The Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) uses the GlobalNET platform to facilitate secure training and collaboration among partner organizations. Thousands of military, diplomatic, law enforcement, and civilian government personnel around the world use GlobalNET to connect with and learn from each other. They work on topics from security cooperation to humanitarian operations; counter-terrorism to public diplomacy; leadership development and more.

Faced with aging technologies and a complicated collection of digital content and microservices, DSCA initially engaged CivicActions to develop a quality assurance program and to ensure system stability during code updates. At the end of that contract, we were tasked with redesigning and rebuilding GlobalNET to create a more personalized, secure, and responsive experience for users.

Years later, we continue to provide agile development, modern IT implementation, and DevSecOps services to keep everything running smoothly and to continuously improve GlobalNET systems.

Client goal

The goal of GlobalNET is to ensure that international legal and security practitioners can easily engage each other for collaborative work. Ease of use and top-notch security are essential to the success of the platform. DSCA uses GlobalNET to:

• Provide professional development and training for practitioners
• Facilitate connection among practitioners and their sponsoring organizations around the world
• Provide a responsive, multi-lingual, intuitive user experience that respects the cultures of individual participants
• Comply with strict security requirements, from FISMA to FedRAMP

Our approach

When we first engaged with DSCA, the agency wanted to bring a better experience to the tens of thousands of legal and security practitioners in the GlobalNET community. DSCA challenged the DoD contracting status quo by choosing a fixed-price agile contract, moving away from the waterfall approaches that doom many government IT projects to failure. We partnered closely with agency stakeholders in an agile process throughout the complex process of redesigning GlobalNET and the massive migration to a FedRAMP-certified platform. Daily collaboration and the ability to adapt to evolving needs helped us complete the rebuild on time and on budget.

Understand the needs

We conducted onsite user research in three cities to initially assess the needs of the GlobalNET community, then followed up with remote consultations. As new features were built, usability testing with site users helped us collect feedback, identify problems, and prioritize future needs for ongoing product iteration. The initial discovery phase uncovered more than 600 user stories, which were then prioritized and tracked to completion.

Automate and test

From confident code deployment to faster Authority to Operate (ATO), we have focused on providing GlobalNET with stability and security from the start. A platform for international security practitioners deserves no less. Our DevOps activities include continuous monitoring, network optimization, and a three-tiered on-call support system to make sure the platform is always up and running. We also apply regular security updates and automated testing.

Quality and security control

We implemented a mechanism for updating, testing, and deploying hardened server instances and application code in a way that is generally invisible to end-users. Server instances are subjected to SCAP and ZAP scans for system compliance, while automated “smoke tests” ensure the code is ready to deploy. All new code is subjected to more than 600 automated tests (and scripted tests by humans) prior to being approved for deployment. This rigorous quality control minimizes surprises and downtime.
 

The challenge

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) provide healthcare benefits to millions of people every year. But the websites and digital tools that help people find and enroll in these programs were built on a myriad of aging technologies and were confusing to navigate. CMS needed to streamline and update its online platforms to improve the customer experience while establishing more efficient backend workflows for agency staff.

This is an enormous and complex task, involving the modernization of Medicare.gov, CMS.gov, CMS open data portals, and many other public facing apps that serve multiple user groups — including beneficiaries, caregivers, health providers, data professionals, and government stakeholders.

WECMS helps more than 100 million Americans every year apply, find, and enroll in healthcare programs. The information and tools provided are essential components in supporting CMS' goals of creating a truly consumer-focused, streamlined, efficient, and omni-channel experience for beneficiaries and their caregivers. The overall intent for this contract is to ensure continuity of operations for the Americans it serves and the WECMS program, which maintains, designs and implements open source software digital services for CMS’ flagship websites, tools, components and applications on Healthcare.gov, Medicare.gov, CMS.gov, and 7 Open Data catalogs. In addition to engineering and design continuous improvements on these established websites, this contract provides security compliance, devops, system infrastructure, content strategy, information architecture, training, documentation, content editor support, public call center dev support, Section 508 improvements, mobile application development, and tooling and systems expertise.

Client goal

When this multi-year transformation is complete, CMS will be able to deliver on its mission more effectively. CivicActions is providing agile development, DevOps, and human-centered design (HCD) services to help the agency:

• Improve the content editing experience for staff
• Modernize legacy systems and tools
• Replace proprietary technologies with open source
• Support active, informed healthcare consumption

Our approach

Collaboration is the key to success in a project of this scale and complexity. With multiple partner vendors (including our primary partner Fearless) and disparate stakeholders across many organizational layers, we work hard to keep lines of communication open and be up-front about potential problems.

Balancing stakeholder priorities, user needs, technical complexity, and CMS deadlines, we created a roadmap that minimizes risk and maximizes opportunities for success. Then we went to work on “quick wins” — tasks we could complete right away that would make the biggest difference for users.

Address the holistic customer experience

We knew that each CMS application is part of a huge public-facing ecosystem of digital tools, with many touchpoints. To address the entire experience that a person would have in navigating the systems, we drew on the agency’s own knowledge of their beneficiary community, working with them to refine and document how each person interacts with CMS online. The resulting holistic view helped us identify how we could improve that experience iteratively.

Adopt a data-driven strategy

To make sure we built the right solutions, we immersed ourselves in the CMS mission from the operational, technical, and UX perspectives. We dug into existing user research, reviewed analytics reports, conducted stakeholder interviews — then created user personas and journey maps to refine the project scope and goals. All this data is managed in a shared repository of user insights and project knowledge, which we refer to as we prioritize the work to be done.

Replace proprietary software with open source

We are “reverse engineering” multiple custom-built Microsoft.NET applications (such as the Medicare Eligibility and Premium Calculator and the congressionally-funded Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) Lookup Tool with modern, open source solutions. As we recreate all these applications in Drupal, we’re making guides and code documentation that outline the entire system — allowing CMS to maintain control of its own technologies and avoid vendor lock-in. We are also migrating CMS open data platforms from Socrata (proprietary) to an open source solution using DKAN 2.