Posted by Jonah Hatfield on February 21, 2014 at 4:30 PM EST

PortfolioStat is a performance metric, established in 2012, which requires federal agencies to report how effectively they manage their information technology portfolios and expenditures. One portion of the PortfolioStat submission is the Integrated Data Collection (IDC). The IDC collects information on the IT expenditures of an agency in order to identify potential technology savings. This information is then reported to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The types of data reported include commodity IT spending, mobile contracts inventories, cost savings and avoidance decisions, etc. As of August 2013, the IDC must be reported to OMB on a quarterly basis, rather than annually.

Executing a data collection process at large government agencies requires the active, direct support of federal employees with strong backgrounds in the individual business lines they support. Since a large portion of the IDC submission involves data not routinely reported by the individual business lines or contained in a central database, points-of-contact within each business line must be contacted individually in order to capture the required IDC data. Agencies have been challenged with automating this process in order to keep the requested data current and readily available for each quarterly submission.

Approach and Methodology

NISH has a structured, collaborative approach to engaging with clients from various business lines and agencies to capture, tabulate, and analyze the necessary data for submission. In order to meet the requirements of the IDC with accurate data, NISH team members work with the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) to effectively collaborate and engage with the agency’s various business lines. Through their participation in the cross-functional data validation process, key stakeholders sign-off on the accuracy of the submission.The sign-off allows each agency business line to explain how they reported a particular metric of the data collection, in the event of an audit by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

NISH team members are well experienced and professionally driven to provide Federal agencies with the project management needed to execute a successful data collection process for the IDC. Prior to the submission due date, the NISH team members create and distribute a schedule of the data collection process to stakeholders. The schedule provides stakeholders with key milestones, submission throttle points, and an itinerary of weekly meetings. As the data is collected, we verify reporting metrics and validate the data requested to ensure it is accurate and relevant to the specifications set forth by OMB.

A challenge many agencies face is automating the IDC process into their day-to-day operations so that the quarterly reporting process is more streamlined and accurate. In some cases, this involves altering transaction codes to identify the specific metrics that are requested in the IDC. For example, one of the requested metrics in the IDC is an agency’s commodity IT spend. The commodity IT categories OMB defines consist of email systems, identity and access management systems, mainframes and servers, mobile devices, etc. Data such as this must be captured in a separate field of an agency’s financial information system, and each commodity IT expense, or line item, must identify the commodity IT category to which it belongs.

Since PortfolioStat is still a relatively new reporting exercise, many agencies do not have transaction codes implemented to capture the full spectrum of commodity IT categories. This means that they must manually analyze each of their line items at the end of the quarter, to determine how to categorize each commodity IT expense. This can be a very tedious and time-consuming process.

In order to automate the identification of commodity IT, the individuals tasked with data entry must be trained to identify the commodity IT category to which the transaction best fits. Since this data will be recorded at the time of entry, rather than at the end of the quarter, the line items will not need to be manually reviewed again at the end of the quarter. Automation techniques, such as this, will save agencies a great deal of time and increase the accuracy of the reported IDC metrics.

Once all of the data has been collected from the agency business lines, the NISH team performs a final analysis and presents a summary of the data and any points of concern to OCIO management. With the support and approval of OCIO management, the data is then submitted through the OMB MAX website.

Results and Client Response

Since the IDC is now required to be submitted quarterly, the strong project management methodologies employed by NISH team members have enabled a seamless and streamlined IDC submission process. The NISH team continues to support our clients by:

• identifying more concrete points of contact,
• setting stakeholder expectations at the beginning of the process,
• providing a collaborative process for determining reporting metrics, and
• clarifying communication channels.

We strive to provide the highest levels of service excellence, not only in the way NISH team members manage the IDC but also with the reliable and actionable data that the IDC provides.