Integrated-CPIC Solution
With the enactment of the Clinger-Cohen Act in 1996, and the e-Government requirements set forth in the President’s Management Agenda, IT Governance (ITG) is more critical than ever. IT also continues to be one of the largest areas of agency spend and remains mission critical for virtually every program in every agency, whether civilian, defense, intelligence or homeland security.
As a result of the Clinger Cohen Act, in addition to fulfilling their traditional responsibilities, federal IT organizations must now also address the stringent requirements of these performance-based mandates:
- Provide assurances that technology expenditures are necessary, purposeful, and will result in demonstrated improvements in mission effectiveness and customer service
- Produce higher quality business cases for IT investments that include risk management, cost estimations, and performance measurement
- Provide visibility of and accountability for IT spending in a decentralized allocation environment
- Deliver timely management oversight, quality control, and executive review
- Continuous portfolio and project assessment including measurements of actual vs projected performance, earned value reporting, and comprehensive spending summary analysis
- Communicate effectively with other government agencies to identify overall duplication and to explore ways to jointly invest in projects
Meeting these challenges requires federal agencies to take an integrated Capital Planning and Investment Control (CPIC) approach to run their IT organizations. The CPIC process has three phases:
- Select: Portfolio planning for optimal investment decisions
- Control: Best practice execution for results achievement
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Evaluate: Monitoring and benchmarking for continuous improvement
For many agencies, however, moving beyond the “Select” phase into the “Control” and “Evaluate” phases is difficult. Without an integrated CPIC solution, agency IT organizations continue to have challenges with data integrity, collaboration, resource and cost management, effective performance metrics management, and little to no ability to track and identify best practices for continuous improvement.
The Integrated CPIC Solution, built on the market-leading ITG solution, Clarity delivers one integrated system to support the entire Select-Control-Evaluate framework.
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SELECT
High Quality Business Case Submittals
The pre-defined templates, default values, and “online help” in the CPIC Accelerator allow agency IT staff to improve the quality of their Office of Management and Budget (OMB) submittals, eliminate redundant data entry, and accelerate the entire submittal and review process. And since the Clarity CPIC Accelerator is fully and seamlessly integrated with Project Manager, Financial Manager, and Portfolio Manager, multiple stakeholders can now extract data from a single data source that has already been collected to auto-populate the relevant sections of both the Exhibit 300 and 53 forms.
Learn more about the CPIC Accelerator
Comprehensive IT Portfolio Planning
The Clinger-Cohen Act requires that agencies and departments use full and accurate CPIC to acquire, use, maintain and dispose of information technology. Achieving compliance requires visibility into IT portfolios, sophisticated risk-benefit analysis and robust scenario planning, all tied to control and evaluation. Clarity brings these elements together in one seamless, readily accessible system, making IT Governance possible in a natural, easy-to-support manner.
Define the Portfolio
Setting a course works best when the starting point is known. Clarity makes it easy to monitor all of the various IT portfolios, including applications, hardware, network assets, projects or resources. Further, Clarity helps organizations collect information on funding sources that are necessary to develop OMB's Agency IT Investment Portfolio (Exhibit 53 and Exhibit 300) reports.
Achieve Optimal Investment Planning and Control
Clarity facilitates an enterprise view of an organization's entire IT portfolio and allows easy analysis of IT portfolios by cost, benefit, schedules, and risks (CBSR), alignment, strategic goals and objectives, Enterprise Architecture or any other criteria. Asset allocation insights emerge from this process, supporting rebalancing of funds among different investment types. Upon inspection, monies allocated to maintenance activities can often be freed for higher value initiatives.
IT Portfolio Management: cost, benefit, risk and alignment relationships are easily visualized through bubble charts, whether the portfolio includes applications, hardware and network assets, or projects.
CONTROL
Best Practice Execution of the Portfolio Plan
Control at the tactical level--whether application development, project management or service delivery--holds the key to facilitating disciplined program management. The robust delivery capabilities in Clarity ensure that an agency operates at maximum efficiency, with the greatest chance for success. Extending beyond basics such as time tracking and project resource management, Clarity provides rich collaboration, knowledge management and best practice methodologies for cross-functional work teams inside and outside the agency.
Matching Resources to the Portfolio
OMB's Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) requires an all-inclusive view of an organization's complete business processes and IT investments. The comprehensive resource planning capabilities in Clarity provide the integrated view that help senior managers achieve FEA compliance and to implement optimal resource usage. Clarity takes into account all resources across the enterprise to avoid bottlenecks or underutilized resources.
Capacity Planning: pipeline management and resource matching ensure that the affordable is also feasible.
EVALUATE
Disciplined Program Management
Effective evaluation of IT investment requires capture of the true costs and true benefits of initiatives. Clarity can deliver both real-time results as well as benchmarking to serve as a point of reference by which process performance is measured. Taken together, this information strengthens a program manager's ability to measure and quantify IT investment performance.
Measure Performance
In order to increase the quality of OMB business case generation, Clarity supports the Performance Reference Model (PRM) standardized framework to measure the performance of IT initiatives and their contribution to program performance. By addressing all four measurement areas of the PRM including business results, customer results, processes and activities and technology, Clarity help agencies achieve the major objectives of PRM: producing enhanced performance information; improving the alignment and understanding of the contribution of inputs to outputs and outcomes; and identifying improvement opportunities that span traditional organizational boundaries.
Scorecards: comprehensive views of business benefits and portfolio performance ensure that that true benefits are obtained from IT investments.
True Cost Project Accounting
The project accounting capabilities in Clarity allow the capture of initial and ongoing vendor costs for hardware, software and professional and network services, plus internal costs at every state of the system lifecycle. The result is a true cost picture of IT initiatives as well as straightforward support for OMB Exhibit 53 and Exhibit 300 reporting.
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