IT Challenges in Government

Download Evergreen's Government Agency Technology Success Story.

When it comes to IT, the federal government currently faces all of the same pressures as commercial industry. It has never been more important to internal government operations to deliver essential services to the public and it has also never been more difficult, as a result of current budget pressures. More than ever is being expected of the IT infrastructure as the budget continues to be slashed. This year alone, the Army has committed to a 5 percent reduction in its IT personnel and a 10 percent reduction in its contractor workforce and civilian agencies face similar cutbacks.

So what is the government strategy for managing more with less resources? In a word, government IT executives will be looking, like their commercial counterparts, to build a business case for initiatives. Old ideas of seeing IT as cost instead of investment center will have to go, but the only way that will happen is if federal infrastructure managers begin to make more direct, measurable cases for projects that contribute directly to program-level performance.

Congress, OMB and the federal chief information officers' community have identified a number of opportunities to deliver value in the federal space, including improved efficiency and effectiveness in applying IT to:

• Grants
• Loans
• Criminal justice information
• Military logistics
• Electronic health records
• Health records
• Travel
• Payroll
• Budgeting
• Collaboration

The challenge will be to show how infrastructure improvement and investment will help agencies perform these functions better and how increased investments in IT infrastructure will deliver real results.

Cost savings initiatives will still be very important, including:

• Network, server and data center consolidation
• Network and system optimization
• Improved processes for desktop and seat management

More strategic initiatives will be driven by initiatives to consolidate redundant systems and applications thereby improving services and optimizing efficiencies while still improving delivery of services. How will this be accomplished?

Cross-agency information sharing, facilitated via leverage of SOA (Service Oriented Applications) and e-business initiatives (web-based applications that leverage the internet as a universal interface between stakeholders and their government counterparts.

These systems will be required to be:

• Reusable
• Cost effective
• Scalable
• Future proofed (transparent to require upgrades and upward migration)

This will only accomplished through a focus on:

• Business process and IT process improvement
• Integration of related systems based on standards
• Extension of data from legacy to more modern systems

This will only be accomplished through a focus on:

• IT process improvement that optimizes business processes and aligns them with agency and public needs
• Leveraging technology to enable improved business processes
• SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) use to speed legacy to modern system integration
• A standards approach that will withstand application and infrastructure obsolescence and leverage ongoing interoperability
• Readily accessible data, customized to user needs

Underlying all of these requirements will be more stringent needs for application security, particularly as it applies to identity management, but security that does not hamper universal public access to important services.

Read below to see how Evergreen Systems fulfilled many of these objectives for one large government agency.

Case Study

One of the federal government's largest agencies was consolidating warehouses and repositories for a variety of IT and physical assets and needed a new system that could both receive and record requests and then manage the resources requested. This highly political and visible government group filled requests from the highest levels of government and managed millions of dollars' worth of physical and IT assets.

The agency was using several older desktop and centralized asset management tools that were outdated and outgrown. Cost was a very important driver, but so was accuracy and customer satisfaction. The system required not only tracking but automation and needed to flow through systems from procurement and warehousing to shipping and receiving. And the system needed to track both physical and IT assets for all sorts of functions - supply/delivery, move set-ups, furniture moving and delivery, keys, locks and other services.

Assessment

Evergreen's assessment recommended a set of processes and supporting technology to facilitate continuous reconciliation and improvement of warehouse data that would reside in a centralized repository. Integrated processes would identify errors and establish a process for ongoing spot checks to update incorrect data quickly, accurately.

Reports were defined to help facilitate cycle counts and to report on inventory changes made during the cycle count process. A process for identification of inventory errors was built into the normal warehouse pull processes so that issues were easily identified during the normal course of operations.

User Requirements

Evergreen worked with the agency defining requirements:

• The government agency needed to request various services using a web-based interface.
• Requests needed to be based on a service/product catalog that could be easily navigated via the web interface by users that had little or no computer experience.
• Requests needed to accommodate multiple levels of managerial approval, quickly and accurately moving through a number of systems while providing multiple 'views' for managers.
• Workflow had to be automated and easily documented.
• Managers needed to be automatically presented with lists of resources and tasks required to fill requests.
• Users initiating requests needed to track their progress.
• Requesters and Managers needed to be notified of request progress via email.
• Requests could not be held up by managers on leave.

A more important requirement was that the agency needed to track the time taken to process requests, number of employees and productivity associated with each request. This was critical to meeting accountablity standards and establishing metrics to measure overall process improvement.

Recommendations

Evergreen recommended an upgrade to HP ServiceCenter™ 6.1 and HP AssetCenter™ to combine warehouse receiving and tracking automation tools (bar codes and scanners) with an asset tracking and management system.

The ServiceCenter upgrade was combined with new processes for all receiving, inventory, shipping and resource allocation that was ssociated with requests. The system expedited the process through the use of ID bar codes to automate the intiation and close of all workorders.

HP Openview™'s web-based client interface met the client's requirements for an easy-to-use and universally accessible interface and Evergreen customized the application to suit all the government agency's requirements.