AboutWeb’s role as part of the Lockheed Martin / The Agency Wide Support Services Contract (AWSCC) Team is to provide staffing support to any and all services within the scope. AWSSC is a 525 million, seven-year contract to provide information technology support to the Social Security Administration (SSA). The services provided by the Lockheed Martin/AWSCC Team include support in application design, development, testing, and maintenance; database administration, imaging and document management; data administration, programmatic repository and enterprise architecture; software engineering, technology; emerging technology applications; and software engineering management.
Legacy Conversion-(SOA/SSNAP/SSNAP-MI) AboutWeb is assisting with the Social Security Administration’s effort to migrate current applications to modern technologies. AboutWeb provides legacy technology and modern technology developers, analysts, and data conversion experts to assist in a support ser-vices contract, which seeks to optimize the modernization of systems in a uniform manner, with seamless impacts to the end users.
AboutWeb currently provides support to the Legacy Modernization task for SSA’s Office of Retirement and Survivors Insurance System (ORSIS). Our Enterprise SOA Architect is currently preparing Architecture Driven Modeling for the ORSIS segment of the SSA EA Architecture. This system and application discovery work has evolved into a proof of concept and a right-sized methodology for ADM that has captured the senior management attention and led to an assignment for the 2010 budget utilizing the POC methodologies.
The ORSIS Strategic Plan will identify ORSIS key change-drivers, guide the changes needed to allow ORSIS application systems to effectively respond these changes, and provide a transition plan for moving from what is to what is proposed. The strategic plan looks 1-5 years in the future.
AboutWeb is also supporting SSAs SSNAP and SSNAP-MI projects. SSNAP is a modification of the current CIS mainframe system in accumulating information pertaining to acquiring a Social Security Number and storing the data in VSAM files. An Access database and front end VB program are used in obtaining and storing evidence not included in CIS. The new system combines the above using front-end Web based Java screens to gather information and store it in DB2 tables.
SSNAP-MI is a replacement reporting system for the current paper reports. Java screens will be used to display user chosen information. Summary information will be pre-calculated the night before and stored in an Oracle database for next day quick retrieval. AboutWeb reviewed specs and verified programs for accuracy and performed functional analyst work creating validation tests in Quality Center.
MI Central - AboutWeb teamed with Lockheed Martin on the MI Central project for SSA. MI Central is a web application used by SSA to perform analysis of their data in the form of summary and detailed reports and print jobs. In the requirements gathering phase, the AboutWeb team formulated several design alternatives based on the requirements gathered from meetings with stake-holders and based on reviews of the current system and code base. These design alternatives ranged from very traditional to very progressive. After several presentations to the client (SSA) the most progressive system was chosen for development.
This new version of MI Central allowed even the most non-technical employees to create and define the screens, business rules, queries, and all other aspects of a reporting sub-application using an administrative GUI. Part of the project requirements were that all of the end-user content (the sub-application reports and screens authored using the Content Management System architected by AboutWeb) meet not just Section 508 requirements for accessibility, but SSA?s (more rigorous) accessibility requirements. Another requirement was that the screen could never flicker or reload. Thus, the progressive solution was a con-tent management system (CMS) that generated all output to use CSS for style and position and used AJAX for page navigation and dynamic behaviors still meeting strict 508 reqs. The solution exponentially reduced the time and money formerly required to create MI Central sub-applications and reports; radically changing internal SSA business processes as a result. SSA is heralding MI Central as the leading example of next generation Social Security applications.
AboutWeb created and designed the software architecture, data caching strategy, and rich client GUI. Data access and caching required accessing DB2 and Oracle data sources, massaging and caching this data on the J2EE Application server. The user interface and sub-application definitions were XML-driven in order to meet the projects release process and portability requirements. About-Web devised, managed, and implemented an agile approach to development and project management in the development environment.