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 the 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 percent and has accelerated the learning curve for new employees by 10 percent.

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