Information Management

Our expansive array of information management services leverages our expertise and experience in science, informatics, and program and project management and other areas to assist our clients in accomplishing their missions. We have extensive experience providing information management services and our highly qualified and accomplished IT architects, system engineers, web designers, application and database developers, analysts, and consultants are led by very experienced portfolio, program and project managers.

We Are Agile

Our Agile scrum masters, project managers, analysts, and development teams have over a decade of experience in the practical application of the Agile project management process and Agile Scrum development framework, including experience tailoring the HHS/CDC Enterprise Performance Life Cycle project management methodology for the Agile incremental and iterative approach to developing IT solutions. IHRC has utilized the Agile project management methodology to perform a broad range of projects including SOAP and REST web services development, web application development, marketplace evaluations, Analysis of Alternatives and many other task oriented IT projects.

Our use of the Agile Scrum development methodology to develop software solutions ensures that with each iteration (i) requirements are continuously captured, revised, and clarified, (ii) architecture and design specifications are developed and refined, and (iii) code is developed, tested, and modified. At the end of each Sprint, the progress of the project is evaluated allowing for changes in requirements, architecture, and design for the next Sprint.

While Agile provides the framework for project management and team development of a IT solution, a rigorous quality management process is required to continuously improve the IT solution under development. A team managed development and test environment hosting best-of-breed development tools and services is crucial to delivering solutions of the highest quality and exceeding customer expectations.

State-of-the-Art Development Environment

Our state-of-the-art virtualized development environment consists of virtual servers hosting our application development tools to support continuous application build, deploy, and test services. Virtual Microsoft and Linux servers hosts our development, test, and staging instances of the software under development. Our build environment consists of source code repository (Subversion), the open-source Jenkins build manager, web servers, application servers, and database servers. The build manager automatically checks out the latest application code from the source code repository, compiles the code, runs unit level tests, creates deployment packages, deploys the packages to web and application servers, and executes automated system level tests created by the quality assurance team.

Security-First

We take a Security-First approach to all application related projects and understand the importance of organizational security requirements. Our team is very experienced implementing solutions that meet appropriate FIPS, NIST, and organizational security requirements. We have created systems that support multi-factor security for external services, systems requiring digital certificates for both authentication and encryption, and internal systems that require single-sign-on with Microsoft Active Directory. Our team works closely with our clients to ensure that our applications meet or exceed the most rigorous security requirements. Our solutions protect the access to our clients’ systems and data, through encryption of sensitive data, SSL encryption of all internet traffic, digital signing of messages and documents, and other security methods.

Application Development

IHRC business analysts, architects, designers, developers, and quality assurance technicians have over three decades of experience developing a wide range of applications for government, military, public health, healthcare, and many other industries. Our depth of development expertise benefits our customers by quickly and accurately determining the type of application resources and technical approach required to develop a high-quality software product within the project budget and deliver the product on-time. Our development staff is experienced with developing many types of applications including web applications, mobile applications, SOAP and REST web services, and APIs with a wide range of software languages including Java, Microsoft .Net, Ruby, PHP, and Java Script hosted locally or in the cloud on virtualized Microsoft and Linux servers.

IHRC’s application development approach is rooted the Unified Process and Unified Modeling Language (UML) and adapted to the Agile development framework. Our approach emphasizes that every application has both function and form. Function corresponds with use cases and form to architecture. The use cases must, when realized, fit in the architecture while the architecture must allow for realization of all required and future use cases.

Our solutions are Use Case driven and address requirements for user and system interaction. Our business analysts actively engaginge the projects stakeholders to define the solutions high-level business, functional, and technical requirements required for design and implementation of an optimal solution. We utilize a wide range of communications approaches including stakeholder work groups, email progress updates, publishing solution information using Wiki web sites, and establishing a developer sandbox allowing customer trials of solution components. We continue to use of the communications tools throughout the Agile iterations until the complete functionality of a solutions is described.

While use cases drive the process, they are not selected in isolation. They are developed in tandem with the architecture. Our Architecture Centric process embodies the most significant static and dynamic aspects of the system and its many views. The architecture grows out of the needs of the enterprise as reflected and is influenced by many factors. We consider factors including but not limited to (i) the platform on which the software is to run, (ii) operating systems, (iii) network infrastructure, (iv) databases, (v) application servers, (vi) reusable building blocks, including frameworks, components, API libraries, user interfaces, external system integration and interoperability, and ( vii) non-functional requirements, such as security, performance, ease of use, and reliability.

Web Application Development

Web applications have evolved from static objects into a dynamic architecture built around HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript libraries that control their behavior and look-and-feel on any device that can access the internet. Our web developers are experienced in developing responsive design web sites and applications using JavaQuery APIs such as BootStrap, JQuery, and AngularJS to create single page web applications viewable on any type of device. We develop web applications that interface with RESTful web services (REST) API using and JavaScript API frameworks to enable interaction with web service applications.

Web Services / API Development

IHRC developers are very experienced developing REST Web Service solution that support any type of services based solutions including web and mobile applications, message and data exchange services, and interoperability solutions. REST decomposes application functionality into independent REST APIs called Resources. REST Resource provide a broad range of benefits including using the existing HTTP communication protocol, high scalability, loosely coupling allows for changes to a resource with minimal impact to other resources, and API type reusability.

Application Assessment

Our technical teams are very experienced in assessing current custom and commercial applications to assist our customers with choosing the correct approach to modernizing the current systems or replacing existing systems with either a new custom solution or commercial product. We offer two approaches to assessing your application:

Analysis of Alternatives

As business requirements change and existing legacy applications no longer meet the business, technical, and security requirements for today’s modern applications, IHRC provides an Analysis of Alternatives service offering to assess the current “As-Is” application against the new business requirements and technical specifications and compare to a set of alternative solutions that may include modifications to current application, new custom application, or commercial applications. Our approach to identify, select, analyze and document potential alternative solutions is based on the Analysis of Alternative (AoA) methodology defined by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Department of Defense (DoD), and the General Services Administration (GSA). The IHRC team conducts a quantitative alternative analysis to systematically compare and evaluate alternative solutions based on cost, benefit and risk parameters. Estimates of future costs, delivery schedules, performance metrics, and other critical metrics will be analyzed in order to understand the risks associated with each alternative.

Marketplace Evaluaiton

Our approach to evaluating the marketplace is based on methods from the Carnegie-Mellon Software Engineering Institute’s Evolutionary Process for Integrating COTS-Based Systems (EPIC) framework, which seeks to avoid large gaps between the features described by requirements analysis and features of products discovered during the marketplace evaluation. The EPIC process involves iterations of simultaneous activities that include requirements definition, marketplace discovery, analysis and negotiation among four realms of Stakeholder Needs and Business Processes, The Marketplace, Architecture and Design, and Risk. Our team focuses on identifying the requirements that should form the criteria upon which the potential marketplace solutions are judged, and applying those criteria to the candidate products to determine those best suited for final consideration. IHRC applies the EPIC approach to Analysis of Alternatives projects when commercial applications are to be considered.

Cloud Services

IHRC offers numerous Cloud Service offerings to assist our customers take advantage of hosting their infrastructure and software applications in the Cloud or utilizing cloud hosted Software-As-Service solution to meet critical business needs. We offer a Cloud readiness service to assess current customer systems to determine if they are Cloud ready and if migration to the cloud would benefit the customer.

IHRC utilizes Cloud services to support and extend our local development environment as needed to meet project communication needs, stakeholder evaluation and feedback, and sandbox and pilot testing. Our state-of-art development environment is cloud-ready to replicate to the cloud for a customer’s own development projects. We recommend that applications you intend to host in the Cloud is developed in the Cloud.

Data Services and Big Data

We offer a wide variety of data services and big data analytics including but not limited to:

Database Architecture
Data Analytics
Data management
Data Visualization
Database creation optimization and maintenance
Database Administration
Data cleaning
Data migration

Program Management Office (PMO)

The Program Management Office is a function of IT Program Management and Compliance that defines and maintains standards for project management within the organization. Governance, oversight and compliance are key functions of the PMO. The organization also supports training, coaching and collaboration between teams and leaders.