Introducing Ad Hoc’s Groundwork Delivery Platform

Government agencies are increasingly looking to innovate in ways that can help them quickly deliver high-quality, secure digital services to the public. But they often face challenges in building and deploying their user-facing applications efficiently.

A digital services platform meets these challenges by providing common tooling, shared components, and a single, efficient pathway to move applications securely into production. It can also reduce the cognitive load and scope of work for developing a new application, allowing solutions to be smaller, less complex, and easier to deliver.

This is where Ad Hoc can help. We’ve created a new program – Groundwork – that offers agencies defined products with simplified pricing to build the foundation of their digital services. Groundwork products give agencies the critical infrastructure needed for modern digital services, allowing them to focus on the needs of their users.

Today, we’re announcing the first product in our Groundwork program: the Delivery Platform, an end-to-end delivery platform for deploying and managing modern government digital services.

Ad Hoc’s Delivery Platform vs. other options

Our Delivery Platform is based on extensive knowledge and experience developing products for various government agencies. It provides the essential components to build services, the DevOps pipelines to deliver and enhance services, and the tools needed to manage and maintain them.

But why should agencies choose our platform solution over options like a ready-made platform offering, or building their own customized platform?

One way to think about the tradeoffs between these different platform options is to consider video gaming computers (which are essentially a “platform” for video games).

People who want to run video games can buy a prebuilt, off-the-shelf computer for their needs, but because these are commodity computers they’re designed to meet the widest possible scope of needs so that many people will buy them. They’re not specifically designed for video games, and that can have a significant impact on which games they support. They’re often a poor platform for video games that have specific resource and hardware requirements, and they include many things that video gamers don’t care about that increase the overall cost of the computer (e.g., licensing for office productivity software).

Consumers who want to run high-end video games have the option of picking the specific components of a gaming machine that meets their needs — for example, picking the specific graphics card or processor that can be assembled into a machine specifically designed for the video games they want to play. The problem with this option is that assembling and configuring a custom gaming machine requires special skills and experience and is probably a thing that most video gamers would only need to do once (or a very few times).

A third option is to engage with a third party to assemble and configure a machine that is specifically designed to support the resource and hardware requirements of video games. It provides the benefit of avoiding all of the unnecessary components of a pre-built machine, allows gamers to take advantage of components specifically engineered for gaming, and doesn’t require gamers to learn how to assemble and configure custom hardware.

The same calculus applies to agencies wishing to implement platforms to support their digital services.

Purchasing an established platform may be convenient, but it can be costly, complex, and often includes unnecessary features that aren’t designed with public-facing digital services in mind. Building a platform from scratch allows for customization, but this option requires specialized experience that agencies may not have in house.

Ad Hoc’s Delivery Platform has laid the foundation so agencies don’t have to go it alone. Teams can instead use our product’s vetted tools, workflows, and configurations and focus their efforts on developing great products that will directly benefit their customers.

The details

Our Delivery Platform and its cohesive set of technologies helps agencies more efficiently deliver software applications and digital solutions for customers. The platform includes core features needed for most digital service projects, like account creation and management, authentication, notifications, and logging. It also includes platform onboarding documentation and governance to help structure how teams interact with the platform, test out new digital services, and validate that they’re ready to go to production.

Our Delivery Platform provides solutions for three key components:

Hosting infrastructure and services to:

• Run applications in production, then manage and scale them
• Store and distribute content efficiently for end users
• Manage secrets like API keys and other credentials
• Store application data

Asset building and deployment infrastructure, tools, and services to:

• Manage source control
• Run automated software builds, tests and deployments and provide service discovery
• Store artifacts
• Automate testing and code scanning

Logging and metrics tools and services to:

• Provide insight into the production state of your applications
• Collect, aggregate, and search logs across applications

Once implemented, Ad Hoc’s Delivery Platform will not only enable quick, secure, and compliant deployment of new digital solutions, but it will also allow your teams to rapidly iterate and enhance features based on your customers’ needs. Additionally, security and compliance are embedded in your deployed solutions, so you never have to worry about delivery slowing down due to manual updates.

Better solutions for building quality digital services

We know how beneficial a solid platform can be for federal agencies whose resources may be limited. Let us help remove some of the barriers to getting started and allow you to focus on creating services that provide your customers with the best experience possible.

Agencies can purchase the Delivery Platform on NASA SEWP through our partner ATP Gov. The NASA SEWP GWAC provides the latest in IT products and services for all federal agencies. It offers agencies streamlined pricing, faster turnaround, and excellent customer service.

The Delivery Platform is just the beginning. Ad Hoc plans to offer more Groundwork products soon that will enable agencies to construct a solid foundation for their modern digital services. Learn more about the value Groundwork offers and how to buy the Delivery Platform.