WILLIAMSBURG, Va.-- The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board had so
much success moving Recovery.gov to the cloud, it is looking there again to give
agencies a new set of accountability tools.
Shawn Kingsberry, the board's chief information officer and assistant
director for technology, said about four agencies are testing a new suite of
data-analysis software to ensure Recovery Act funds are not being subject to
waste, fraud or abuse.
The Recovery Board is working with several agencies to test out these accountability tools in the cloud. The tools include data-
analysis software that can detect data anomalies on contracts, grants and loans
issued with stimulus funding.
Agencies submit award or proposed award data to the board. The board then
uses these tools to find potential issues with the vendor and passes that
information back to the awarding agency. The agency can then decide what steps
to take next.
Kingsberry said agencies can and should take a pause to make sure the funds
are not falling victim to waste, fraud or abuse.
The Recovery Board's experience with putting software in the cloud has been
successful. It first moved its site to the public cloud in April 2010.
Kingsberry said the board saved $750,000 by using Amazon Web Services and moved that money into mission needs to detect waste, fraud and
abuse.
With the audit tools, the board will follow a similar path — starting small
in the board's own data center to create the baseline and then moving it to the
cloud, Kingsberry said.
-Jason Miller, FederalNewsRadio.com
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Showing posts with label Process Improvement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Process Improvement. Show all posts
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Friday, January 25, 2008
At Agriculture, CIOs and CFOs are putting their heads together
In the military, they are called two-hatters: officers with two jobs. But you’ll also find civilian agency two hatters.
Chuck Christopherson at the Agriculture Department is one such hybrid. He’s the chief information officer and the chief financial officer. With those two hats, you might think Christopherson simply has meetings with himself to decide IT spending priorities.
But it’s not quite that simple.
Having a single CIO/CFO “strengthens the priorities on both sides,” Christopherson says. “Often, in the financial side, if there’s a vacuum, support of IT becomes weak.” If there’s a vacuum on the IT side, the tech folks may find they are not getting the funding they need “and not understand why.”
As a dual hatter, Christopherson tends to delegate day-to-day activities to the deputies, but is not above reaching down into the ranks to operate at a more detailed level when necessary.
In effect running IT and finances for what he describes as the world’s eighth largest bank, Christopherson says he finds advantages in having the two functions work closely together. Being in the loans, grants and insurance business, the CIO/CFO combine has focused on IT-enabled process quality improvement according to the so-called Six Sigma philosophy.
Five major projects concern establishing departmentwide standard processes for invoicing, grants, loans, insurance issuance and geospatial information systems. “So USDA will have one process for the whole department, with minor variations,” Christopherson says. He expects the effort to start saving the department $20 million per year, all resulting from finance and IT teams working together.
Christopherson is pushing change throughout USDA process owners. He is also sending large groups for training in project and change management at the department’s school in Greenbelt, Md. By the end of this year, he hopes 130 people will have been trained in the art and science of overhauling business processes.
-FedInsider.com
READ MORE...
Chuck Christopherson at the Agriculture Department is one such hybrid. He’s the chief information officer and the chief financial officer. With those two hats, you might think Christopherson simply has meetings with himself to decide IT spending priorities.
But it’s not quite that simple.
Having a single CIO/CFO “strengthens the priorities on both sides,” Christopherson says. “Often, in the financial side, if there’s a vacuum, support of IT becomes weak.” If there’s a vacuum on the IT side, the tech folks may find they are not getting the funding they need “and not understand why.”
As a dual hatter, Christopherson tends to delegate day-to-day activities to the deputies, but is not above reaching down into the ranks to operate at a more detailed level when necessary.
In effect running IT and finances for what he describes as the world’s eighth largest bank, Christopherson says he finds advantages in having the two functions work closely together. Being in the loans, grants and insurance business, the CIO/CFO combine has focused on IT-enabled process quality improvement according to the so-called Six Sigma philosophy.
Five major projects concern establishing departmentwide standard processes for invoicing, grants, loans, insurance issuance and geospatial information systems. “So USDA will have one process for the whole department, with minor variations,” Christopherson says. He expects the effort to start saving the department $20 million per year, all resulting from finance and IT teams working together.
Christopherson is pushing change throughout USDA process owners. He is also sending large groups for training in project and change management at the department’s school in Greenbelt, Md. By the end of this year, he hopes 130 people will have been trained in the art and science of overhauling business processes.
-FedInsider.com
READ MORE...
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