Operating Model

The goal of the USDA IA CoE is to help guide Mission Areas and Staff Offices through the process of ensuring IA projects are efficiently and effectively delivered with a focus on customer service. Throughout their work, the CoE also focuses on reducing risk, maintaining oversight, eliminating redundancy and ensuring consistency. The USDA IA CoE includes the following functions. This is being expanded to accommodate a shift toward Intelligent Automation (IA) and as functions are revised, this page will be updated.

IA Intake and Planning

• Customers engage early with the CoE to ensure maximum code reuse and potential cost savings
• The CoE works with customer to document requirements, walk customer through the process, and provide development Level of Effort
• The CoE governance board reviews and provides approval

IA Development

• For Centralized development customers, the CoE will work with customer to create design documentation, perform development tasks, test and deploy to production
• For Federated development customers, the CoE will have regular checkpoints with the customer team to perform code reviews and assist with deploying into shared hosting environment

IA Testing

IA Operations

• With the Centralized model, the CoE will migrate bots to production and work with customer to ensure ongoing production operations themselves
• With the Federated model, each customer will deploy to production and ensure ongoing production operations
• The CoE contract will have a Customer Line Item Number (CLIN) for customers to take advantage of long-term operations and maintenance needs