard APls across all development projects, how are the IRS developers proceeding? To answer this question, the committee participated in a number of discussions with front-line developers.
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From page 31... ...
Apparently, the '~corporate" data model, which took about 4 years to develop, covers only "tax return" data, and not the control data needed by systems that are processing return data. Such coordination problems are common in large development projects, but a more mature development approach would highlight such issues before developers were well into their development cycle.
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From page 32... ...
In 1993, the IRS evaluated its own software development capabilities using the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) that was developed by the Department of Defense's Software Engineering Institute (SKI} at Carnegie Mellon University.'7 In the CMM, organizations can be ranked at levels 1 through 5, with CMM level 1 corresponding to the lowest-quality process and CMM level 5 representing a development process that is repeatable, defined, managed, and optimized.
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From page 33... ...
However, these efforts were at a very early stage and the committee was unable to determine if such a curriculum would be appropriate to ensure that all IRS employees would be trained to a sufficient level to implement process improvement recommendations. The committee reiterates three specific suggestions for software and systems engineering process improvement and strongly recommends that the IRS act on these suggestions immediately: Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pa., August.
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From page 34... ...
TSM is an extremely important modernization effort, and the IRS should use the best practices and people to develop it. TSM applications will still be invented and 23 The Capability Maturity Model for Software was developed by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University as a model and method for assessing the software development capabilities of an organization.
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From page 35... ...
Moving from a batch, mainframe system to a workstation-based, distributed database, client-server system while simultaneously improving all aspects of software engineering in the organization is a very difficult task. A plan for incremental involvement of projects and process improvements over time would be wiser.
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From page 36... ...
· Overall, as a software or systems development organization, the IRS currently does not have sufficient capabilities or experience to complete TSM successfully. The IRS has made good progress in the last 5 years in improving specific development practices on specific projects, but it is not improving its overall organization at the rate required to keep up with the pace of technology in general and TSM in particular.
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From page 37... ...
Recommendation 2.5. The most important TSM projects, most notably the Integrated Case Processing (ICP} project, should be conducted using modern, mature development techniques in order to focus IRS developer attention.
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