Transparency and Accountability

Challenge 

Many federal agencies operate within antiquated technology environments that challenge the ability to share information and work efficiently across large and dispersed organizations. This impacts the level of transparency and accountability agencies strive to achieve. Guidehouse supports our clients in implementing business intelligence and real-time monitoring tools to increase cross-collaboration and information-sharing.

A federal government agency’s various regional offices had each developed individual processes to formulate budgets by manually updating spreadsheets. The decentralized process led to a lack of transparency around budget formulation and required a considerable amount of time to input the information into standard reporting formats. Since a central repository for budget formulation did not exist, leadership was unable to gather metrics and, therefore, was unable to track the performance of the regional offices.

Solution

The Guidehouse team engaged with the Agency's financial mangers and stakeholders to conceptualize and define business requirements for a new budget formulation and execution tool that encapsulated the logic associated with the processes and provided a user-friendly interface. The tool receives inputs from existing systems and applies rule-based logic to each business category, allowing users to create future spend plans, formulate the current year operational budget forecast, and track variances from previous years.

The Building Operations Budget Execution Tool both standardized and automated the Agency’s budget formulation process.

Impact

The tool’s successful adoption reduced the amount of time spent coordinating budget guidance from the central office, cutting each regional office’s formulation time by fifty percent. The centralized platform increased transparency around the process, and the ability to export metrics data has increased the level of accountability.

Guidehouse leveraged our comprehensive suite of solutions to help the organization streamline and optimize business processes to increase transparency and accountability.