IRS’ Modernization Vision & Strategy (MV&S) supports the fulfillment of the IRS mission and strategic goals by establishing a five-year plan that drives information technology (IT) investment decisions based on priorities around modernizing front-line tax administration and supporting technical infrastructure. MV&S leverages existing systems, as defined in the As-Built Architecture, and new development to build IT capabilities, optimize capacity, manage program costs, and deliver business value on an incremental and frequent basis.

As such, it provides the foundation for the IRS Enterprise Architecture. It does so by defining the business vision of the IRS and how the IRS will conduct its business in the future to fulfill its mission, and by providing context for the architectural direction that is reflected in the architecture of the Target EA. This business vision and strategy is then documented within the EA’s Enterprise Transition Plan.

To achieve this objective, segment architecture is used to identify the enterprise segments and to link enterprise-level planning with the development and implementation of solution architecture. Segment architecture work products describe detailed results-oriented architecture and a transition strategy for each segment area. Segment architecture is fully reconciled with the agency enterprise architecture. Business investments and resources are also fully aligned with the approved segment architecture. Segment architecture is developed to support a clear and concise value proposition linked to the agency mission, as well as to its strategic goals and objectives

The MV&S framework is built on this functional segmentation of the IRS, representing the core mission business functions that directly relate to front-line tax administration. These segments, or business domains, reflect a purely functional rather than organizational view of the business, and ensure that business priorities remain the focus of IRS IT investments.

The IRS Business Domains include:

The business domains are supported by services that must be available to support the effective and secure execution of the core mission business functions. These services are addressed by the service domains, and include cross-cutting data, infrastructure and security services as well as common business functions that can be leveraged to support business domains.

The IRS Service Domains include:

Finally, Technical Domains were recently introduced into the MV&S Framework. The focus of the Technical Services Domain is the delivery of base products and services (shared resources that can be used on demand by many different applications) that affect the development, operations, and maintenance costs of systems; the time necessary to develop and deploy new or revised capabilities; the flexibility and capability to resource-development efforts; and the effective operational performance of these systems and their ability to provide the desired business results.

The Technical Services Domains include:

Many of the core IRS business processes support the strategic goals as described in the 2005-2009 Strategic Plan. In the current EA 3.1, connect to the link http://irsprime.web.irs.gov/irsea/index_framework.html, the Table1 presents a matrix that associates each of the target IRS business process groups with the Goals and Objectives within the Strategic Plan. The matrix is provided to assist in the development of business cases or E300s to provide a stronger justification of proposed improvements to IRS business processes by demonstrating a clearer line of sight to IRS business results.

The IRS EA presents programmatic requirements for the IRS Business Systems Modernization Program. In all cases, these programmatic requirements have been established on the basis of higher authority (for example, the U.S. Congress) and exist independently of the IRS EA. Therefore, they are merely referenced herein, rather than stated explicitly. Given the broad scope of many of the referenced requirements, some provisions of some of these requirements may not be fully applicable to the IRS Business Systems Modernization Program. The IRS EA describes the following three varieties of programmatic requirements:

The following information is provided for each programmatic requirement

The primary purpose of the Security Requirements model is to specify security requirements for the IRS Enterprise Target Architecture (ETA). In addition to that model, two supporting models are also included here–in all, three models:

Other Models of the Target Architecture Security View

The security architecture view of the Target Architecture consists of other models besides the three named just above. Other models of the security view include:

Privacy Requirements Models: The primary purpose of the Privacy Requirements model is to specify privacy requirements for the IRS Enterprise Target Architecture (ETA). In addition to that model, a supporting model is also included here:

Other Models of the Target Architecture Privacy View: The privacy architecture view of the Target Architecture consists of other models besides the two named just above. Other models of the privacy view include:

The IRS EA describes high-level system performance requirements. Five categories of performance requirements are specified:

These performance requirements are primarily based on the performance goals specified in the Process Thread Performance Matrix (provided in the EA’s Performance Architecture section). However in many cases, the performance goals specified by these matrices are incomplete. Therefore, they have been supplemented by information from sources such as the tax statistics area of http://www.irs.gov. Future versions of the Business Architecture are expected to provide more complete specification of performance goals. This will lead to expansion and refinement of the performance requirements specified herein, and may result in replacement of some of the requirements based on supplemental sources.

Each performance requirement has a unique identifier in the form PR nnnn in EA, where PR stands for performance requirement, and nnnn is a unique four-digit numeric string. In order to preserve uniqueness and avoid ambiguity, a requirement’s identifier is not reused when the requirement is deleted.

The Enterprise Systems Management (ESM) Requirements exist primarily because systems and networks are not currently self-healing. In order to move the IRS towards the goal of self-healing, self-managed systems, applications, and networks, all MIS devices, systems, applications, processes, and system platforms (Tiers I, II, III) must participate in the overall systems management strategy. All ESM functions must be closely integrated with each other, provide for extensibility, scalability, and secure operation, and afford extensive multi-platform management capability.

Described below are arrays of management capabilities that must be provided in order to achieve a "best-practice" ESM solution for the IRS:

The ESM solution deployed at the IRS must be flexible enough to adapt to a wide variety of operational models. Producing an Enterprise-wide solution provides for a high degree of flexibility with regard to implementing evolutionary changes to the operational model with the least amount of disruption to service levels.

The IRS EA describes the Enterprise-level, future-state functional requirements that will support the modernized IRS. The Business Process Model includes

A Business Service is a complete business transaction or interaction that the IRS conducts with a customer, partner, or stakeholder. A Business Service is an actual service that the IRS provides (or wants to provide in the future) that delivers something of recognizable value to one or more stakeholders. It can be a Tax Service (for example, answering a tax law question, processing a tax return, answering an account inquiry, issuing and/or validating a Taxpayer Identification Number [TIN], delivery of a Transcript or even a set of Transcripts for a group of TINs in batch mode, or providing a Letter of Determination), or a service that provides a Tax Product (for example, the provision of a tax form or tax publication, that can be delivered in either paper or electronic form). Like other business enterprises, the IRS offers an array of services, similar to a menu or catalog of services that identifies the various products and services that one can obtain from that business enterprise.

The IRS EA Describes the Enterprise-level, future-state business processes that will support the modernized IRS. The Business Process Model includes

The IRS EA provides business scenarios that demonstrate how selected business processes contained in the IRS EA support key business events. These scenarios were developed in response to requests from the business community to meet two objectives:

The IRS has, in addition to the traditional administrative accounting applicable to all government agencies, the added custodial requirement to manage the receipt and disbursement, and related assets and liabilities, of taxpayer accounts. Creating and applying financial controls to these activities is not just good accounting practice. The Joint Financial Management Improvement Program (JFMIP) identifies controls as part of its mandatory requirements for federal financial management systems. In its Framework for Federal Financial Management Systems (which also contains an extensive list of pertinent laws and regulations), the JFMIP states that Effective financial management depends upon appropriate control of business transactions, in accordance with internal control standards, and recording business event information in a manner that satisfies multiple users and uses.

The added responsibility for safeguarding the taxpayer’s money makes custodial financial controls an important topic in the EA. The IRS has the custodial responsibility to manage the receipt and disbursement, and related assets and liabilities, of taxpayer accounts. Control of these financial events is critical and required.

The IRS EA defines several key concepts, in order to provide a better understanding of how and where custodial financial controls fit into the EA. These key concepts are:

The IRS Enterprise context diagram profiles the business environment in which the IRS operates. In doing so, it describes the external entities with which the IRS interacts. These entities are organized hierarchically with summary-level entities sometimes broken down into second- and even third-level entities. Hierarchically structured entities are abstractions of organizations or people, which are defined by the roles they play (or will play) within the IRS.

In general, the IRS’ Enterprise context diagram does not describe interactions among the multiple roles of organizations unless those interactions are applicable to IRS business. For example, a business is a taxpayer when it pays its income tax, and a business is an employer when that business withholds taxes from its employees and submits tax-related W-2 information to the IRS. The IRS Enterprise context diagram describes interactions between business taxpayers and the IRS and between employers and the IRS; it does not describe interactions between taxpayers and employers.

The IRS Enterprise Context Diagram describes a conceptual view of the external entities with which the IRS interacts. The figure includes channel partner interactions. Interfaces between third parties and taxpayers are included in the domain of the context diagram. Internal IRS organizations are not displayed on the context diagram. The current and future states of internal process flows and organization design are described in other model views.

The external entities are organized hierarchically with top-level entities broken down into second-level and sometimes third-level entities. Each entity has an EE-xx identifier. This hierarchical organization parallels the Enterprise Conceptual Data Model’s definitions of taxpayer and third party. The IRS EA (in Context Diagram Entity and Interface Definitions) presents the complete hierarchical organization and provides detailed definitions of the entities and interfaces. Only the most significant, higher level external entities are presented in the IRS Enterprise Context Diagram. The higher level external entities are listed below:

The IRS EA describes linkages between every Tax Administration Services, Support Delivery of Services and Internal Management of IRS Resources business process as defined in the End-to-End Business Process Views by Domain and its data and functional requirements as specified in the Conceptual Data Model and Functional Requirements by Domain sections. These linkages are illustrated in a table in EA corresponding section. The table is divided into four columns, sorted by the first column:

The IRS EA describes the Enterprise-level, future-state functional requirements that will support the modernized IRS. The Business Process Model includes

Here does not include security, privacy, performance, and system management functional requirements, which are described elsewhere.

The IRS EA describes processing threads that are used to demonstrate how system software applications are involved in executing high-level business processes. The processing threads consider aspects of processing tax returns and payments, initiating compliance actions, and providing customer support and taxpayer education. Third party support also is addressed. A security processing thread presented in Security Processing Thread emphasizes the involvement of infrastructure components as an employee logs on to an IRS workstation and begins working on a filing and payment compliance case. The following processing threads are discussed in the corresponding section in EA:

Each thread is described as a sequence of actions. Most of these actions are automated by particular software applications within IRS systems. However, some actions may be manual. The processing steps are depicted in one or more figures. Solid arrows depict the logical flow from step to step. Systems involved in the sequence of steps are shaded. Dotted arrows indicate the exchange of data with specific IRS data stores, which are likewise shaded. As appropriate, additional symbols are added to the figures to indicate human participants and particular types of information (for example, a letter symbol for any paper tax form, correspondence, or notice). A table accompanies each figure and provides a detailed description of the actions in each step in the EA. These steps are numbered to correspond to the associated figure. The IRS system (in capital letters) and application (underlined) that perform each step are first identified, followed by the detailed actions within that step.

IRS Organization Descriptions, which are part of the IRS EA Organization Model View, identify and describe the organizational entities that comprise the modernized IRS. The scope encompasses the entire IRS Enterprise, including advisory functions, such as Chief Counsel and the National Taxpayer Advocate, as well as all Operational Support components. The IRS EA provides summaries of organization-level business concepts of operations (ConOps) that have been completed, processed, and approved for inclusion in the EA. These ConOps describe how various IRS organizations will operate in the future to achieve their mission and strategic goals. The modernized organizations as described have been envisioned as a result of the ConOps efforts and are established in order to support the modernized mission and goals. ConOps scenarios show examples of how the modernized organizations will perform selected key functions. The full business ConOps and representative business ConOps scenarios from which these summaries are drawn are also available in the IRS EA.

The purpose of the Role Definitions section is to identify and classify roles that support the core business of the IRS; it is not intended to be an exhaustive list of roles. While functional roles are identified, organizational roles are not identified, because these change over time. All identified roles contain role descriptions that define each role.

The Location Type Definitions identify and classify all of the distinct types of locations where IRS does business (directly or indirectly) or where critical functions are performed in support of IRS business or technical operations. These definitions establish the enterprise-wide terms, nomenclature, and hierarchical structuring of locations, so that consistent names and meanings are used across the enterprise. The focus is on functional and physical locations that are durable over time. The Location Types definitions do not try to define organizational locations, which tend to change over time. IRS business processes are associated with the specific IRS Location Types at which they are performed in Process / Location Type.