In May 1990, his group completed the Tax Systems Modernization Architecture. As the new architecture model was being finalized, Tucker realized that open systems was the way to implement it. Handing off the responsibility for managing the architecture, Tucker chartered a small team Q called the Open Systems Group Q to focus on open systems solutions. The Open Solution. In December 1991, the IRS's Open Systems Group published the Workstation Application Profile that described how workstation applications would operate in an open systems environment.
Developers are responsible for the business application only, which is platform independent.
By limiting developers' responsibilities to the core application, development time and cost can be dramatically reduced. The new architecture provides other benefits. With standard interfaces, elements of the infrastructure are transparent to the applications. Magnetic disks can be replaced with CD-ROMs, and faster drives can be installed without impacting the application. Of course, applications can also be ported to other platforms with minimal modifications.