Case Study: State of Washington Office of Financial Management (OFM)

State of Washington Office of Financial Management (OFM)

Improving the Delivery of Information Technology

The Office of Financial Management (OFM) sought professional consulting services to conduct a study of how OFM develops, deploys, and sustains information technology (IT) systems. The study was also designed to identify improvement opportunities around current business processes, project management, systems development, and product quality. Moreover, OFM wanted to decrease the time to market for all their IT products and services while maintaining acceptable risk levels and customer satisfaction.

Overall, OFM IT functions had served the agency very well in the past, but the current model was not well suited to successfully moving the organization into the future. The doubling of agency size in the last several years had strained existing resources and processes. Upcoming needs threatened to overwhelm current resources and processes, rendering OFM unable to meet its goals and objectives.

There were two IT organizations within OFM that developed software; and while these two organizations were located in different divisions in OFM, much of their work overlapped.

• The Information Services Division (ISD) provides the IT infrastructure to OFM and the Office of the Governor, including developing and supporting custom workgroup applications for a specific line of businesses.
  
• The Statewide Financial Systems (SWFS) group develops financial and administrative systems used by all state agencies.

PCG Technology Consulting (PCG TC, formerly Eclipse Solutions, Inc.) focused on assessing OFM’s management of technology in relation to 5 key agency goals:

• Goal 1: Management of people, processes and technology
• Goal 2: Management of enterprise IT projects
• Goal 3: Ensuring that OFM’s IT is organized effectively
• Goal 4: Improvement of IT’s evaluation and assessment processes
• Goal 5: Maximization of OFM’s IT portfolio capacity

PCG TC conducted an in-depth review and assessment of the existing management, organizational structure, staffing, and operations of IT services within the agency by conducting approximately 70 input gathering sessions, including over 175 people. PCG TC also conducted a survey to obtain OFM’s definition of good user service.

PCG TC identified trends, which were reviewed with the project sponsors. The final report was the analysis of those trends and the assessment observations. PCG TC took the assessment observations and compared them to best practices to determine the gaps which would inform the recommendations.

The 6-month assessment was successfully completed and resulted in 33 recommendations. It was validated and embraced by the executive management at OFM and broadly distributed to staff. Many of the recommendations have been implemented, such as more direct involvement in IT governance issues by executive management, the organizational restructuring into a centralized model for the delivery of IT services, and the hiring of some new key positions.