This blog post is an excerpt from GovLoop’s recent guide FITARA: What You Need to Know. Download the full guide here.
Despite the massive size of government and its diverse makeup, there’s a lot agencies can learn from one another. While missions may vary, every agency can benefit from strong IT management, better budget tracking and robust data reporting. In this section, we explore some of the best practices agencies are adopting to make FITARA implementation successful.
Where do you start with FITARA implementation?
Approaches will vary, but one way agencies are responding to FITARA is through a PMO [program management office] structure, Newhart said.
This doesn’t necessarily mean agencies stand up a new office. But this structure does involve a team of people who can address what needs to be done to implement FITARA, what gaps exist and work to build a coalition of like-minded people throughout the organization to embrace change.
That approach is working for USDA. The department has a FITARA operations team tasked with managing implementation of the IT reform law. Initially, USDA assembled a diverse team of 50 volunteers and divided them into teams by color — each assigned to specific areas called out in the OMB implementation guidance. “We all decided to approach it like we were responding to a federal RFP,” Hunter said.
Everyone would gather or call in every morning for the 15-minute standup meetings to ask questions and get their assignments for the day. “Talk about a true agile approach,” Hunter said. “It didn’t take five or six months to get it done because we were doing something every day. It was less than a month.” (The operations team has evolved since this time, and we’ll explore that more in this section.)
At the Commerce Department, bureau CIOs were asked to answer the same annual assessment questions OMB initially posed to the department CIO, said NOAA’s Goldstein. “I had to answer the very same questions [as the department CIO did], but from the perspective of NOAA. If another CIO hasn’t thought of that, it would be a pretty smart thing to do.”
Your agency may not be the size of Commerce, but you can take a similar approach on a smaller scale. Rather than posing assessment questions to bureaus, you may direct them to smaller offices.
At the Commerce Department, bureau CIOs were asked to answer the same annual assessment questions OMB initially posed to the department CIO, said NOAA’s Goldstein. “I had to answer the very same questions [as the department CIO did], but from the perspective of NOAA. If another CIO hasn’t thought of that, it would be a pretty smart thing to do.”
Your agency may not be the size of Commerce, but you can take a similar approach on a smaller scale. Rather than posing assessment questions to bureaus, you may direct them to smaller offices.
How do you keep the momentum going?
Having a committed team to keep everyone engaged and on task is vital.
But know that the amount of time each team member can dedicate to FITARA operations may vary. It’s likely those volunteers still have to balance their regular job duties with new responsibilities under FITARA.
Take USDA, for example. The department started with 50 volunteers during the initial FITARA planning phase in 2015. That number has since dwindled to four team leaders, but Anderson and his small group make the most of the time they have. Leading up to the April 2016 deadline for turning in an updated annual FITARA self-assessment, the team reviewed the initial assessment the department submitted to OMB in November 2015. That document detailed current operations and how USDA would address gaps to fully meet FITARA implementation requirements.
“Now when we go in and meet with the CXOs, the team lead for budget is responsible for getting some answers on budget formulation,” Anderson said. “Then the team lead for acquisition is responsible for those [requirements] associated with acquisition.” Their job is to make sure that CXOs are following through on what they said they would accomplish in the November plan. They want to know if the target dates for meeting certain goals are still accurate, or need to be adjusted. The team leads also want accurate descriptions of everyone’s current status in meeting FITARA implementation requirements.
How do you ensure future success, even after a change in leadership?
FITARA adoption must become more than a compliance exercise.
“The challenge is to incorporate that into how an agency does business, so that when a leader moves on to other things, you don’t lose that momentum and lose all the headway that you’ve gained,” Powner said.
USDA is addressing that issue by developing a concept of operations for FITARA. “And what that concept of operations will do is basically be the playbook for how we do FITARA at USDA,” Anderson said.
The playbook will address several areas, including how each of the FITARA operations team members are supposed to coordinate with the CXOs, the expectations coming out of that coordination and the development of a risk-management plan that explains what happens if certain tasks don’t get done and how to mitigate those issues.
What are best practices for aligning the budget process with FITARA requirements?
CIOs must have the opportunity to review the portfolio of potential IT investments early on, so they can identify similar requests and opportunities for department-wide purchasing.
For NOAA, that means adjusting internal budgeting processes.
Consider this, within NOAA there are various line offices. In many respects, those line offices function much like bureaus in the department. As part of NOAA’s budget formulation process, the CFO would see proposals from line offices either before or at the same time as the CIO office.
“We’ve always known it was a shortfall, but FITARA means we’ve got to devote the time to fixing it,” Goldstein said. “What fixing it means is that I need to always see [the budget] no later than the CFO sees it, and ideally before the CFO sees it, so that if there’s an enterprisewide opportunity, I get to construct that before it goes to the CFO.”
From there, the CIO and CFO will work collaboratively on the budget to ensure IT and non-IT requests are meeting the bureau’s needs. For example, a new research project may require time on NOAA’s supercomputers, and that has to be addressed in the budget.
The new change to ensure the CIO sees IT requests before the CFO will take effect for the fiscal year 2019 budget because NOAA is well into planning for the 2018 budget. The opportunity to view budget requests early on is huge for Goldstein because less than 10 percent of NOAA’s IT budget is under his direct control.
“FITARA gives us the wherewithal to say, ‘Not only is this a good idea, but the law requires it,’” Gold- stein said. “So if I get pushback, I’m in a much better position to advocate this improvement.”
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