ImmigrationDHS hits reset button on the Electronic Immigration System (ELIS)

DHS has awarded InfoZen the first of multiple contracts for the Electronic Immigration System (ELIS), designed to process immigration forms. This is the latest attempt to digitize the processing system after spending roughly $1 billion and five and a half years under a contract led by IBM.

InfoZen’s 3-year, $11.9 million contract calls for the firm to combine software from various other vendors, and test the system’s effectiveness and compatibility with existing source code, according to federal officials. When completed — a completion date has not been set —  ELIS would allow users to pay fees for visa processing, extend or change the status of a stay, and apply for investor green cards.

IBM, the incumbent on the initial 2008 $536,000 contract, will now assist with the transition until May 2014. DHS officials reported that had the department not changed course, costs for the project could have reached $3.6 billion. NextGov  reports that the Citizen and Immigration Services (CIS) published solicitations for new proposals in June 2013 to sixty-eight pre-vetted IT vendors on the Alliant Small Business network, and although InfoZen was selected in October 2013, the award was not disclosed by DHS or InfoZen until recently.

“This contract is critical for the success of the agency’s large scale automation of current business processes, as well as deploying a modernized code base that is sustainable, cost-effective, and reusable,” InfoZen president Raj Ananthanpillai said in a statement.

In a February 2012 memo, CIS chief information officer Mark Schwartz noted that IBM’s “design is poorly thought through and inconsistently applied by the developers. The result is duplication of efforts, time spent on rework, slowness in debugging problems, poor quality code, etc.”

With InfoZen now leading the electronic program, it must adopt a software design approach called “agile development,” a government-wide practice promoted since the start of President Barack Obama’s first term. The practice demands short deadlines for smaller sections of code and constant feedback from agency users about functionality, as opposed to the more traditional approach of investing resources to build large systems which, upon completion, may not function properly, and would later prove costly to fix. IBM’s initial involvement in the program was being developed under the traditional method despite negative feedback from CIS officials and federal auditors.

IBM is not precluded from bidding on future software jobs with CIS, and when asked to comment on the contract awarded to InfoZen, IBM spokesman Michael Rowinski told NextGov, “IBM looks forward to continuing our important mission work for USCIS.”