Social services rewired

The first step was the development of a blueprint study to test the feasibility of modernising the agency’s core mainframe systems, followed by a proof-of-concept prototype involving a government retirement scheme. Following the success of that initial phase, the project has now moved onto modernising the remaining schemes.

The redesign of the social service agency’s core systems had a number of key considerations:

• Architecting for agility and stability
• Building the future workforce
• Human-centered design
• Optimising talent
• Embedding future-readiness

Thanks to modernised User Interface screens, users’ activities are now more intuitive and involve less need to switch between systems and functions during a transaction. This has resulted in productivity gains of up to 20% and has accelerated the learning curve for new employees by 10%.

The productivity of IT users has also increased, thanks to the custom-built accelerators that have reduced the time taken to analyse and develop test scripts. The gains include time savings of more than 70% when analysing COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) codes, and up to 30% during application testing.

Overall, modernising this social service agency’s core operating system has delivered substantial immediate benefits to productivity —while also re-equipping it to meet citizens’ evolving needs in the future.