Digital War Room

Challenge

The client, which includes representatives from the US and partner nations, operates a multi-billion-dollar budget and centrally manages their program office through six functional areas. Historically, these functional areas were managed with a combination of manual and functional-centric systems and processes. This resulted in manpower-intensive efforts, a distinct lack of timely information needed to oversee and manage each function properly, and an inability to integrate data between functional areas.

Solution

These challenges—time spent gathering data, analyzing it, developing reports, and supporting ad hoc status requests—are not unique to this client organization. To address these issues, the client engaged Guidehouse to develop a digital transformation solution leveraging Agile methodologies. Guidehouse worked closely with the client to determine the vision for the Digital Decision Platform (DDP), which provides program leaders, and stakeholders with real-time, ready-to-access program metrics for rapid analysis, and powerful evidence-driven decision-making for the program. This application was designed through user-driven interactions that allow data and risk-informed decisions to be made while also speeding up the decision-making cycle. Along with the DDP front end, the Guidehouse team employed cutting-edge data analytics and methodologies (machine learning, natural language processing, etc.) to provide the client with new data insights. Ultimately Guidehouse was able to replace the client’s old conference room filled with post-it notes with a new Digital War Room.

Impact

Through this effort the Guidehouse team was able to help the client obtain enterprise wide benefits through the following:

• Created new data connections across the organization from previously siloed data sets, allowing users to identify underperforming areas and organizational risk factors quickly
• Enabled predictive capabilities by visualizing data in a continually evolving framework, allowing leaders to speed their decision-making cycles and implement mitigation strategies ahead of the risk curve
• Provided quick access to data from the source and reduced the time spent creating and waiting for reports and analyses
• Implemented open-source code development, allowing future iterations of the product to be modified to meet changing and evolving user needs