Accenture Public Service Platform

Information technology executives are tackling increasingly complex challenges while at the same time hoping to capitalize on technological advances. Yet the accelerated pace of technological change further complicates the equation. What is the right technology? When is the right time? Will it pay off?

Nowhere is this more evident than in the public sector where CIOs find themselves squarely in the middle of initiatives to control costs, reduce spending, modernize aging legacy systems, enable health-care reform and provide better services to citizens who expect more targeted and meaningful services than ever before.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) offers the first real opportunity to deliver the kinds of savings, reusability and flexibility that IT professionals have been searching for. At the same time, a dizzying array of choices exists as technology providers tout product after product as the “next big thing.” With these choices come the challenges of connecting best-of-breed products to make them work together in your environment to achieve your vision. Unfortunately, these SOA products do not fit neatly together even when purchased from a single vendor. And, they can take months to integrate and are often difficult to upgrade, enhance or extend. At Accenture, we understand these challenges firsthand and have developed software solutions that save you time and money while allowing you to develop the real-world solutions your organization demands, today.

The Accenture Public Service Platform (APSP) turns promise into practice, enabling you to:

• Adopt an enterprise-wide SOA allowing you to easily deploy information systems that directly serve your organization’s mission.

• Improve citizen services despite decreasing budgets and growing service demand.

• Prepare your enterprise to meet the challenges of health-care reform while protecting the decades of investment you have made in your legacy application portfolio.

• Equip your internal customers to quickly adapt to policy changes keeping your limited technical resources focused on implementing innovative solutions to save your enterprise time and money.

The Accenture Public Service Platform allows organizations to achieve these outcomes. Built on SOA principles, guided by open standards, APSP provides a turnkey solution to connect your SOA products and quickly unlock their promise while minimizing risk.

APSP supports dozens of SOA software products from competing vendors, giving you the flexibility to easily knit together a service-oriented capability in a way that leverages your existing investments while protecting new investments.

For years, the promise of SOA has been the topic of whiteboard discussions around the globe. However, there has not been a clear path for taking SOA from the whiteboard to the data center—until now. The Accenture Public Service Platform takes the confusion and guesswork out of your SOA implementation by providing a pre-built, pre-tested execution architecture that easily connects your SOA applications to reap their benefits faster.

APSP’s multi-layered design provides you the breadth and flexibility you need to meet your enterprise integration goals. Key components of the APSP architecture include:

• Presentation Services - Services that integrate with your chosen portal product and open standards to bring the latest Web 2.0 capabilities to life.

• Business Services - Loosely coupled services that contain business functionality. Business services are configurable and based on open standards, like XML and Web services.

• Service Integration - Pre-built services residing in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) that monitor flow of requests from software services and application components. The ESB orchestrates delivery of services, messaging and transformation capabilities. External systems interact with APSP using Web service calls or traditional online and batch interfaces.

• Technical Services - Highly reusable services that support technical processes such as workflow, reporting, document management and business rules. Technical services include authentication and authorization frameworks that provide necessary security protection.

• Data Services - Services providing access to databases, storage and repositories. This layer insulates the database back-ends from the application layers to enforce open standards.

• Security - The necessary security services to help protect all the other layers by implementing encryption, audit, and authentication and authorization frameworks.

The Accenture Public Service Platform provides you with a proven execution architecture out-of-the-box to jumpstart your SOA journey. Only APSP delivers the pre-configuration and tools needed to start now, deliver business results quickly and enable agility into the future so that your enterprise can quickly adapt to changing business and regulatory requirements.

Advantages to the APSP:

• Vendor-Agnostic - With more than 40 adapters already developed and more to come, APSP provides a comprehensive execution architecture integrating commercial off-the-shelf and open source products from Oracle, IBM, Red Hat and others. APSP integrates the following types of products: enterprise service bus (ESB); Web portal; workflow/business process management (BPM); single sign-on (SSO); authorization, authentication, attestation (AAA) security control; master data management (MDM) and business rules management system (BRMS). With our multi-vendor suite of adapters, APSP can enable quick implementation of your choice of SOA middleware products, whether from a single vendor or your own collection of best-of-breed solutions.

• Standards Compliant - APSP is built in compliance with well-known open source and industry standards allowing you to leverage as much existing infrastructure environment as you desire. We use standard technologies including Java and Web services. We align with standards defined by the Web Services Interoperability Association, World Wide Web Consortium, Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, Federal Technical Reference Model and Medicaid Information Technology Architecture.

• Tested and Proven - APSP is the latest in Accenture’s constantly improving series of architecture platforms and shaped by more than 30 years of public sector enterprise architecture and application experience. APSP is built on real-world project experiences from hundreds of solutions delivered to dozens of public sector clients and supported by an engineering team from the world’s largest implementer of SOA solutions. APSP is the foundation for Accenture Software’s suite of Human Services applications and for other Java-based solutions. Tested with millions of transactions to verify its scalability, APSP is delivered with reusable test scripts and data for future use as you build, providing lower project risk and reduced cost for applications built on APSP.

• Pre-Configured and Ready to Deploy - With more than 50 pre-built technical services and frameworks ready to use, APSP enables quick implementation with the flexibility to meet the unique requirements of your environment. These components can eliminate as much as half the time associated with configuring the typical SOA solution stack and provide a fully functioning development environment in as little as two weeks.