Improving Performance Through Automation

Background

Each and every year IRS computer systems support billions of transactions. Their ability to perform even during seasonal peak demands are paramount to the agency’s ability to support its mission. IRS performance engineers closely monitor transactional and resource data to make scaling and tuning adjustments to ensure that services are both reliable and available when used.

Challenge

The IRS enterprise is a complex tapestry of systems and subsystems that use custom and COTS solutions that execute on multiple operating systems across many different platforms. Some systems are modern, while others were developed decades ago. The process of collecting and analyzing data from so many different sources is an arduous task. A system central to IRS tax processing is the second release of the Customer Account Data Engine. For years data was collected from its various components for analysis through labor intensive manual methods. The IRS needed a better way.

Services
- .01Automation
- .02Engineering

The Solution

Working with the IRS, an expert STP performance engineer developed an approach to automate the qualification, selection and packaging of performance data. What was once a manual process using Microsoft Access and SharePoint, became an automated process where data is analyzed using industry leading SAS tools. The new method provides engineers with web based on-demand reporting vs waiting on the manual creation of a weekly report. By improving the collection, selection and review of the data, engineers are better equipped to make the necessary tuning adjustments to the current implementation as well as produce more accurate models of future demand.