Delivering Department-wide Transparency and Accuracy over IT Spend

This US State Department of Public Safety covers the detection and prevention of crime, participates in searches for lost and missing persons, and assists in cases of statewide or local disasters or emergencies. The Department is organised into four divisions: State Police, Emergency Management, Fire safety, and Forensics Lab.

Outdated spreadsheet tools meant there was no way to quantify the value of IT to support delivery of key agency services or track dollars at risk of being lost.

This US State Department of Public Safety (DPS) was using an outdated spreadsheet to charge state agencies their yearly IT costs. Once the new IT Director of the Department of Public Safety (DPS) delved into the data, it became apparent that this manual approach would no longer be an option. The Director was under pressure to justify the billing for services delivered to their clients.

Additional challenges included:

•   Providing the State Government cost transparency by department, by service, by user

•   Partnering with Government Department Directors to show value of services

•   Defining a clear process and providing a structured platform for yearly budget costs

•   Implementing a solution that is simple, efficient, and easy to use.

The primary business challenge was to implement an accurate IT spending model that would create better transparency. Additionally, this State Government needed a sophisticated IT catalog and usage methodology to monitor investments. These challenges led our client to consider an IT Financial Management tool to help structure and calculate the total IT spend for all infrastructure, services, and support for the upcoming fiscal year.

To provide the US State Department of Public Safety with an IT Financial Management solution to enable transparency to their four agencies on service costs.

In order to meet their deadline of reporting year-end IT services costs, the DPS team would need to approve a tool and vendor, and move to production in less than eight months. In addition to selecting a system that would generate consistent and accurate analytics, the team required a tool that could be quickly and easily implemented.

Only one company enabled true visibility of IT spend across 4 agencies.

With an accurate, flexible, and sustainable IT Financial Management application and methodology in place, reporting will take minutes rather than days or weeks to produce.

ClearCost was also able to provide:

•   Ongoing training and technical support via web conferencing

•   Start of Project to Production Deployment well within expectations

•   Scalable platform to meet business demands

•   Efficient data gathering process for assets, CapEx expenditures, and forecasting

•   Service catalog reporting of a blended Chargeback and Showback model

•   Accurate budgeting process

Most importantly, the DPS team gained trust with State Agencies by providing complete transparency, with direct linkage to every cost and resource reported. Establishing this important linkage capability will ensure the continued involvement of State Agencies in the budget, forecasting, and service planning processes, thereby bridging the gap between the DPS and the State Governments they serve.

Gained Department-wide transparency and accuracy over IT spend.

DPS now has a fully functional IT Financial Management solution providing accurate, transparent reporting, and analytics.

These new ITFM metrics have fully replaced the inaccurate and inefficient finance spreadsheet tools.

State legislature executives now access these metrics to justify IT spending and provide a blended Chargeback and Showback model.