Scope of Work
The Department of State's Interagency Working Group (IAWG) is responsible for monitoring and reporting to Congress on Federally supported international exchanges and training. Devis designed, built and manages, including full application service provisioning, the Federal Exchanges Data System (FEDS). FEDS is used to collect and analyze information on US Government-sponsored international exchanges and training.
In addition to building and supporting the FEDS application, the contract includes operating IAWG.gov using Devis-developed open source web content management software.
Skills and Expertise Required
Beginning with FY 1998 performance data collection, and under a tight deadline, IAWG hired Devis to build a distributed database system to collect data on all Federally funded international exchanges. The application has migrated over the years with advances in technology to take advantage of the latest in Internetworking capabilities. Using advanced object-oriented development tools, Devis created an SQL compliant database system that is accessed via the Internet by both the IAWG staff and all Federal agencies reporting on their international exchanges.
As part of the FEDS program, Devis was required to provide customizable reports to Congress on an annual basis, provide data upload capability to allow agencies to submit valid, well-formatted data to the application, and provide application hosting in a secure environment. FEDS is hosted using our secure VMWare vSphere 4 virtual infrastructure with monitoring performed by Nagios and up.time to ensure maximum availability to users spread across the country.
Results/Impact
In 2010, FEDS underwent a complete overhaul of the data entry system using agile Scrum processes. The system was redesigned from a desktop client application to an online web application, thus solving many installation problems for Federal users. No longer did users need to download the latest software from the IAWG website and install the system on their local environment (which in many cases needed to be first approved by an Agency's security advisor before being installed). Instead, users can login directly to the FEDS web app via any internet connection and enter their program's participant and funding data for the fiscal year. As a result, the IAWG team has seen a dramatic reduction in helpdesk calls and, therefore, significant cost savings.