BUSINESS CHALLENGE:
When a major defense organization was tasked with reporting, analyzing, strategically planning and managing its massive IT portfolio of projects, which spans across the globe, it faced a complex challenge as meeting expectations and compliance meant having to collect pre-existing data sources from multiple disparate databases. This meant the agency now needed to invest a significant amount of time, human resources and budget for additional IT integration while running against the clock. Worse, some of the information resided in a proprietary non-collaborative, custom-built application while other information from the IT investment catalog was only available in spreadsheets exported from yet another system. Bottom line: it created a highly frustrating experience for the Portfolio Management team. After all, how can you compile a report quickly and efficiently and arrive at intelligent decisions when you’re trying to solve a puzzle and the dots don’t connect?
STRATEGIC SOLUTION:
The organization called upon InQuisient to initially make the organization’s enterprise architecture available for reporting and analysis. After careful review and flawless execution, InQuisient leveraged its innovative data collection and reporting platform to support a structured, online approach to managing both the strategic and execution plans within the same environment as the enterprise architecture itself. The new, streamlined approach facilitated a faster and more consolidated flow of investment and budgetary information from the respective systems of record into the new knowledge database. The final objective was achieved when the organization was able to shut down the non-collaborative compliance application so that the entire investment review process could be managed using data within Inquisient’s platform and tools.
RESULTS:
By centralizing disparate data sources in multiple formats, from both common and proprietary reporting tools into the intuitive InQuisient platform, the organization saw a dramatic decrease in costs to produce and maintain the vast amounts of data. Additional cost-saving opportunities that were not previously anticipated were uncovered as a result of facilitating cross-portfolio similarities, redundancy and dependency analytics. Moreover, with faster turnaround times for reports and analytics, the organization was now able to significantly increase the managerial level of confidence in the reported data. It maximized data integrity and minimized risk of errors in analysis, reporting and planning. As a result, the organization has been able to re-establish stakeholders’ trust so it can effectively support decisive action at a critical budgetary period of the organization’s planning cycle. It has also experienced a positive shift in contractor support productivity during the yearly cycle, moving away from painstaking manual data collection and validation to tangible management of the data, resulting in the increased effectiveness of the entire Investment Review process.