Alexander Albychev, Treasury - about overcoming dependence on Oracle and Microsoft, IT budget dynamics and focusing on data

Alexander Albychev: The pandemic, indeed, has become a serious test for everyone, which our IT service coped with, in my opinion, with dignity. The main challenge, of course, was the transition to a remote format of work. We have about 40,000 employees across the country, a geographically distributed network of 2,000 locations. Rapid remote access was required for about 20,000 employees, and our infrastructure allowed us to do this.

Alexander Albychev: There were several options. It is clear that we could not organize 20,000 laptops at the moment, so somewhere we took computers from office workplaces, purchased laptops, configured remote access on home PCs. In any case, it was a remote connection to a virtual desktop, an electronic signature, a secure crypto channel.

The information security department found the right solution for a safe transition to a remote format, and the support service organized a fully remote configuration scheme.

Now we can say that the technology has been worked out, several thousand employees continue to work remotely.

Alexander Albychev: Basically, of course, they returned. In this mode, we worked for about six months. During this time, we developed video conferencing services on the domestic Mind platform, now we have more than 1000 licenses, several dozen conferences are held daily.

Before the pandemic, the VKS platform was fully used, mainly by IT employees, other services used it mainly to view webinars and training courses. When the pandemic period came, everyone was forced to videoconference and now, having become accustomed to this, many continue to use them, because the savings in time are very significant. We are a geographically distributed agency, even in Moscow we are located in several buildings, and the movement between face-to-face meetings is a significant loss of working time, and the VKS makes it possible to interact quickly. Now even external meetings are often held through the VKS.

Convenient or uncomfortable - there is no consensus, but, objectively, the meetings have become more concentrated, the culture of communication has increased, everyone understands that it is impossible to speak at the same time, you need to talk briefly, to observe timing. Another advantage of the VKS is that you can connect several hundred people and immediately convey certain information to everyone, set a goal and formulate tasks.

In addition, we have seriously developed the internal portal document storage service to give employees the opportunity to exchange documents for collaboration, outside the document management system, which we have already implemented.

Alexander Albychev: From my point of view, the efficiency of remote work is lower than the efficiency of work in person, still family, children, environment can be distracting at home. Naturally, this imposes certain restrictions, it is more difficult to concentrate attention, so I consider the remote mode of operation to be a necessary measure. Office efficiency is higher. On the other hand, we have a number of employees who really liked this model, and they came out with a request that they would like to work remotely. We're still thinking about it.

Alexander Albychev: First of all, I want to say that Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Nikolaevich Chernyshenko, who oversees digitalization, really gathered us (heads of the digital transformation of federal departments, - approx. TAdviser) into a single team. Once a week, he holds meetings at which we have the opportunity to give feedback. We have ratings and KPI, we feel that we work in a single coordinate system.

Alexander Albychev: It was, but in a different way. A government commission worked, which someone was a member of, someone was not a member, and all the leaders of digital transformation are involved here - deputy heads of federal ministries and departments, everyone is constantly in a single information field.

The rule of such meetings, which take place in video conferencing mode, is only one hour, very clear time management, everything is tightly structured. As a result, we all understand what to do and what priorities are.

In addition, a model of "digital special forces" appeared, which actually works when urgent tasks arise, and there were a lot of them in the pandemic - various payments that needed to be worked out in zeitnot mode. We participate in many such projects, because the Federal Treasury is, in fact, a payment service. Dmitry Nikolaevich, together with the Analytical Center under the Government of the Russian Federation, is actually personally conducting such projects, the so-called "federal incidents."

Incident management is a cool story that has not existed before. But for us, of course, stressful, because every time a federal incident arises, we all must work in a special mode.

Alexander Albychev: One of the incidents of 2020 is the "cowardly" payments to doctors who needed to be controlled on a daily basis. It was necessary to do a full analysis, provide an opportunity on the country's map online to watch how the funds went from the federal level to each subject of the Russian Federation, then to municipalities, and further - to regional and municipal hospitals, and, ultimately, to doctors.

Within one week, we had to form a new data model and implement the collection of data on the new model and its visualization on, issue dashborda all this to the Coordination Center of the Government of the Russian Federation and through the created dashboards API and specialists of the Coordination Center carried out control. Together Ministry of Digital Affairs of Russia Ministry of Health Russia with and a lot of work was done and transparency of payments was ensured.

Recently, there was another project - the so-called "retro cashback," when it was necessary to reimburse parents for the costs of leisure children in children's camps, here we worked Rostourism with Russia, the Ministry of Digital Affairs of Russia and JSC "."NATIONAL PAYMENT CARD SYSTEM

Another example is payments to legal entities from pandemic-affected areas of the economy that did not reduce personnel, the federal budget compensated them for the minimum wage for each employee, in which case we interacted with the Federal Tax Service of Russia and the Ministry of Digital Affairs of Russia.

In all these cases, cross-functional commands were quickly assembled and new information interaction schemes were quickly worked out, which were later implemented as quickly.

Alexander Albychev: Yes, approaches to the coordination of informatization are changing. In particular, the number of documents that are needed to approve the departmental digital transformation program has been minimized. Working in the current dynamics, but in the old paradigm, it would be difficult. Now the model is built so that a large pool of changes is entrusted to the head of the digital transformation of the department.

In addition, the Ministry of Digital Affairs of Russia has now prepared a draft amendment to the key decree of the Government of the Russian Federation, regulating the procedure for managing the "digital budget." I am sure that with its adoption, the speed with which the authorities will follow the path of digitalization will only increase.

Alexander Albychev: Yes, there are certain limit limits within which such redistribution is possible. In addition, the Ministry of Digital Affairs focused on coordinating departmental development budgets, on the results that each department should achieve at the end of the year. And that, I think, is right. We took an active part, helped, advised when a new interaction scheme was designed.

Alexander Albychev: Yes, verification should be concentrated on the side of development budgets. Constant control for each minor change in the service contract, which you have the same annually, does not matter much.

Alexander Albychev: We can say that we succeeded. The most difficult thing for us was to create a technology stack, an alternative to what was laid down earlier. We spent a lot of time on this and as a result approved the import-independent stack on which the first subsystems were built. GIS Electronic Budget We created the Importozameshchenny stack on DBMS PostgresPro and also the components constructed on Open Source Software families Apache, and Eclipse ClickHouse others. Migration from the ASFC, which will last about two years, has already gone to it. We look at how the load goes, finalize, optimize. Why is this not happening at the same time? Because we work with budget funds, and it is important for us to carefully transfer each client, to clearly check everything, to draw up the necessary documents, that is, this, including, is a lot of administrative work.

We used to have a distributed system of 85 regional components. Now, for the sake of sustainability and security, we are dividing the system according to the business processes adopted in the Federal Treasury. It turns out about seven large independent units, and a temporary emergency failure of any of them will not affect the operation of everything else. This is very important, because making a single base is a big risk.

Alexander Albychev: Not exactly so, the target system is unified in terms of interfaces, security mechanisms, regulatory and reference information, mechanisms and principles of integration interaction, but now it is architecturally divided into separate functional services integrated among themselves within the framework of end-to-end business processes. Also in the process of implementation is the task of ensuring georeservation.

The first subsystems of GIS "Electronic Budget," created on the domestic software stack, are made according to the functions of treasury support and cash management.

Treasury support is a large block of business processes related to the work of external customers. At the same time, the business process that was laid down in the ASFC was transformed. Relatively speaking, earlier when concluding each contract, it was necessary to open a separate personal account - it was a very complex model. Now the personal account is opened once, and many contracts and chains of operations are attached to it.

In addition, a remote personal account appeared in which the client can perform all the operations he needs. We are preparing to release a mobile application so that it is even more convenient to work. Individual customers who also work on bank support note the convenience of treasury support.

Also, on the imported software, the cash management subsystem of GIS "Electronic Budget" was created, which was born thanks to the project to create a treasury payment system (UPC). This is a fundamentally different mechanism for conducting both external and internal transactions. A new entity appeared - treasury accounts, all business processes were consolidated in the framework of a single platform.

In addition, within the framework of the project, the mechanisms for working with a liquidity pool have been significantly changed.

As the results of the project: the liquidity of the single treasury account (CEN) increased, and this is more than 1 trillion rubles in average daily terms, non-cash operations between public sector institutions take place online, additional resources have appeared for lending to the constituent entities of the Russian Federation, the regional budgets themselves receive additional revenues from the operations of the Federal Treasury to place free balances.

According to the forecast of our analysts in 2021, the Treasury of Russia will earn additional income for the federal budget from the placement of temporarily free funds in the amount of 240-250 billion rubles, and for the regions - 20-25 billion rubles. This is 70-80 billion rubles more than last year.

The development prospects are further improvement of the treasury payment system, including ensuring interaction with all significant payment systems, improving the money management system, the payment monitoring and authorization system, and the implementation of artificial intelligence technologies for robotizing the routine operations of the system.

Alexander Albychev: Yes, there is a plan, we are going along it. The most important thing was to believe in this software solution, create it.

Alexander Albychev: The transition to domestic software and the rejection of used information technologies is a complex technological process that has no analogues in its scale. First of all, this is a detailed schedule, scheduled by day for the next two years, consisting of data migration, improvements, optimizations, tests, infrastructure development and much more. It should be noted that the payment function of the Treasury of Russia should work continuously and any failure in payment transactions is unacceptable. Given that our operating day begins at 01:00 in the east of the country and ends at 21:00, all difficult work with stopping services takes place in the remaining four hours, and, given that the duration of work, as a rule, exceeds this time, work has to be done on weekends throughout the project. So when I answer your question, I will say that we will try to keep up with this tight schedule.

Alexander Albychev: This is open information, the support contract is about 75 million rubles a year, which is about 10% of the cost of annual ownership of the system.

Alexander Albychev: No. The system was originally built in such a way that the entire license pool was purchased into ownership. Only software support remained to be paid. We still own licenses, but we can't do without service support yet, you won't go anywhere.

Alexander Albychev: Certainly cheaper. If we built a system on foreign software, then only the cost of licenses without development and implementation would be more than two billion rubles once and about 20% of this amount annually for its support, because the system is large. The implementation on the basis of open software made it possible to reduce these costs several times, PostgresPro support costs us about 220 million rubles a year. Now this DBMS is already part of the architecture of GIS "Electronic Budget," GAS "Management" and other systems of the Treasury of Russia.

Alexander Albychev: The solutions of giants such as SAP and Oracle are industrial, they are tested by many corporations and years of use. The amount of man-hours invested in these solutions is so huge that everything is already built and honed in them, the level of maturity of these systems is still higher than that of domestic solutions.

When we create our software stack, we have to optimize many software products, and there are dozens of them, for our load profiles. Of course, some solutions are already boxed, used by many customers and everything is fine with them. And some solutions require constant optimization.

Why did it take a lot of time to create a system on the domestic stack? Because we give a load - the system in terms of speed subsides. We return to optimization, we optimize for several months, give the next load. In this mode, we have been preparing the product for one and a half to two years. Now the software product is able to withstand our loads, and now our task is to start using it. This is probably the difference from foreign software. It is important to note that if import substitution is supported by such a large customer as the Federal Treasury, then the remaining departments will receive in most cases already optimized software.

Alexander Albychev: Thanks to the project on centralized procurement of office software through the Ministry of Digital Affairs, we received the R7-Office package. We carried out a large amount of optimization work, it was not easy, for example, we had to finalize the electronic document management system, as well as our internal treasury systems, because they were not ready to recognize files in other formats. Now this package is installed on all workplaces and is actively used.

In addition, during this time, we significantly developed the BI system (PIAO - the information and analytical support subsystem of GIS "Electronic Budget," approx. TAdviser), as a result of which users began to move from Excel to it, because it is more convenient to work in it, especially when the number of rows in the table goes to tens of thousands. This is important for us - we have all the budget analytics in the BI system, and Excel is already, let's just say, not interesting to watch.

Together with office software at the workplaces of employees of the Treasury of Russia, the postal system is subject to import substitution. Now we are studying the decisions of Russian vendors, assessing the pros and cons. Selection is not easy because the software you use closes all employee needs when working with email, calendar, and task management.

The next direction is to replace the Microsoft Windows operating system with a domestic system. During the next calendar year, we plan to solve it. We have already deployed stands and are starting to pilot various software products.

Alexander Albychev: For convenience of operation, probably one, but now we are testing several products. As a result, we expect to formalize the requirements for the operating system for the preparation of competitive documentation. I make a reservation, it does not matter to us who wins the competition, it is important to get a software product that meets our requirements.

Alexander Albychev: Our strategy consists of several stages. The first that we have already implemented is a departure from the proprietary Power-technology stack based on the IBM vendor for GIS "Electronic Budget" and the Unified Procurement Information System. This allowed for more competitive purchases of iron. The rest of the GIS already operate on the x86 architecture. This architecture is supported by a fairly large number of vendors. Now domestic vendors come to the tender, fight, drop prices.

Alexander Albychev: Yes, on domestic processors we tested data storage systems. So far, their productivity is not enough for large projects, but there is a niche for their application in the Federal Treasury.

Alexander Albychev: While we are in the process of working out and studying solutions.

Alexander Albychev: Jobs are more difficult. So far we are at the beginning of the journey, but we need to move forward, analyze the available solutions, conduct tests.

Alexander Albychev: We constantly develop our own competencies, this is part of our strategy. We are still in the department with you, which is engaged in the centralization of accounting. For three years, thanks to this project, a serious examination has been created here: testers, development management, specialists who can customize software products.

Now we have our first and second lines of support. The line on which incident managers analyze complex situations in detail is already divided. Most are outsourcing, but there are also full-time employees who can carry out partial refinements on their own. We came to this model gradually, and, I believe, it is most effective. Going further towards your own development is probably not a completely correct story.

One more direction of insourcing in which we very well promoted it is operation of infrastructure of the Data-processing Centres (DPC). In 2018, in order to improve the quality of data center infrastructure management, a distributed service for the operation of software and hardware complexes (RSE PAK) was created on the basis of the IT branch of FKU TsRB, located on the basis of our regional divisions in Vladivostok, Novosibirsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Vladimir and Moscow. The key task of the unit was to fully monitor the operation of the data center infrastructure and ensure the continuity of its development. The division created allowed us to refuse to purchase the services of external contractors, saved financial resources and strengthened the information security of our infrastructure.

In establishing the PAC RES, the best of the practical ways of organizing the work of the units involved in the provision of information technology services in the 24/7 mode were laid down. This achieved the availability of the Unified Cloud Infrastructure of the Federal Treasury of more than 99% and SLA for the execution of applications - more than 99%. Today, such an operating system is unique at the federal level and gives us the opportunity to deeper immerse ourselves in the processes of operating information systems.

It is important to note that data management activities have become particularly relevant in recent years. The information systems of the Treasury of Russia contain large volumes of data of interest to many participants in the budget process, so our key users are now interested in creating data storefronts at GIS "Electronic Budget" and GAS "Management."

This requires knowledge of the relevant software products, data management technologies, data quality control, so we begin to grow such competence within a separate division.

Alexander Albychev: While this is 30 people. In fact, a competency center is being created, in which we gather employees with skills in the field of data management. The relevance of its creation is due to the growing need of the new cabinet for management decisions using the visualization of diverse data on monitoring dashboards online.

Previously, the Federal Treasury concentrated on analyzing state finances at the federal level - transferred funds and formed reports. Now the Government of the Russian Federation sets the task of ensuring the traceability of financial transactions to the level of subjects of the Russian Federation, municipalities, and further to the level of final recipients. Such a model of "painting" budget funds leads us to the need to restructure many existing processes. In addition, the Treasury of Russia, as the operator of GAS "Management," aggregates and analyzes not only financial data, but also many industry datasets.

Alexander Albychev: Yes, this year we are actively engaged in this, turning our "data bag" into a clearly structured model. As part of the project to monitor national projects and national goals, a data laboratory has been created on the basis of the "Management" state automated system with the entire complex of components - from the construction of a data model to the functionality of automated data quality control.

Alexander Albychev: "Gosoblako" is a strategically correct direction of development, because in the public sector there should be a single information infrastructure, which, nevertheless, does not exclude the existence of independent data centers. The Federal Treasury today has a large-scale infrastructure that ensures the operation of nine global state information systems, and therefore we are forced to use our data centers. For small departments, probably the most correct solution will be the use of the services of Gosoblak. This will allow them not to think about security, increase the speed of creating products, not to spend time deploying servers, not to keep employees with appropriate specific competencies. Today, the Federal Treasury is working on various options for joining Gosoblako with its infrastructure.

From the point of view of a single platform, I also consider "Guest" to be the right direction for the development of IT in the public sector, so we are working with the Ministry of Digital Affairs of Russia on options for our participation in the project. While there are no industrial implementations, but in the near future they will begin to appear, so we are closely monitoring its development.

Alexander Albychev: The Federal Treasury works in the system of three-year budget planning. The largest investments in recent years have been associated with the creation of our own data centers and the abandonment of third-party resources, the centralization of regional servers has been carried out, in this regard, our budget has increased significantly, now it is stable: the operational component occupies about 60%, the investment - 40%.

Our plans are to increase the investment component. For the next three-year cycle, we initiated a number of large projects, such as: the creation of a single tax account, the development of a project to centralize accounting, the transition to full robotization of the payment authorization function, the development of information and analytical services, the development of the state and municipal payment system.

Alexander Albychev: We have a single supplier - he is responsible for the infrastructure of communication channels, which is about 7% of our budget. Everything else is competitive procurement, necessary for the operation and development of existing information systems, as well as the modernization of IT infrastructure.

Alexander Albychev: Any model has pros and cons, we are now using a model of competitive procurement procedures.

Alexander Albychev: Nothing difficult, the road will be overpowered. The main thing is a team of professionals that was able to form in the Federal Treasury, and which continues to grow and develop. Still, only a person can make decisions in situations with a high degree of uncertainty, and not artificial intelligence or a new generation server.