The Internal Revenue Service’s newly established enterprise digitalization and case management office has started to adopt an incremental approach to funding information technology modernization programs, including the digitization of paper-based taxpayer services and consolidation of case management platforms, Federal News Network reported Friday.
Harrison Smith, co-director of EDCMO and former deputy chief procurement officer at the IRS, said advancing IT upgrade projects in “smaller chunks” allows the agency to identify viable concepts within months or weeks.
“Identifying opportunities where we can take an informed shot and frankly an informed risk and continue if something works before we really invest a significant amount of money, it’s really a very strong business case for how we’re pursuing things in this office in general,” Smith said.
Smith and EDCMO Co-Director Justin Lewis Abold-LaBreche will oversee the transition of business processes to a Pegasystems-built enterprise case management platform in the cloud.
Abold-LaBreche said the IRS will take about a year to 15 months to finalize the move and EDCMO expects the initial business process to be operational on the cloud-based system by December.
“We have a fast feedback loop all the way to the end-user employee to say, ‘Is this working for you?’ and they’re involved in the development cycle. And then the big picture, we’re tackling business process modernization policy change and technology all at the same time, and we’re doing that in these bite-sized chunks, so it makes big change possible, but in a less risky way,” Abold-LaBreche added.