Actualidad -- Mayo 24, 2006
AWARD FOR TECHNICAL EXCELLENCE HIGHLIGHTS COLLABORATIVE INNOVATION
The award is CSC’s highest technical honor and recognizes innovation in the company’s work with its clients. The six recipients reflect the global nature of CSC’s business, spanning Europe and the United States, and representing both government and commercial entities.
"CSC's Technical Excellence Awards are a great example of the innovations that the company creates in collaboration with its clients," says Bill Koff, vice president and chief technology officer for CSC's Office of Innovation. "These collaborative innovations lead to CSC's next practices, which are leveraged by our clients worldwide."
The following projects received the 2006 Award for Technical Excellence.
BundOnline takes German government services to the Net
A CSC team spearheaded the largest e-government program in Europe with BundOnline 2005, which moved all available German government services to the Internet. BundOnline 2005 included nearly 500 projects and 114 federal agencies and authorities and a baseline budget of 1.4 billion euros. The project, completed before a highly visible 2005 deadline, will simplify German citizens' and businesses' interactions with their government and save the German federal administration an estimated several hundred million euros per year.
The CSC consultants, represented by Boris Neutzler, Markus Schmitt, Ernst-Dieter Wallrodt and Wolf Zimmer, M.D., worked on the project for more than five years. As the major vendor among multiple consulting companies, CSC provided project management, risk management and technical architecture standardization. BundOnline 2005 includes such technical innovations as a service-oriented architecture, standardized enterprise content management, secure transaction and communication standards and digital signatures that protect the authenticity of electronic documents. Those innovations helped develop skills that will be useful for other European governments that are also considering e-government initiatives.
Colorado's transportation gets intelligent
CSC worked with the Colorado Department of Transportation on the Colorado Traffic Management System (CTMS), a system designed to integrate an extensive network of low-level devices to provide more intelligent traffic management. CTMS, written in 90 percent open source, uses an array of technologies to help transportation authorities safely manage the flow of traffic and give current information to drivers.
The system, built in partnership with Enroute Traffic Systems, integrates the various roadway devices in use across the state and automatically provides operators with data in the form of charts, graphs or color-coded roads on the map interface. The result is an automated traffic management system that gives operators a unified view into every device and the ability to manage them from a single application.
"Every day, CTMS provides traffic operators with real-time access to speed and congestion data and alerts of incidents on roadways," says Jason Westra, CSC's system architect for CTMS. "It enables operators to inform the public of these incidents more easily. This enables the traveling public to make better decisions about when and how to travel to their destinations as safely as possible."
EADS Astrium harmonizes its IT operations
CSC helped European space specialist EADS Astrium complete a new European-wide information system to standardize business processes in just 16 months. CSC signed on in January 2004 to implement SAPHIR (SAP Astrium Project for Harmonization, Integration and Re-engineering of Processes), intended to align the company's practices around SAP. The scope of applications that needed to be supported ranged from accounting to logistics to business intelligence.
SAPHIR enabled the implementation of a central purchasing organization, streamlined company reporting, improved cash management, simplified intracompany production processes and increased visibility of stock levels. It established an internal SAP Competency Center to support the application centrally. The solution also provided a high level of data security required to support EADS Astrium military activities. The implementation of a single IT system for all entities slashed operating costs. [Read the full story.] The SAPHIR team included Alain Chansy, Jean-Pierre Kirch, Pierre Nivelle and Lothar Weberring.
FraudVision™ helps bank fight check fraud
CSC's FraudVision is a suite of automated, patent-pending software tools that enables banks to fight increasingly sophisticated check fraud. Augmenting traditional fraud-detection tools, such as signature verification and data analysis, FraudVision integrates multiple pattern-recognition capabilities to detect fraudulent checks in high-volume, image-based operations.
Recipients Katerina Blinova, Chaz Engan, John Lee and Bob Nugmanov, with support from Pierre Luu and Joanna Willis, built upon more than 15 years' experience in pattern recognition to develop the tools. FraudVision analyzes characteristics such as handwriting and check stock, comparing them to a dynamically maintained customer profile, and combines the results of this image analysis with results from external data analysis systems, resulting in better quality, more accurate results. By removing many of the false-positives that traditional tools generate, FraudVision enables analysts to focus on fewer checks, but ones that are much more likely to be counterfeit or forged.
NASA supercomputer supports space, atmospheric projects
In response to the United States falling behind in the high-performance computing (HPC) industry, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) built a world-class supercomputer, which they dubbed Project Columbia in honor of the fallen space shuttle astronauts. CSC was an integral part of the team that supported the design, development and implementation of this supercomputer, which allowed NASA to prepare the space shuttle for a safe return to space, conduct safe space exploration and obtain data for high-resolution climate and ocean modeling.
Comprised of 10,240 processors holding 20 terabytes of shared memory, and 440 terabytes of online and 6 petabytes of offline storage, Columbia can process a staggering 62.4 teraflops. The system became operational in 2004 to give NASA the fastest supercomputer in the world at that time. Although most projects of this scope take more than two years to reach operational status, Project Columbia took just 120 days.
One of CSC’s contributions was developing a capability to add systems to the production workload incrementally. Instead of having to wait for all the systems to be installed at the same time, users were provided constantly increasing capability during the build. At one point, nine systems had to be installed and put into production in 10 days.
The project was instrumental in the launch of NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's work in conducting forecasts for Hurricane Katrina. The CSC team included Davin Chan, Ed Hook, George Myers and Herbert Yeung.
SOA Framework for U.S. Department of Education
CSC developed and applied a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework for the U.S. Department of Education (DoED), making it simpler for businesses and IT stakeholders to understand IT spending and align IT with business needs. The White House Office of Management and Budget ranked the new DoED enterprise architecture among the top four most effective enterprise architectures used by federal agencies.
The SOA framework encouraged acceptance of enterprise architecture as a strategic management tool by the DoED's executive management team, and framed innovative funding mechanisms, such as venture capital, to accelerate the transition of IT activities to the desired future state.
The SOA framework simplifies enterprise and solution architecture by using a business-based, universal language to describe both business and technology aspects of the architecture. The universal language of the SOA framework makes it easier to trace the relationship between detail-level and summary-level elements of a given architecture. This traceability helps investment decision makers understand the full impact of changes due to decisions, risk events, and poor performance on the desired end results at all levels of the architecture. It also facilitates the migration from existing "stovepipe" structures to ones in which service components can be introduced incrementally into current operations, thereby avoiding the enormous risks and costs of wholesale system replacement.
At the DoED, the SOA framework was instrumental in the agency's efforts to revamp its commitment to improving education by tying school performance to the awarding of DoED grants, loans and other funding. The framework's capabilities can also be leveraged in other industries where there is a need to reduce risk in delivering transformation services. The framework can be used to describe the current state architecture using SOA terms, articulate desired end results in business and technical terms, expose risks, examine solution options, craft a transformation strategy and manage the transformation execution. The SOA framework was developed by Gordon W. Babcock, Gerald Love and Richard A. Reba, Jr.
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Learn more about the Award for Technical Excellence and the Leading Edge Forum.
Read a case study about EADS Astrium.