Agile Development

DoS TOMIS

Background

The Department of State’s Office of Foreign Missions is responsible for facilitating/ensuring equal treatment of U.S. Missions abroad based on reciprocal treatment of Foreign missions in the United States. To accomplish this mission, the OFM must ensure that the interests of the American public, the American diplomatic community abroad, and the foreign diplomatic community residing in the United States are upheld and that all diplomatic benefits, privileges, and immunities are properly exercised in accordance with federal and international laws.

This is an enormous task, as there are currently more than 2,000 foreign missions in the United States that employ nearly 70,000 staff and close to 90% are entitled to some degree of diplomatic or consular immunities. To help manage this challenge, the OFM developed The Office of Foreign Missions Information System or TOMIS. TOMIS allows OFM to electronically process foreign mission notifications and requests for services, and it provides the ability to manage a wide range of benefits and services to the foreign diplomatic community. This capability is a key element in strengthening bi-lateral relationships between governments.

Due to the sheer size and scope of the Department of State Diplomatic mission, the TOMIS systems needs to share around 40GB of data every month with multiple agencies. The system collects data and information from 177 embassies, 195 United Nation Missions and over 1,000 consulates covering over 15,000 personnel within the United States. In addition, the TOMIS team needs to manage a data warehouse that maintains 30 years’ worth of diplomatic reciprocity data and provide reporting capabilities.

To meet the growing challenges and IT demands required to support the diplomatic and consular mission of the Department of State operations at home and abroad OFM enacted a comprehensive IT Modernization initiative of TOMIS.

Challenge

Provide Full IT Support Services for the Office of Foreign Missions Information System (TOMIS). This support entails day-to-day management, maintenance and development of the Office of Foreign Missions’ (OFM) applications suite and technical operations.

Scope of work covers all major services to OFM:

Solution:

OFM engaged Alpha Omega Integration to be responsible for the design and development of new functionality to expand what TOMIS supports and to continue to modernize existing functionality and features. This capability will support changing business rules and policies to better support the OFM user community government agency partners.

Our agile team, comprised of architects, business analysts, developers, and testers, completed the modernization of legacy subsystems into a single consolidated TOMIS system using Bootstrap, .NET, and Oracle. We have developed APIs and services for both federal and non-federal partners for data intake and processing using a combination of web-based, file-based, and offline data transfers.

Results:

Alpha Omega Maintains day to day operations ensuring that the computer systems and applications are bug-free and reliable for end users maintaining maximum system uptime.

Employing a customer intimate approach that leverages an in-depth understanding of the OFM mission, and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) methodologies, Alpha Omega is able to continuously upgrade and enhance the system, seamlessly integrating new features and enhancements to help OFM succeed.

As diplomatic requirements continue to grow and evolve, Alpha Omega’s Agile Scrum methodologies, provide application development support for the enhancement and maintenance of existing TOMIS functionality, and develop new functionality as needed. In this way, the TOMIS platform is able to constantly expand data management capability, modernize software and hardware, and update business rules for improved results.

More importantly, Alpha Omega enables the OFM staff to focus on strategic information technology planning, enhanced customer liaison, more analysis of emergent customer demand, and how to effectively meet this through the expanding use of technology. And – ultimately to better support the diplomatic mission of the Department of State.