What We've Done

At Tandem Conglomerate, we are devoted to maintaining a stellar reputation amongst out customers. The results of our hard work speak for themselves. Regardless of the nature of the tasks at hand, we have consistently provided high quality service and deliverables. Learn about some of our success stories below, and then contact us to discuss how we can add you to our list of satisfied customers.

Not-for-Profit/Associations

National Academies / National Research Council (NRC) – Strategic IT Review

Tandem assisted the National Academies' National Research Council (NRC) in its effort to improve Information Technology (IT) planning throughout its operating divisions including the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council. Tandem performed a high-level review of key IT trends and their potential for positively impacting the operations and mission of the NRC. Our analysis looked at cloud computing, mobile computing, IT in research, security, and social networking.

Transportation Research Board - Enterprise System(s) Package Implementation

Tandem assisted the TRB in identifying, selecting and implementing a new enterprise management system to replace their people/association management system. Our efforts examined the requirements, conducted a build/buy assessment, and made a recommendation on an enterprise system that suited TRB’s unique operating environment. Subsequently, Tandem was retained to facilitate the implementation of the new system and to run the Project Management Office as well as to take a lead role in performing the necessary data conversion to the new system. The system will enable the TRB to operate more efficiently and focus their resources on supporting their membership and sponsorship base that conducts world class research into today’s local and global transportation challenges.

StarSpangled200.com - Website Design, Development, Deployment, Operations and Maintenance

Tandem lead an effort to roll out a new website, www.starspangled200.com, for Star-Spangled 200, Inc., the company tasked with promoting the State of Maryland's War of 1812 Bicentennial celebrations. This required coordination of the efforts of six public and private sector organizations to design, build, and deliver the site under very tight time constraints. Tandem built the original site on the open-source Drupal platform as the content management system and subsequently managed the hosting of the site during its initial roll out and operation. The site was launched on November 17th, 2012 in conjunction with a press conference held by Maryland's Governor Martin O'Malley and Baltimore's Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.

Health IT

District of Columbia / DC Access - IT Planning

Tandem supported the District of Columbia in its effort to meet the Affordable Care Act’s requirement for States to implement a new Health Benefit Exchange. Tandem worked as a team to prepare specific requirements for the District’s exchange, DC Access System (DCAS). Our requirements efforts defined key elements of the system including architecture, eligibility determination, customer service, self-service capabilities and data integration with DC’s other human and health benefits systems. Tandem worked with key District personnel, such as CIO for the Department of Human Services staff, and personnel from the Department of Health Care Finance and the Office of the Chief Technology Officer.

The DC Immunization Information System (IIS) – Electronic Health Records

As part of the District of Columbia’s Department of Health American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) / Center for Disease Control (CDC) program, Tandem is enhancing the interoperability of Electronic Health Records (EHR) and the Immunization Information Systems (IIS). The purpose of this program is to provide support for the enhanced interoperability between EHR and IIS with a specific focus on the exchange of vaccination records and reducing the duplicate data entry burden on providers. IIS exists to contain and make available to healthcare providers, patients, and educational centers' health offices the immunization records of adults and children receiving care, attending school or child care, or residing in the District of Columbia; and to support the DC Immunization Program's daily operations, priorities, and policies. One of Tandem’s efforts for DC Immunization Information System (IIS) is to convert the data transmission to HL7 Version 2.5.1 [HL7v2.5.1] standards. The HL7 v2.5.1 standard currently addresses the interfaces between various healthcare IT systems that send or receive a variety of healthcare data.

DC Department of Human Services – Oracle Based Application Development

For the District of Columbia Department of Human Services (DHS), Tandem is providing data and system architecture consultation and advisory services directly to the DHS Chief Information Officer. Tandem has been providing this assistance and advisory services to the DHS CIO for several years for their primary Oracle 11g/Windows based architecture. Our primary effort involves establishing a database repository that collects data from the different DHS databases/applications for centralized reporting.

Tax and Revenue Systems

District of Columbia / City Clean Hands (CCH) - Service Oriented Architecture / Enterprise Service BUS development

As part of the initiative to ensure that anyone applying for a license or permit in the District does not owe more than $100 in delinquent debt to the District, Tandem implemented ESB services to: monitor FTP locations for agency debt and compliance check request files, load batch debt into the CCH database, transfer compliance check request files to a designated location for processing, and send out e-mail notifications. Tandem also designed and developed the following:

  • ESB services to: poll the eTaxpayer Service Center (eTSC) database for W2/W2C files submitted online by employers, transfer the files to the Office of Tax Revenue (OTR)'s Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) for processing, and keep the eTSC updated with the status of each submission.
  • ESB web service that can be invoked by OTR's Integrated Tax System (ITS) to verify the IDs of entities requesting tax refunds in order to flag potentially fraudulent requests for investigation.
  • A nightly extract service to transfer data from 26 ITS tables to the EDW for use in producing OTR's batch debt feed for CCH, among other purposes. This required an ESB web service that can be triggered from DB2. The service uses metadata from recent runs to extract data that have been added or modified. Then, the ESB invokes a Dataflux web service to initiate further processing in the EDW.
  • A web service interface between the Office of the State Superintendent of Schools (OSSE) and OTR to verify the income of parents whose children are applying for educational grant money. For each incoming web service request, the ESB queries an EDW view for the relevant tax data extracted from the parent's D40 tax form stored in ITS, and returns the data, if found, to OSSE.
  • A web service interface between the Office of Contracting and Procurement (OCP) and the CCH database to allow OCP contracting officers to check vendors' CCH compliance statuses before awarding them new contracts.

Public Sector Administration

District of Columbia / DCStat - Data Analytics and Warehousing Development

The DCStat initiative is about organizing and supplying intelligence, District-wide, in an actionable form to all of DC’s participating departments addressing the key performance metrics for each Department. Tandem consultants played a key role in providing vital IT Management and Infrastructure Services to the District, ensuring the successful implementation of the DCStat initiative. Through our systematic approach to planning, design, build, test and operations, we were able to provide secure, reliable, real-time data integration from various District systems in a highly available environment. Please contact us to learn more. It is built on open source standards, J2EE and .NET, and leverages various state-of-the-art technologies like SeeBeyond eGate, ESRI ArcIMS, and Oracle Spatial to provide the real-time intelligence and analysis.

District of Columbia / ASMP - Procurement Systems

Tandem resources have been an integral part of the District of Columbia's Administrative Services Modernization Program (ASMP). Tandem resources were vital to the successful implementations of the District's Procurement Automated Support System (PASS) and HR systems. These resources were responsible for the delivery of major architectural components through the design, build, test, deploy and run sections of the technical architecture and infrastructure for Procurement (Ariba) and HR (PeopleSoft) verticals. Tandem has been consistently committed to forging a strong partnership with the District that transcends the traditional client/vendor relationship.

K-12 Public Schools

County School System – Infrastructure Services

For a school system with nearly 50,000 students, Tandem has been providing managed services support for the District’s primary student information system. Our work has ensured the stability and reliability for student related instructional and administrative data for each student in the District. Tandem reviewed the related technical environments (production, testing, development, and training) and made recommendations for improvements and has been providing daily, weekly, and monthly monitoring of performance, stability and utilization as well as emergency support services to the District. Additionally, Tandem established the Disaster Recovery site for the District at a 2nd location and has provided ongoing backup and recovery services.

The College Board – Data Warehousing and Data Governance

The College Board implemented an Enterprise Data Management (data governance) program in order to more effectively support business initiatives across the enterprise, and more specifically, the College Board’s “Achieve the Mission” (ATM) initiative. ATM recognized that the College Board must improve and strengthen its organizational effectiveness to face a challenging and changing environment. Tandem assisted in the development of the data governance Program Plan and Scope document. It outlined the high-level approach to implementing the College Board’s initial data governance program. It identified the critical data governance components that must be addressed in order to establish a data governance foundation and the interdependencies between them: Data Governance, Meta Data Management, Data Architecture, and Data Warehousing / Business Intelligence.

DC Public School Systems – Student Information Management Systems - Operations and Management

For the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), Tandem provides full technical, operational and data management support of the DC Student Tracking And Reporting System (DC STARS) application. DC STARS is an Oracle based integrated student information system that manages student demographic, emergency contact, schedule, attendance, transcript, mark and other information needed to manage and track student progress through their academic career. Our team technically and functionally operates, administers, maintains and enhances DC STARS as well as provides business process operational, data management/governance and technical consulting internally as well as externally with other administrative and instructional systems. STARS is the system of record for all students within the District of Columbia and has been stable since Tandem took over its operation. Our work gives us extensive knowledge of K-12 student administration operations, business rules, data architecture and integration with other DCPS administrative systems.

Leading K-12 Educational Software Company – Student Information Management Systems – State Reporting Development

In support of one of the leading Student Information Systems (SIS) in the marketplace, Tandem has been helping the parent organization expand the system's capabilities in the area of state reporting. The organization's efforts to expand their market share in Virginia, New York, an New Jersey led them to engage Tandem to identify, design, develop and test source code to meet each state's legislatively mandated reporting requirements. We worked in partnership with the product development team as well as each State's designated PoC to ensure that our work complied with all requirements in terms of content, format and frequency. Tandem's efforts have allowed the company to rapidly expand into new markets.

DC Public Schools / PASS – Procurement Systems

The District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) successfully implemented the District of Columbia's Procurement Automated Support System (PASS) for its entire enterprise. DCPS PASS is the first Ariba implementation for the school district. PASS is Ariba’s Buyer & Invoice Modules with about 50 small modifications. PASS is integrated directly with the District's general ledger (GL), through SeeBeyond’s Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) software. For the DCPS PASS implementation, Tandem provided the technical architecture and infrastructure oversight as well as guidance over the training, readiness and deployment coordination.