Army division uses IT to gain comprehensive view of finances

When the Army branch responsible for engineering weaponry became concerned it might be shut down during base realignment and closure, finance managers began to lobby for information technology that could demonstrate productivity divisionwide.

One decade later, the chief of financial operations at the Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center at Picatinny Arsenal, N.J., says the whole service could benefit from the approach ARDEC adopted to ensure projects stay on track and on budget, and meet objectives.

The center's new business intelligence system replaces an arrangement that gave ARDEC's finance team and engineers little insight into centerwide spending, and forced them to create ad-hoc spreadsheets or request custom reports. ARDEC's IT office maintained the agency's business information warehouse, developed by SAP, while finance used a separate IBM Cognos business intelligence system. This setup was not ideal, said Mark Sauvageau, ARDEC's chief of financial operations.

"You should have the business people doing the work [of maintenance] and the IT people acting as consultants," he said last week.

Financial analysts and engineers are the end users, so they should have a hand in the implementation of financial management systems, Sauvageau said, adding, "It shouldn't become a squabble." His point, which runs counter to the popular concern that IT people never have a seat at the table, could serve as a lesson as agencies focus on measuring performance with technology. The Obama administration has launched multiple performance-tracking public Web sites during the past year and proposed more in its fiscal 2011 budget.

In 2008, ARDEC decided to upgrade its Cognos platform to a system-agnostic version that could talk to multiple databases throughout the center, including the SAP data warehouse, legacy machines and ARDEC's accounting system. The new platform tracks performance results, from different and disparate data sources, and measures how the results stack up to predetermined goals. The technology allows agencies to add measurement and reporting criteria, according to Robert Dolan, public sector industry executive for IBM.

ARDEC engineers and finance analysts now can log onto one Web-based application and draw up score cards and trend-analysis displays, called dashboards, on the results of every operating arm. Financial strategy is planned around ARDEC's budget, finances, project management and human capital information. If a project is running awry, the color-coded dashboards will flag the problem with a red icon.

IT research firm Gartner Inc. in 2009 presented ARDEC with a Business Intelligence Excellence Award for its approach. A July 2009 Gartner case study on the restructuring concluded "it's not the technology, but the organizational approach that is the difference between business intelligence success and failure."

The report recommended that other entities aiming to replicate ARDEC's accomplishments should ensure all end-users -- not just IT personnel -- can tweak the technology to meet their needs. "The business intelligence that comes from your vendor might not be the most fit for purpose in your organization -- let your end users help you decide which business information tools are right," the report said. "If there's a particular department in your organization that has an affinity with using business intelligence -- and a manager willing to sponsor and drive it more broadly in the organization -- take advantage of it. IT doesn't have to be the owner of business intelligence."

According to Gartner, ARDEC achieved a cost-savings of about $208,000 annually, mostly by eliminating the need for custom reports. Plus, the application generated intangible time-savings by allowing engineers to easily create presentations during project review meetings. Prior to having a unified view of analytics, engineers had to manually find, manipulate and cut-and-paste data into a PowerPoint presentation.

Jon Desenberg, senior policy director at The Performance Institute, a think tank focused on results-oriented government, has been following ARDEC's work. He said most other agencies are reluctant to monitor performance metrics in such a holistic manner. Many "are still using spreadsheets ... If you're using PowerPoint, you can't get to one version of the truth," he said.

Sauvageau said it might be hard to convince Army officials that the agencywide General Fund Enterprise Business System should use ARDEC's approach to gain a more comprehensive window into performance. "It has to do with the IT people having their functional specs of what they think should happen versus what the business people think should happen," he said. In order to obtain wide-ranging performance metrics, an agency needs "collaboration and communication, down, across -- you need to have buy-in by senior management."