US Federal Requirements
Achieving Best-in-Class Application and Process Management
Complex Application Development
Federal government agencies and contractors have increasingly complex application development requirements. They are required to work with many different core applications to service their changing missions. They need to:
- Automate and streamline complex software builds,
- Integrate business requirements with change and configuration management through a single, unified process for faster, higher quality outcomes,
- Achieve end-to-end management of incidents, including incident escalation from a help desk to development,
- Automate and streamline the entire release management process from change request to production deployment, and
- Ensure comprehensive, team-based software change management.
Process Tracking and Auditability
Federal government agencies and contractors have more stringent process tracking and audit requirements that ever before. They need to develop application metrics to drive intelligent IT decisions.
- Organize, manage, track and protect software assets across distributed development teams,
- Automate and audit the process of deploying assets for testing, staging and production,
- Track project and portfolio resources and demand, and
- Audit the financial management of projects to focus investment and innovation strategically.
Continual Process Improvement
Federal government agencies have forms-intensive environments and processes that require streamlining for easier citizen access and usability. They need to:
- Coordinate activities by managing organizational processes across agencies,
- Design, automate and catalogue common processes for transparency and re-usability, and
- Combine content and processes from many different systems using industry-standard SOA and Web-services interfaces.
Collaboration
Federal government agency and contractor interaction requires better collaboration to control scope, cost and quality. They need to:
- Increase application quality and minimize IT project risk/cost through collaborative requirements management,
- Communicate, collaborate, and prototype application behavior before coding begins, and
- Manage the capture, routing, collaboration, and resolution of post-production issues and defects.
Visibility
Government oversight organizations are requiring agencies to achieve better visibility into processes and programs and forcing them to become more accountable. They need to:
- Design, automate and catalogue common processes for transparency and re-usability,
- Track IT project and portfolio resources and demand, and
- Audit the financial management of IT projects to focus investment and innovation strategically.
Regulation
Increased government regulation is leading to a preference for web-based, single-repository solutions that meet federal security requirements. Federal government agencies and contractors need to:
- Modernize siloed applications that are crucial to operations,
- Transform older systems to meet current government business needs in a cost-effective way, and
- Dramatically reduce the cost and risk associated with large-scale technology change.
The Security of Certification
Current federal regulations require all major applications and general support systems to be certified as being compliant with information technology (IT) security requirements so that information resources and data are protected adequately. Based on this certification, agency heads issue authorizations to operate (accreditations) to systems that are compliant. This highly structured and regulated process serves two purposes: it documents various aspects of the system's security posture, and it allows the system owner to understand and accept the residual risk associated with the system's operation. This provides the basis for the Government mandated risk-based management of IT resources. Both DoD and OMB require every system to be recertified once every three years after initial accreditation, or whenever major changes are implemented.
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