Infrastructure Development & IT Integration for PBOCS, U.S. Census Bureau

During challenging times, U.S. residents were hesitant to respond to US Census surveys. Just when data and innovation changes in technology were just started to speed up, the US Census was in dire need to fulfill critical tasks to run Census surveys across the country in 2010. Prior census surveys were done by paper and the need to automate and provide innovative solutions was key. Having done over 50% Populations Metrics and Mapping for mission critical environments for both government and commercial, ICS Nett became known as the “Innovation—Collaboration—Synergy”. For the Decennial Census, ICS successfully aided the U.S Census Bureau’s Field Data Collection Activities Project Management Office (FDCA PMO). The successfully fulfilled task was to develop an in-house software development capability of sufficient efficiency, and maturity, to allow the Government to assume responsibility for the development of Operations Control System (OCS), applications supporting all 2010 Paper-Based Operations (PBOs) conducted in the 2010 Decennial.

ICS Nett transformative support for PBOCS program included:

• Performed service based and legacy integrations of 11 external systems through message-based interfaces (JMS), file interfaces (Oracle Dump and XML), and large volume data import/export (ETL)
• Collected requirements and represented them though UML models (design, development, implementation, testing, and production deployment)
• Created interface control documents (ICD), deployment diagrams, external interface specifications and contract models to document interfacing systems requirements and interfacing systems interactions
• Prepared a Program Management Plan
• Provided end to end Survey Operation Control for Nationwide data collection across more than 500 Local Census Offices
• Developed a service-oriented software architecture and related documentation to support the development effort
• Developed Systems Design Documentation and Models including (Domain Models, Use Case Models, and State Transition Diagrams. Detail-level Design Report Specifications)
• Developed J2EE Enterprise applications for the Local Census Office /Regional Census Center users to conduct, monitor and track nationwide decennial field operations using state-of-the-art web-based technology including Enterprise SOA capabilities
• Risk identification and mitigation related to the technical implementation, deployment and use in production
• Built Data load and Data Transformation Integration solutions to support more than 80 Terra bytes of nationwide Census data
• Development, Testing, Production Systems Engineering Platform Planning, Development and Implementation
• Established Continuity of Operations Support Planning Development and Implementation including COOP disaster processes, created a COOP infrastructure, performed repeated disaster simulations
• Business Process Re-engineering
• Document and Systems Governance and Configuration Management
• Security service integration with enterprise IDMS integration
• Implemented SSL using x.509 public key infrastructure certificates (PKI), port filtering, and other security controls to implement trusted internet-based connections
• Established the controls, organizational discipline, training and audits to protect PII information in accordance with US Code Title 13
• Gap Analysis and Benchmarking, including review bi-weekly code deliveries of the Prime for Group Quarters Validation (GQV) and Map Printing, risk and change identification, reporting

ICS helped the U.S. Census Bureau create a roadmap for the transformation of operations towards more mature levels of service integration that achieved increasing business benefits associated with higher levels of systems integration maturity. It created web-based applications that integrate the capabilities and data of multiple external systems, and standardized SOA implementation models for the PBOCS project. In addition to the development of an operational control system, ICS engineered and maintained the infrastructure required to support the integration of 11 disparate systems into an existing enterprise architecture. Using the ICS Nett Common Process Framework (CPF) methodology, it helped to provide a common operating environment under which all team members will participate in executing the Task Orders.

During Gap Analysis, ICS Nett compared actual performance data with potential performance data. This analysis enabled ICS to measure investment of time, money, and human resources required for the project outcome. In addition, it performed comparative analysis of business process and performances metrics to industry benchmarks.

Department of Commerce, U.S. Census Bureau (BoC)