Part Four of a Four-Part Series (see Part Three)

In the previous blogs of this series, we looked at OMB’s recently announced 25-point plan for restructuring federal IT from a variety of perspectives – shared services, program management, and improving the acquisition process. What’s driving this comprehensive review of federal IT policies and procedures is the consistent message from the current Administration for more open, transparent government.

In discussing the OMB’s proposed IT overhaul, federal CIO Vivek Kundra has said that oversight has been hindered in the past by as many as seven or eight layers of governance between OMB and the control authority for a particular IT system. This culture of “faceless accountability,” as Kundra calls it, is one of the chief obstacles to better visibility into government.

The bottom line is that agencies need visibility in three areas:

• Governance – To prove to constituents, Congress and the Administration that they are spending money wisely,
• Accountability – To monitor and track how an agency and its employees are doing at their jobs, and
• Performance –To create processes to do those jobs better

It’s here that Business Process Management software offers a key benefit to government. After all, BPM is by its nature about visibility – making transparent the business processes that were previously opaque. Process improvement in a government agency starts with seeing more clearly how that agency truly operates today, and maintaining that visibility to measure improvements as changes are implemented.

With BPM in place at the agency level, OMB will be able to reform and strengthen investment review boards, as the restructuring plan calls for, through BPM’s inherent strength in data analysis and reporting. Creating models for technical review could likewise be expedited, and the Administration could finally make real strides toward its goal of better transparency in government.

So, in concluding this post series, I’ll say again that the OMB’s 25-point plan for public-sector IT improvement is tailor-made for business process management software solutions. BPM for government can be a strategic driver for leveraging the cloud for shared services, improving program management, increasing governance and accountability and streamlining materials and services aquisition processes.

Tags: , BPM for Federal Acquisitions, BPM for Human Resource Management, BPM for Program Management, BPM in the Cloud, BPM software, Business Process Management, Cloud Computing, Government 2.0, OMB, software-as-a-service

Part Three of a Four-Part Series (see Part Two)

The White House wants to make some substantive changes to the way the federal IT acquisition process works. Beyond creating a specialized group of IT acquisition professionals, it’s looking to identify IT acquisition best practices and adopt them across the government.

The goal is so important that the OMB has integrated it into its recently announced 25-point plan for restructuring federal IT, in what OMB calls “aligning the acquisition process with the technology cycle.”

Fortunately for OMB, this goal has come many steps closer to being met with the application of BPM at the Defense Acquisition University (DAU). DAU is the Department of Defense’s corporate university for acquisition education, providing continuing education for over 126,000 military and civilian acquisition personnel. As the government’s expert on procurement and acquisition, DAU is using BPM to run its own operations.

The first application DAU found for business process management was micro-purchase management, creating a system to reduce processing time, eliminate repetitive data entry, and create reports on data and statistics about requisition training trends. Ultimately, DAU’s vision is to use BPM as its central business system, migrating into a larger procurement application.

If one of the OMB’s plans for restructuring federal IT is to identify IT acquisitions best practices and adopt them government-wide, it can hardly do better than to start with DAU. After all, the university’s job is to teach best practices. DAU is using BPM now to understand and optimize its own practices. What DAU learns will become, by default, industry best practices, or at least critical factors in understanding those practices.

In the final installment of our series, we’ll look at OMB’s notion of governance and accountability, and the role of BPM in meeting that goal in the restructuring of federal IT.

Tags: , BPM for Federal Acquisitions, Business Process Management, DAU, Government 2.0, OMB, Process Improvement for Government

Part Two of a Four-Part Series (see Part One)

One of the most often discussed problems facing the federal government is the graying of the workforce. As more senior employees look to retirement, what can be done to fill the knowledge gap created by their departure?

Strengthening program management is one of the underlying themes behind the OMB’s recent 25-point plan to improve federal IT, announced in December 2010. According to the plan, this requires (among other things) a best practices collaboration platform to help even the newest IT managers make better decisions.

This is an ideal application of BPM software. Procedures and institutional knowledge are often only retained in the memories of long-time workers. Finding out what these people do today (i.e., modeling their processes) is crucial. That visibility enables process improvements to be implemented. Standardizing the execution of those oprimized processes is crucial for getting new employees up to speed and productive quickly. Codifing optimized processes, driven by business rules, creates a standardized documented system that can be understood and practiced by the next generation of workers.

Beyond workforce enablement and career development, the benefits of business process management in developing a best practices collaboration platform are obvious. Consider the Customs Border Patrol (CBP), which is using BPM to manage and monitor the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) project. The WHTI project encompasses multiple methods for identifying travelers and assessing potential security threats at the US borders. BPM technology gave WHTI the active project management, process visibility, documentation audit trails, and collaboration capabilities needed to efficienctly manage concurrent development and deployment across 63 distinct sites.

Collaborative best practices also offer tangible benefits to the mission-critical functions within agencies where the next generation of IT program managers are plying their trade.

In our next blog, we’ll look at how BPM helps implement another important aspect of the OMB’s overhaul of federal IT – namely, aligning the acquisition process with the technology cycle.

Tags: , BPM for Program Management, BPM software, Business Process Management, Business Process Management and Government, Government 2.0, Government and Efficiency, OMB

[Part One of a Four-Part Series]

The Fed’s latest guidelines for improving IT in the public sector virtually scream out for the application of Business Process Management.

In December 2010, the Office of Management and Budget announced a 25-point plan to restructure federal IT. The 25 points are based on five broad changes to agency IT, first outlined by OMB in November. Jeffrey Zients, the federal chief performance officer, said the plan should help remove barriers that get in the way of successful project management and execution.

Not surprisingly, nearly all of OMB’s broad changes can be made easier to by adopting BPM solutions.

In our next several blog entries, we’ll look at some of these plan points and look at the role that BPM can play in bringing about the changes that OMB wants. Today, let’s look at the notion of “applying light technology shared solutions.”

The point of shared services in government is to optimize data center capability among agencies through collaboration rather than new technology purchases – while also adopting a “cloud first” policy for new technology.

The continued focus on cloud computing is laudable. Organizations like the Department of Education, which is starting to use Amazon Web Services for some of its new initiatives, are already showing their understanding of how to put a “cloud-first” mandate into action.

At the heart of OMB’s shared services model is a need for better-detailed process. If one agency needs more computing space and the other has it, we’re not just talking about computing space, we’re talking about the process of understanding when your agency has excess capacity, and the process of making other agencies aware of that available capacity. That type of process can be turned into a template and shared across agencies.

Communities of interest have sprung up around BPM to provide just such “templatized” processes. For example, the Appian Forum online community provides application templates and components developed by Appian, its customers and partners. These templates all can be shared, hot deploying an application for any solution. That’s real knowledge sharing and collaboration across and between organizations.

Improved collaboration within and across agencies will get the Fed closer to OMB’s goal of shared services. When processes can be standardized not just for agency specific functions but at the edges as well, sharing that information leads to better sharing of computing capacity, too.

In our next blog, we’ll look at OMB’s goal of “strengthening program management” and how BPM fits in.

Tags: , Appian, BPM for Program Management, BPM in the Cloud, BPM software, Business Process Management, Cloud Computing, Government 2.0, Government and Efficiency, OMB, Open Government, Process Improvement for Government, software-as-a-service

It’s one thing when technology leaders talk about the cloud. When the newly minted Chief Performance Officer for the federal government joins the conversation, you know the cloud is truly here to stay.

Jeffrey Zients, the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) – and the above-mentioned federal Chief Performance Officer – recently described a “cloud-first” policy for the fiscal 2012 budget. Government IT managers will need to look first at distributed IP-based systems when selecting software applications, according to Zients.

“Government agencies too often rely on proprietary, custom IT solutions. We need to fundamentally shift this mindset from building custom systems to adopting lighter technologies and shared solutions,” Zients said. OMB will require that agencies default to cloud-based solutions whenever possible, he added.

For forward-thinking agencies, the strategy of moving to the cloud is already old news.

The Department of Education recently issued an Authority to Operate (ATO) certification  to Appian for the company’s Appian Anywhere process solution. Built on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform, this is the first cloud-based business process management solution to be granted an ATO by a federal agency.

Now that OMB is stressing a cloud-first policy for IT applications, the assurance of an ATO certification can greatly simplify the budgeting and planning process for agencies government-wide. That signals a bright future for the combination of cloud and BPM in helping to create a more efficient government.

Tags: , Appian, BPM in the Cloud, Cloud Computing, Government 2.0, OMB, software-as-a-service