Inland Revenue (Digital Partner Services)

Industries

Public Sector

Solutions

Assurity Cloud

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As it undertakes the largest business transformation journey in New Zealand, the Inland Revenue department has engaged Assurity Consulting to provide an innovative approach to systems integrity which enables self-service testing by the multiple partners playing a role in the execution of its mandate. The result is Digital Partner Services (DPS), a cloud-based automated solution which equips partners with the tools they need to test, validate, and confirm the quality of systems integrations on the fly. The solution plays a role in accelerating the introduction of Inland Revenue services by automatically identifying errors, reducing, or eliminating manual interventions, and allowing partners to work at their own pace.

“The initial and obvious benefit was acceleration. We are able to onboard new parties rapidly by enabling them to self-service with testing, reducing their need for physical engagement with IR. Provided with the right information, it makes testing easier for them and for us, so both parties win."

Chris Hourigan

Business Transformation Testing Lead

Inland Revenue

Solution

Digital Partner Services (DPS), a cloud-based automated self-service solution which equips IR’s partners with the tools they need to test, validate, and confirm the quality of systems integrations on the fly. DPS met IR’s high standards for security and was successfully approved to meet government standards for security.

Services provided

Created cloud-hosted, reusable test assets accessible by partners which would allow them to emulate live interactions using transactional data and evaluate the results
Extended self-service automated testing for partners, equipping them to understand, code and test their integrations against IR APIs, independent of and decoupled from IR infrastructure
Provided DPS as a pay-as-you-go service and made available to IR partners
Adopted DevOps ethos to employ DPS test to validate the production implementation, allowing IR for the first time to introduce new services against IR endpoints, without depending on an external party
Employed service journey tests as an enduring Customer Experience Monitor (CEM) service in the production environment, providing real-time feedback on service performance
Deployed test automation for continuous testing across all services

Outcomes delivered

Transformed testing approach – Multiple parallel parties’ systems tested vs previous ‘one on one’ approach
Sped up third party integrations by 4 times
Reduced time taken for integration testing from weeks to days
Reduced time required for firewall changes from days to minutes to enable customers to engage in testing