The Folio Modernization Journey
As part of the federal government's investment in IT, the Office of Management and Budget requires tracking and reporting on cost savings and cost avoidance in an agency’s portfolio. The Electronic Capital Planning and Investment Control (eCPIC) system was created in 2003 as a tool to help meet that requirement, replacing the older, windows-based Information Technology Investment Portfolio System (I-TIPS). In its day, each of these systems was considered the gold standard for portfolio management.
In the decades since these tools were created, digital technology has advanced significantly and new best practices have evolved. GSA data functions had historically been managed within I-TIPS, but to meet the challenges of digital change, in 2017 the Federal eCPIC Steering Committee (FESCOM), a shared service community of 17 federal agencies, of which GSA is one, began development of a new portfolio management application. GSA selected Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) Cloud Services (FCS) to host that new application, which began the process of migration to the modern, cloud-based IT portfolio management application we now know as Folio.
From the beginning of the transition from life under eCPIC to Folio, Folio’s design and development has been – and will continue to be – committed to offering portfolio management that achieves three specific goals:
Provide an improved user experience that is built on a streamlined and intuitive user interface.
Enable flexible data collection and tailored user access with a system that is robust and customizable, and that supports sophisticated data collection,analysis, and reporting.
Offer a modern technology stack that leverages the latest technologies, is built for the cloud, follows industry best practices (such as Agile development and automated testing), and that adheres to the standards of the U.S. Web Design System.
Folio went live on FCS in 2020 with Everything But The App (EBTA) in order to meet the client's March 2020 modernization deadline. EBTA allowed Folio to begin utilizing fully integrated, automated application stacks with orchestration tools that enabled push-button deployments. While not the containerized environment for which Folio was designed, this interim stop on the journey provided invaluable information. Specifically, the Folio team learned the importance of working with the infrastructure team early in the planning process, to better understand the technologies supported by the environment. The Folio team also gained meaningful insights into the security review process. Both of these aspects are critical in data management and have been applied throughout the Folio modernization journey.
Folio’s migration to the Multi-tenant Container-as-a-Service (MCaaS) platform in 2022 provided containerized environments that are well suited to the Folio application because they offer increased flexibility and agility in deployments, which can minimize downtime and maximize resources. Sweeping changes in one aspect of data management can pose risks to other areas of an application, but with MCaaS, Folio is able to apply small changes to specific aspects of the application without requiring a full deployment. In addition, MCaaS even makes it easy for Folio to selectively increase RAM or CPU power on different areas of the application, APIs, or microservices, depending on what may be needed at the time.
Learn more about EBTA on the FAS-IT Playbook.
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Learn more about MCaaS on the FAS-IT Playbook.
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When Folio first launched on MCaaS, the development team requested that customers not use the application during deployments. The Folio team was not yet confident about how the user experience might be affected during deployment, so a decision was made then to eliminate the associated risks by prohibiting users from staying logged in during deployment periods. However, the Folio team subsequently reviewed application performance testing results and realized that customers had experienced virtually no user disruptions during deployments, primarily due to the speed in which live deployments are executed in MCaaS. In March of 2023, Folio presented these performance results to the user community and, together, they agreed that customers can and should continue to work in the application during deployment cycles. While the Folio team recognizes that it will take time for customers to become comfortable with this new way of working, they are excited about this overall improvement and confident in the continued growth and benefits that MCaaS is bringing to the Folio application.
