1. Migrating Legacy Mainframe Programs: Achieving Cost and Resource Savings by Migrating to a User-Friendly UNIX platform
The Small Business Administration ran their FTA 7(a) program on a legacy IBM z/OS mainframe system that included 800 Easytrieve programs, 400 COBOL programs, 800 IBM JCL files, 335 VSAM files and 700 UFO screens. They were increasingly having trouble finding resources to maintain the system and it was extremely costly to sustain.
The goal was to achieve cost and resource savings by migrating to a Solaris UNIX with Micro Focus COBOL operating platform, on an Oracle database.
Tellenger utilized our proprietary ICONs toolset to convert JCL and related processes to Perl scripts, VSAM to the Oracle database structure, and IBM COBOL to MicroFocus COBOL. The entire migration took 14 months. The final UNIX system replaced many COBOL programs and allowed SBA to utilize their resources more efficiently and run the FTA 7 (a) program more effectively.
2. Cloud Readiness & Migrations: IT Portfolio Optimization with a Hybrid Cloud Solution
The US Census Bureau has a major workflow and set of processes with a 10-year lifecycle, tied to the Decennial census. During this time, they undergo the largest data capture effort in the world. Their need to rapidly test and implement solutions that will be used for a short period and then retire them made them a great candidate for the cloud. However, they still wanted to leverage a custom data center facility in which they had invested heavily.
Tellenger helped USCB operationalize a hybrid cloud infrastructure model that leveraged their existing data center infrastructure while extending capabilities into AWS GovCloud and Microsoft Azure Government public cloud environments. Tellenger designed the hybrid cloud architecture and helped USCB obtain Authority to Operate (ATO) for AWS Direct Connect and Microsoft ExpressRoute to create a seamless hybrid cloud network. Using this new cloud network and Red Hat’s suite of hybrid cloud tools (OpenStack, OpenShift, and CloudForms) our team was able to provide robust Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions to USCB stakeholders on demand.
This hybrid solution gave USCB the best of both worlds. They could keep their sensitive data safe in their own facility on an ongoing basis, but by extending into the cloud they had demand-driven flexibility without the high ongoing costs of more physical-based infrastructure.
3. Content Management Systems: Ensuring Legacy Data Reports Are Discoverable with a Custom-Built Module
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) had thousands of legacy data reports, PDFs, and web pages that could not easily be searched or found. They needed a way to organize these reports so that they could be accessible to researchers, media, and policy-makers.
Tellenger built a custom module that enabled SAMHSA users to appropriately load, identify, tag, and publish web-ready report files or web-ready files in an organized way. This improved the ability for reports to be found on the website, but more importantly it allowed links to reports to be generated dynamically so that the information could be found through a variety of channels rather than being hard-coded into the system.
4. Grants Performance Reporting System: Achieving Desired Outcomes for Grant Programs with a Cloud-Based System
The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) shared a legacy system with multiple agencies. The functionality was not tailored to their needs and the costs were high for the services they received. They desired a new system that could collect and report grant program data with the flexibility to integrate additional grant programs in the future. Additionally, grantees needed to access the system directly to enter data.
Tellenger leveraged Software as a Service (SaaS) options to get more to market quickly and at a lower cost. We provided full lifecycle development services including project planning, IT consulting, requirements gathering, and systems integration for this work. The Microsoft Dynamics platform we chose provided a stable, robust, and scalable solution.
Our cloud engineers also worked with ACF’s OCIO to plan, document and implement a full Microsoft Office 365 tenant that included Dynamics 365, Exchange 365, and Sharepoint 365 all built upon MS’s Azure Government cloud. By leveraging a fully FedRAMP certified SaaS solution, ACF was able to receive a rapid Authority to Operate (ATO) which kept the project on time and on budget.
This cloud-based Data Reporting System ultimately allowed ACF to accurately collect grant performance measures while also providing the ability to analyze data and run reports to monitor the progress of grantees. Now they can continually validate that their program goals are being met.
5. Data Management Systems: Simplifying the Process of Running Agency-Wide Data Reports with an Integrated, Cloud-Based Platform
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) had reporting that was limited to individual grant programs. Understanding the performance of all SAMHSA grant programs as a whole and in comparison to one another required running separate queries across multiple databases, then manually combining and processing the data. It was a labor-intensive task that made meeting Congressional and OMB deadlines difficult.
Tellenger was part of the full lifecycle development team that integrated three disparate data systems into one cloud-based platform providing Data Collection and Reporting capabilities to improve data quality, performance monitoring, and programmatic outcomes for SAMHSA grant programs. CDP was built using Amazon Web Services (AWS) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud services to enable rapid prototyping, development, and deployment.
Tellenger stood up a fully featured development environment in AWS fully embracing DevOps practices by including a fully automated Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. This development environment enabled three agile development teams to work in parallel on the platform with automated builds, testing, and deployments.
For the first time SAMHSA was able to synthesize data collected across grant programs and even across different SAMHSA Centers to, for the first-time, give a SAMHSA-wide operational perspective.
6. Health IT: Helping to Solve Local Healthcare Issues with Evidence-Based Approaches
The key health IT challenge that Tellenger has worked to overcome is the distribution of health science to communities and organizations that are seeking evidence-based approaches to address local health care issues. Tellenger built and – for five years – managed SAMHSA’s National Registry of Evidence-based Program and Practices (NREPP) that made available to the public a scientific evaluation of community-based interventions for mental health, substance abuse prevention, and substance abuse treatment programs. The NREPP system integrated custom workflow software for the review and approval of the behavioral health programs with a data architecture to improve the public’s access to information that helped researchers, policy-makers, and community leaders find protocols with proven success meeting the needs of their specific, targeted demographic.