Behind the Curtain at TCG

USASpending.gov garners praise from Congress

More from Jason Miller at FCW about the launch of USASpending.gov, including very complimentary comments from Tom Coburn and Tom Davis (These are very rare, so worth collecting!)

FFATA Web site launched: USASpending.gov

'Tis a momentous day for followers of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA) as the Web site that meets the January 1st deadline stated in the law has been launched! USASpending.gov allows users to search grants and contracts (loans will come later), and even offers an interface so users can extract and manipulate data for their own sites.

As Jason Miller reports in FCW, OMB has beaten the deadline by some two weeks with this launch. Given the scope of the task and the many different hurdles they've needed to jump through, this is a big achievement and one to be applauded. OMB started with a great platform -- OMB Watch's FederalSpending.org site -- but has added some neat-o features, including a wiki and the aforementioned data interfaces.

The weak link in all of this is agency's reporting to the various systems that feed USASpending -- it can only search the information that's made available -- but I know that OMB and all agencies are working to improve that. In the meantime, you can search data through the end of FY2006. More granularity, including sub-grants and so on, will be added over time.

Kudos to OMB for getting this done!

TCG Alum is famous!

We've had getting-up-towards 200 employees over the years. Many left when the company had hard times, some left because they found other work or had kids, we even lost two to Amazon and one to Microsoft. (Amazingly, our voluntary turnover is still under 7%!)

But to my knowledge only one TCGer has had significant recognized success in his field. Scott Roewer, who worked on a DOT contract for us, reinvented himself and made being persnickety a core value. He started a company called Solutions By Scott and was president of the DC metro chapter of NAPO (National Association of Professional Organizers) in 2006.

Most recently, he was featured in this article in the Washington Post's Express section. Coming soon: Look for him on a small screen HDTV near you soon.

I hope all our ex's will be as successful!

Invitation to comment on the draft Federal Financial Report

The government is trying to consolidate federal financial reporting requirements and recently issued a Federal Register notice to invite comments on the latest draft of that consolidated report. Here's the heads-up from the National Grants Partnership.

Attached (here [PDF]) please find the federal register notice on the consolidated federal financial report which consolidates and replaces four existing financial reporting forms (SF–269, SF–269A, SF–272, and SF–272A) with a single Federal Financial Report (FFR). The form is unchanged from the form discussed during the grants.gov webcasting and the from posting on the grants.gov website. The attached notice does however address the 200 plus comments received when the form was first published in the federal register for comment in 2003.

This is your last chance to comment before the form and instructions are finalized. Please direct your comments to Marguerite Pridgen, Office of Federal Financial Management, Office of Management and Budget, 725 17th Street, NW., Washington, DC 20503; telephone 202–395–7844; fax 202–395–3952; e-mail mpridgen@omb.eop.gov no later than JANUARY 08, 2008. Electronic submissions are encouraged due to mail delays.

The FFR “standardizes reporting information by providing a pool of data elements from which agencies can choose to use for reporting purposes. As a result, Federal agencies are not required to collect all of the information included in the FFR. Instead, they will identify, prior to or at time of award, the data elements that recipients must complete, the reporting frequency, the periods covered by each report, the dates that the reports are due, and the locations to which the reports are to be submitted.”

Grants.gov posts Adobe tutorial

Just got this from the Grants.gov mailing list. Good to see these things appearing!

We continue to update the Grants.gov site to reflect the transition from PureEdge to Adobe. You may want to take a few minutes to view our new Grant application tutorial for Adobe. To view it, go to: http://www.grants.gov/applicants/apply_for_grants.jsp and view under Step 2.

Questions for GMLOB consortia leads

In October OMB released its new guidance so each agency can conduct a fit/gap analysis between its grants management needs and the capabilities of GMLOB consortia leads (Education, HHS/ACF, and NSF right now). That guidance includes templates to help agencies map their needs against provider capabilities.

Some of TCG's consultants have been thinking about the fit/gap problem for several months. We see several questions that the GMLOB lead agencies need to answer so that client agencies can make the right choices:

1. What is the likelihood that the consortium could fail?
Agencies need to know whether the economic model is viable and whether the technology is appropriate for tomorrow's needs as well as today's. Agencies will be making long-term investments, and need to know that the service and service provider will be around tomorrow. Shared service providers need to guarantee that an agency's interests will be well served in the long term.

2. Is the security model of the consortium in line with the needs of the client agency's grant programs?
While all agencies have the same responsibility to keep their data secure, some agencies may assign different security level designations to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of different processes. An agency's security designations, contained in the certification and accreditation documentation prepared for FISMA reporting, need to be equal to or less restrictive than the designations of a consortium with which it would partner. Agencies need to see the consortia's security models to make a comparison.

3. Is the architecture model of the consortium compatible with the client agency's target enterprise architecture?
Partnering with a shared service provider forces an agency to accept certain assumptions about the structure and future of the system architecture and of its capabilities. Many agencies are attempting to establish service-oriented architecture models that allow them to share services among various lines of business and within grants programs. Although all three shared service providers talk about SOA, none has a true SOA offering from the architecture through the pricing, as near as we can tell. Each client agency should assess how the consortia lead systems meet its broader architectural goals.

4. Is the process model of the consortium compatible with the client agency's to-be process model, or is it sufficiently malleable to become compatible?
As a result of the move toward GMLOB, many agencies are conducting business process reengineering activities to improve their grants management operations. Agencies need to know the workflow for each of the consortia, and the structures in place for change. Without knowing exactly how the services support grants, agencies cannot evaluate them against its own workflow.

5. Is the business logic of the consortium systems compatible with the needs of the client agency's grant programs?
Federal agencies need to contend with legislative and regulatory changes that affect their grants enterprise. They need to know how the consortia handle change. They need to see evidence of changes to date, and they need to know how each service provider plans to accommodate change in the future. If there is a change process in place, it should be documented and followed. If there is no process, agencies should beware.

6. Is there an overall cost advantage to using the consortium in a reasonable time frame?
The purpose of the Grants Management Line of Business is to save taxpayer money. Yet every agency must invest money to take advantage of a shared service provider. Agencies need to know the expected economic payback, and when it will be available. Service providers that do not have that information available have not thought through their business. Agencies need to know whether they will be able to migrate existing systems to the consortium, including data or even individual process steps. They need to know what is needed for migration. They need to know they can be involved in management and oversight of grant program processes at the consortia.

If agencies cannot get the answers to these questions, they should think twice about choosing one of the existing consortia. The ultimate purpose of the Grants Management Line of Business is to better serve grants applicants and recipients and the American public. They are not well served if agencies are forced to buy a pig in a poke. This is big business, serious business, and should be approached as more than a political football. But, then again, we could be just plain wrong. Let us know what you think in the comments!

NGP Releases Grants Management Standards White Paper

How did I miss this until now?! The latest National Grants Partnership white paper as been released, titled, The Need for Federal Grants Management Standards [PDF]. From the executive summary:

In an effort to achieve [the goals of grants streamlining] and provide context to the topic of grants standardization, this white paper sets out to provide a brief background and history on standardization, addresses the need for grants management standards based on survey and interview responses, and outlines recent developments in the areas of grants streamlining and standardization.

Massive kudos should go to Merril Oliver of the Maryland Governor's Grants Office for leading the effort to produce this paper, which I co-chaired (but, really, Merril did all of the work of keeping the team going and getting the paper published!). The paper contains the results of a survey completed by grantors and grantees across the country, so it really gives a good flavor of the standards that exist, how they are being used, and how they might be used in the future.

Cheap Microsoft and Parallels licenses for NIH users/contractors

This is an interesting tidbit: If you work at the National Institutes of Health as an employee or contractor, you are probably eligible for discounted license prices on many Microsoft products and Parallels Desktop for Mac, or so CIT's latest Interface newsletter informs me.

I happen to know that this is also true at the Department of State (the Microsoft part, anyway) so I wouldn't be surprised if employees and contractors at most Federal agencies were able to take advantage of similar arrangements. Check with your IT folks to find out!