Defenestrated

TCG To Support USDA’s Lean Six Sigma Grants Process Initiative

We will be issuing this press release first thing in the morning. We're very excited about this project, for working at USDA again and because of our application of Lean Six Sigma techniques to grants streamlining!

TCG TO SUPPORT USDA’S LEAN SIX SIGMA GRANTS PROCESS INITIATIVE
Complements the GMLOB initiative; modernizes and streamlines grant business processes

Washington, DC, May 1, 2007: TCG, a leading government technology strategy and IT company, announced today that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has awarded the company a contract to provide program management services for the Lean Six Sigma Grants Process (LSGP) initiative.

Under this contract, TCG will apply Lean Six Sigma techniques to analyze USDA’s grants business processes, develop a needs assessment, support organizational transformation and transition, improve customer satisfaction, and align with the Grants Management Line of Business (GMLOB).

Federal grants management environment (NGMA Conference 2007 material)

I delivered this presentation at the NGMA Conference yesterday, as part of the "Grants Streamlining & Consolidation: Aligning with the GMLOB" session. It describes the major drivers in US Federal grants management. The second part of the session was a presentation by Darren Ash, Associate CIO of DOT, which discussed the work that was undertaken in this area (and we can't provide that because it's DOT's to share!).

Build, Buy, Upgrade, or...?

On Wednesday I participated in a panel presentation, sponsored by Grantium, in which we discussed the costs and benefits of enterprise grants management systems. In my part of the presentation, I described the pros and cons associated with four options to deploy a federal grants management system: custom, GOTS (government-off-the-shelf), COTS (commercial off-the-shelf), and components. Enjoy!

Havekost is Austria-bound

I think this ranks among one of the less-expected stories of the week!

Charles Havekost announced Monday that he will be leaving his position as chief information officer at the Department of Health and Human Services in mid-June and moving with his family to Vienna, Austria, where he will work for the International Atomic Energy Agency. He has been hired as director of that agency’s information technology division.

Charlie was the first Grants.gov Program Manager and achieved the momentum that's carried the initiative a very long way. We can only hope now that the Austrians appreciate his Rock God guitar skills!

NGMA session - Grants Consolidation and Streamlining: Aligning with the GMLOB

The NGMA Conference is this week and we're speaking at this session on Thursday morning. I'll be joined by my fellow TCG-er, Judith Turner, and Darren Ash, Associate CIO at the Department of Transportation. Here's the abstract:

This session will describe the processes and difficulties of achieving grants systems consolidation. We will discuss how agencies are looking at their As Is and To Be situations, and finding similarities and differences, and how some processes (e.g. local and regional approval and help with applications) present challenges to Grants.gov as it is presently constituted.

At the end, we hope you will:

1. Understand how the federal government is seeking to streamline grants systems
2. Understand the process of developing “as-is” and “to-be” models that aid federal agencies in consolidation efforts
3. Identify similarities and differences across organizations and the government
4. Understand the gaps and disparities between government-wide systems and agencies’ existing systems

So come along! You might learn something and it'd be good to meet you.

Cost/Benefit Analysis for Enterprise Grants Management - 4/25/2007, 16:30 EDT

I'm speaking at this event tomorrow night, and you're all invited! It's sponsored by Grantium, a provider of COTS grants management products. Here's the pitch:

The timely topics that we will cover are:

* Optional approaches to modernizing Enterprise Grants Management solutions
* The keys to a successful system implementation
* Input costs for Enterprise Grant Management system solutions
* Expectations for results - the value proposition

This seminar is a direct response to the increase in the demand for grants management solutions that we have been experiencing for the past several months.

The panel will take place on April 25th from 4:30 p.m. to 5:15 p.m. followed by a networking reception from 5:15: p.m. to 6:30 p.m. in the Rotunda Room, Ronald Reagan building (1300 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C). There is no cost but registration is requested. You can RSVP by emailing [email protected] or calling Sue Barrett at 1.866.417.0007 ext. 246.

My fellow panelists will be Sandy Schwab, former OMB policy guru and now an independent consultant, and Peter Andrews, CEO of Grantium. I'll be talking mainly about the different options for acquiring and deploying an enterprise grants management system -- custom, GOTS, COTS, components -- and their pros and cons. See you there!

Performance metrics to drive LOB choices

Mary Mosquera at FCW has an interesting report about OMB's push to drive adoption of Financial Management Line of Business providers by gathering and providing performance metrics. Trisha Broadbelt, deputy program manager of the Financial Management LOB at the Interior Department’s National Business Center in Denver, is quoted:

“By adding new metrics for performance, it will encourage agencies to take a closer look at shared-service providers and give them an objective view of the services that they can obtain” from a shared-service provider, Broadbelt said.

New OMB Management Watch and High-Risk lists published

GovExec reports that OMB released updated versions of the Management Watch List and High-Risk List last week. As they put it:

Business cases for IT investments end up on the list if OMB officials find one or more weaknesses. The plans -- required under the 1996 Clinger-Cohen Act -- are then targeted for follow-up so that potential problems can be corrected before the project begins.

and

Placements on the high risk list, established by OMB in August 2005, are determined by projects' complexity or level of importance. The 549 initiatives on the list represent about $12.9 billion in projected IT spending for fiscal 2008. OMB has decided they need attention from "the highest level of agency management," but in a statement, noted they are not necessarily at risk for failure.

Across agencies there are some common themes:

• Financial Management Line of Business
• Human Resources Line of Business
• E-Authentication
• Many e-gov projects (E-Rulemaking, E-Travel, etc.)

There are several grants management programs identified in these lists, too:

• USDA "GMLoB Migration"
• USDA "Legacy Grants Management System"
• HHS "Grants.gov Find and Apply"
• HHS "NIH OD Electronic Research Admin (eRA)"
• Treasury "Grants Management at CDFI"
• Education "Grants Administration Payment System (GAPS)"
• Education "G5"
• DoE "EE State Grants Administration"
• EPA "IGMS"
• DOT "eGrants"
• USAID "JAMS System (JAMS/PSIP Investment)"
• NSF "GMLOB Government-wide Initiative (NSF and HHS Co-Managing Partners)"
• NSF "GMLOB Research.gov"
• NSF "FastLane"

A well-documented 'best practice' for IT projects is that the involvement of senior management is essential for long-term success, especially for those initiatives with broad application across the enterprise. As I mentioned back in January, my hope is that the application of 'best practices' such as this will not be taken simply as "bad news" and lambasted by all and sundry. The kind of attention being given to these important projects is encouraging and should be interpreted as demonstrating good management oversight -- something that has been poorly lacking over the years and which the government is trying hard to address.

FedSpending dinged for publishing SSNs

[Via Slashdot, even though they incorrectly attribute the whole thing to OMB] Uh oh. The New York Times has an article today about FedSpending.org which unbeknownst-to-most included thousands of social security numbers. Apparently the data came from USDA, via Census (the FAADS system), and was imported into FedSpending.org.

This news highlights exactly the kind of issue that concerns agencies that need to comply with FFATA, through which FederalSpending.gov will be populated with data. Most agencies have excellent privacy policies now but clearly there's a need to go back to older systems and scrub them of questionable or problematic data.

[Update 4/24/2007 9:13 EDT: Jason Miller's also published about this story on FCW and GCN now. Apparently USDA is offering fraud protection/credit checking services to all those impacted by this incident.]

Open source Grants.gov tools available from UC Berkeley

Ken Geis of UC Berkeley sent me this e-mail today and I thought others would be interested in his Grants.gov tools. They help with the PureEdge forms right now and Ken plans to update them for the new Adobe forms (and would welcome help!). From Ken's e-mail:

I thought you might be interested in the tools I developed at UC Berkeley to help us out with Grants.gov applications. I recently Open Sourced the programs. They are at

http://ggsuite.sourceforge.net/

You can try them out at

FormFiller
http://www.spo.berkeley.edu:8080/ggfiller/

FormChecker
http://www.spo.berkeley.edu:8080/ggchecker/

And from the Sourceforge site:

• XFOM is a library for reading, writing, and manipulating XFDL (PureEdge) e-forms. It provides an object model for XFDL.
• FormFiller is a web application for pre-filling key information in a Grants.gov application package. For example, it can fill in institutional information such as the contact information for the Authorized Organizational Representative and contact information for the Principal Investigator. It can also modify the behavior of the form; for example, if the application is for NIH, the NIH Commons ID is required on the R&R Key Person Profile form.
• FormChecker is a web application for validating Grants.gov application packages before submitting them. It includes some agency specific validations on top of the basic validations performed by the application package.

As open source, anyone can adopt, update, and elaborate upon these tools -- so go to it! Big kudos to Ken and UC Berkeley for making this code freely available.

[Updated 4/21/2007 11:29 EDT: Changed text to reflect new information; according to Ken, the tools will be updated to support Adobe forms.]