Address Budgetary and Cultural Issues

he Technology Transfer Administration's issues appear to be both budgetary and cultural in nature. They can be addressed separately, but there is some overlap,and cultural issues are sometimes the hidden agenda behind budget questions.

The budgetary issues include determining whether requirements have been inflated, whether outsourcing is the most cost-effective approach, and whether funding exists for all the requirements. The project team should review requirements to determine whether there is an economic benefit associated with PC outsourcing when compared to reasonable alternatives.

To ensure that valid requirements are gathered, the IT representatives from each field office should submit their requirements and describe how they would be met if there were no outsourcing.

Also, the outsourcing requirements from each field office should be approved by field office senior management. The project team should analyze the submissions, assessing how the requirements compare to prior plans and budgets. This process should allow the field offices to submit reasonable requirements while flushing out any inflated ones. The project team should then compare the outsourcing approach against other alternatives.

If the requirements are valid and the outsourcing procurement is the most cost-effective alternative, then there should be enough funding. If there was not funding for some new requirements, then those requirements should be subjected to a "new start" budgetary review.

Any economic benefit from outsourcing must be understood in context. Even if resources can be saved through the more efficient delivery of information technology support, this may not be a complete justification. This may be a case where costs are saved in the more efficient delivery of this service, but the delivery approach may somehow hurt overall costs or performance.

This agency-level procurement also may be out of sync with a culture of decentralized local control. In a technical agency where project performance is valued and rewarded, managers will try to arrange everything so their chances of project success are improved. An IT service provided by the local field office is generally preferable to one provided from headquarters because project managers feel they will have more clout with a local service provider.

This cultural issue needs to be addressed by senior managers. If the IT support that is to be outsourced can be viewed as a commodity,a standard service that can be procured from a number of sources,and if the outsourced IT will adequately support mission performance, then senior agency managers can make the judgment call about whether the estimated cost savings are worth any real or perceived loss of local control.

Shane Rawley should continue the effort with broad agency participation on the project team; thorough, professional and swift analysis; a candid review of that analysis; and resulting recommendations in the appropriate management forum.

Russell Rice was formerly the director of the Information Resources Management Division at NASA headquarters. He currently is an independent information technology consultant.