Civilian Customers
Binary has consulted with CIOs in several civilian agencies to support business intelligence and digital transformation initiatives, including:
NASA HQ Information Technology and Communications Division (ITCD), HQ CIO
NASA HQ CIO (ITCD) wanted to enhance visibility into their IT application portfolio and its viability to drive performance, particularly application development within the business intelligence area. The goal was to ultimately optimize the investment in BI service acquisitions and allow leadership to make ROI trade-offs, increase budget visibility, and enable long-term forecasting. The organization has previously been using a combination of legacy and streamlining plans and was looking for a new and more agile approach to strategic planning and enterprise architecture.
Challenges: NASA ITCD’s data collection and dissemination processes was neither automated nor aligned. Actionable metrics had not yet been defined. Teams were working on components but without an overall objectives-based roadmap.
In addition, NASA ITCD had acquired a business intelligence tool suite, including dashboard functionality, but the group was looking for high-level guidance on how to optimize their contracted services portfolio and derive tangible value from the large investment. Due mainly to the complexity of the initiative, the processes, and number of stakeholders (including the CIO organization, enterprise stakeholders, contractors, and contracting communities), there was inadequate alignment around shared outcomes.
Solution: The NASA HQ CTO needed a different approach to tackle this complex initiative quickly and cost-effectively. Binary’s Outcome Driven Enterprise Approach™, a rapid and agile planning and implementation methodology, was used to address the HQ CTO’s challenges and provide a way forward to gain the performance visibility needed. Binary’s approach focused on delivering incremental “quick strike” results, accelerating progress towards the established project goals.
Results: Binary’s ODEA™ delivered value and results for NASA ITCD rapidly, including:
- The common outcomes for stakeholders and mission success were quickly identified, including accountability and a timeline to complete the initiative
- Enhanced stakeholder alignment and confidence in a way forward to a shared service that could provide great value to all stakeholders was established
- The analytics for developing a BI dashboard roadmap were sequenced and prioritized
- Achievable milestones and tasks developed to get to a dashboard that provided visibility into needed application development
Environmental Protection Agency – CIO Office
Binary supported the EPA CIO on EPA’s E-Enterprise, a very high profile and complex enterprise strategic initiative for the organization.
Challenges: EPA needed cross-cutting business and shared services architectures to achieve the agency goal to reduce regulatory burden across Federal, State, Tribe, municipalities, and internal organizations, and improve knowledge management and open data sharing. EPA also needed a catalog of sharable data and application services as well as a common target technical architecture along with preliminary incremental roadmaps to enable more effective collaboration as well as enhanced information gathering, sharing and transparency across the enterprise. EPA faced many regulatory and cultural hurdles to achieve their strategic vision, as well as disruptions throughout the engagement. Data sharing was difficult and duplication of efforts abundant. Due to the short timeframe to accomplish the tasks, EPA needed a rapid way to effectively deliver new technologies and capabilities, while effectively mitigating risks and disruptions, to achieve stakeholder and mission goals and meet Government regulatory requirements.
Solution: Binary deployed their Outcome-Driven Enterprise Approach™, an agile and rapid planning and deployment methodology, in Discovery sessions held with EPA key stakeholders to identify a common set of outcomes, metrics, and reporting requirements across multiple program groups. These requirements were coalesced down to relevant and realistic data sharing outcomes, while still providing specific reporting capabilities the individual program groups needed. Binary’s ODEA™ methodology helped to facilitate and coalesce stakeholder needs and common data sets for the capture and sharing of data by leveraging existing core technology components like EPA’s Central Data Exchange.
Results: With Binary’s strategic support, EPA’s CIO was able to converge six (6) chemical reporting programs to a single data collection and reporting approach to greatly reduce the regulatory reporting burden, improving data accuracy, and providing 21st century technology services to all stakeholders to reduce time and costs. Binary’s ODEA™ approach was repeatable and was applied to other areas of E-Enterprise to produce similar rapid results that aligned with the mission.
Binary’s EPA E-Enterprise customer success story using our ODEA™ methodology