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Enterprise-Wide IT Performance Reviews
Eureka! One of my clients
asked us to prepare an agency-wide Operational Analysis Review
(OAR), and that approach was an exciting discovery that can work for
others. In the past, all of the OARs that we have conducted have
focused on a specific program, IT investment or system. But this Chief
Information Officer wanted a review of how well all IT assets
were performing—infrastructure, applications, Web presence, data, and
IT personnel.
Conventional Uses of OAR. An Operational Analysis Review compares the
performance of an IT asset or system to the established baseline.
In the U.S. Federal Government, it
is applied to individual IT investments that are in the “Steady State”
(Maintenance) phase. Such investment-specific
assessments are useful in determining whether established systems are
meeting expectations, serving stakeholders, and operating within
expected cost parameters. More information is in Part IV of OMB’s Capital Programming Guide.
Breathtaking View at the Enterprise Level. We applied OAR on an
organization-wide basis within a bureau of a major federal department,
and it was a bolt of lightning. The assessment—covering the entire IT
budget—gave a clearer perspective on:
- The relationship between agency mission
performance and IT performance
- Overall usability of IT assets for customers
- Relationship between resource allocation and
mission priorities
- Areas where IT was becoming the core delivery
mechanism for mission-driven business services
- Gaps in resources
- Alignment of IT human capital with mission
and business requirements
- A framework for IT capital investment
planning and budget execution
- A basis for reviewing the IT strategic plan
(and the agency strategic plan) and updating it.
A Panoramic View of IT. Our
approach to agency-wide analysis avoids the tunnel vision that is
often prevalent when management focuses primarily on new
projects and big acquisitions. Operations and maintenance,
legacy systems, and small projects typically receive scant
attention even though they typically consume 75% of
the IT budget!
The Baseline. Key to the success of
our enterprise-wide OAR was the availability of baseline data for a
5-year period. We used FY 2005 through 2009. While
I had to organize data from multiple agency sources, the client had
been meticulous about maintaining data on budget, IT personnel,
operational performance levels and statistics, and user satisfaction.
This enabled trend analysis.
Our baseline included agency performance
goals (from current and previous annual performance and accountability
reports), and we linked these data to IT performance and budgets. In
addition, the client agency conducts periodic customer satisfaction
surveys, which provided a fairly objective measure of IT performance
over multiple years, from the perspective of stakeholders. Future
requirements for transitioning to the target architecture were also
incorporated as to-be extensions of the baseline.
Another baseline series that we would like to
do in the future is tracking of economic benefits accrued. Remember all
of those Cost Benefits Analyses for individual systems? Wouldn’t it be
great if an agency OAR conducted a consolidated review, over 5 years,
to validate and aggregate the cost savings and cost avoidance actually
achieved? This would be a great
measure of how strong IT management adds value to an enterprise!
Brevity is Golden. Our overall OAR for the
client organization was under 30 pages! True, we
added appendices with more detail, but we wanted to boil our findings
down to a document that could be used, read by leadership, and acted
upon!
Focus on Key Issues. Our OAR has been
striking in how well it focuses on strategic issues both for the
enterprise and IT management. Rather than getting stuck on tactical
issues for individual systems or issues, our approach reviews what the agency
as
a whole needs to accomplish and how IT can do the best job
possible in driving the mission forward. Rather than deal with budget
and schedule variance of one program or contractor, it looks for
patterns that may explain systemic causes of variance between planned
and actual costs. It evaluates whether the available IT workforce
actually has the right skill sets to carry out the
stated business requirements. It looks for opportunities to
leverage mission results.
Assessment and Action. Our OAR included a Strengths, Weaknesses,
Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) Analysis which considered the mission
environment—including the lagging economy—as well as IT. In addition,
we conducted an assessment of how we (the agency and the IT
organization) could:
- Better meet customer needs
- Meet needs at a lower cost
- Partner with others to advance strategic goals
- Use technology to provide better services and
a lower cost.
The assessment provided the basis for
recommending action steps to strengthen both mission and IT performance.
Outline of Report. Our OAR report was organized as follows:
- Summary
- Introduction
- Review of Baseline
- Operational Results
- Review of Strategy
- Assessment and Recommendations
- Appendices
Conclusion. We recommend that more CIOs use
enterprise-wide Operational Analysis Reviews as a means for integrating
performance evaluation and management into a coherent whole.
The P2C2 Group seeks to move forward with a
two-tier methodology that covers both the investment/system and
enterprise levels of operational assessment. We view this as becoming
an annual review process that is aligned with budget formulation and IT
investment decisions.
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