Facilitating a More Effective, Efficient Use of Budgeted Dollars

Reengineering processes that create more visibility into federal agency’s IT spend

Overview

A federal agency’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) required portfolio planning, demand management, business process improvement, strategic performance management, governance, and communications support for the agency’s $400M annual IT budget.

Our Approach

RiverNorth’s expert analysts support strategic measurement initiatives to analyze, assess, and provide metrics that track progress toward IT strategic goals. The metrics we develop drive investment priorities for the budget formulation process.

We are also responsible for CIO communications and use a multi-channel approach to ensure the prompt and effective dissemination of relevant IT information across the agency.

As a business process improvement task, we helped the client gather, document, and act on lessons learned from their annual IT Budget Formulation process. We facilitated nine focus groups across all CIO branches/sections and two brown bag sessions, compiling lesson learned data. We then held three working sessions with the CIO Leadership Team to prioritize improvement areas during the upcoming budget formulation process. RiverNorth created a presentation of findings and recommendations that was briefed at the CIO’s three-day all-hands event.

Results

We supported the overhaul of the client’s Demand Intake process for new IT system/services requests, including applying best practices within the ServiceNow Service Management module. The client's processing time for new Demands has decreased from 15 days to 1 day, increasing CIO productivity and more rapidly moving demands to fulfillment. Additionally, the percentage of submitted Demands dispositioned monthly increased from 61% to 100%, which decreased the Demand backlog and improved internal customer satisfaction when using the Demand Intake process.

The previous contractor used three different spreadsheets and multiple macros/pivots to generate regular reporting (taking 8 hours). We re-engineered and automated the reporting process using ServiceNow to deliver data to the customer in less than 10 minutes.

Our team also developed a new process for compiling monthly metrics, using a handful of reports and queries in ServiceNow, to reduce the data consolidation and processing time from several days down to 45 minutes per month.