Integrating CXO Data into US Citizenship and Immigration Services with ServiceNow

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (UCIS) belongs to the fifth largest government department, the Department of Homeland Security, and is responsible for the entire US legal immigration system. It has an annual budget of over $2 billion and processes more than eight million applications and petitions a year.

However, despite its role and the importance of its work, just a few years ago, UCIS had been operating largely separately, with each of its CXO functions (finance, HR, IT, acquisitions) operating in isolation. . Not only that, but the way UCIS is funded—through fees and full cost recovery, meaning it didn’t have to plan for a two-year budget cycle—means that planning has always been less visible. Was.

Rick Sindel, deputy component acquisition executive, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, explains:

This means that only we can use our revenue, and for the most part, we get to decide how our money is used. This is both good and bad. This means we don’t have to wait for the two-year annual budget process and we can account for new needs or capacity gaps. It also means that we are structured only to be accountable and the culture is one where planning is not fully involved.

So over the years we aim to implement an integrated planning function across various CXOs with the acquisition program management authorities. This includes the chief information officer, chief financial officer, principal contracting authority, as well as the component acquisition executive.

Sindel is speaking at the Service Now at Work virtual event this week, where he and his colleague, Tim Smith, Chief Component Acquisition Executive at UCIS, explain how their work — Acquisition CXO — sits in between other CXOs and Service Now. platform to facilitate a common picture of investments over time.

UCIS has more than 850 investments, totaling $1 billion a year, feeding 75 programs and supporting 160 projects. This used to be a manual review process, which was later moved to a SharePoint site. However, in 2016 the organization implemented ServiceNow. Smith says:

We deployed ServiceNow in 2016 to manage our investment process. We’ve made several iterative improvements since then, but our main goal was to reduce the number of form fillable PDFs that were being emailed to group mailboxes and tracked across multiple spreadsheets.

Soon after deployment we realized we could use our data with other CXO offices – so in the years since 2016 we made major improvements to the toolset for sharing that data. And where we are today, we really want to be more transparent among the community, and hold our stakeholders accountable.

It’s really about stopping the finger between the offices where the data is, or where requests have stalled or stalled, and it’s about reining in things like shadow IT budgets across the agency.

improve transparency

According to Smith, UCIS had little transparency in the organization’s $2 billion general spending budget, of which about $1 billion was for IT. This presented a challenge in terms of understanding the return on investment for projects that may start out as research projects, but then go on for years and years, without being successful. Smith says:

We really want to shut down other systems once the new systems come online – and we need to get them online as soon as possible to reduce the cost on the old systems.

The implementation of Service Now has helped us understand where and what is being spent on all UCIS operations. Smith says:

Right now we have about 400 tasks that go through our workflow. Every year we’re working to reduce the limit for things like buying cards in very small contracts, and that will actually double the amount to about 800 actions in the coming year. They all go through a gatekeeper and having a robust workflow, a cloud based solution like ServiceNow, really helps us in this.

Each of these requests has about 20 supporting documents, such as requirements, statements, government estimates, market research, that have to flow with the request. And in some cases some of our larger contracts take over 500 days from consideration to award. And so we’re trying to reduce that number by increasing efficiency and sharing data and holding stakeholders accountable.

We really attacked our group mailbox philosophy, and every day we come across new, anonymous group mailboxes that are receiving data that can frustrate users.

striving for greater integration

The implementation of Service Now aims to eventually integrate the UCIS CXO community along the same path. Smith says:

As we said before, many of these use the same data, or data need to be compared, and this really helps us to make future plans or multi-year plans that we have never really had. Not even UCIS. And we’ve launched an initiative to create a multi-year plan and show us what our budgets are going to look like in the years outside.

They weren’t really integrated on the same path, that’s our goal, and we’re using ServiceNow to accomplish that. One of the ways we’re integrating is with reports and dashboards to show more transparency, and we think transparency creates accountability.

Dashboards showing shadow IT budgets, or where timeline contracts, are the kinds of things we need to be more transparent about. We are also working on a drill down type of dashboard that takes data from multiple CXO organizations and brings them into one place to see if there is a connection between the silos, and how can we break down those walls or How can we connect those data systems to improve our performance. .

Sindel says that prior to the implementation of Service Now, each CXO had its own stove pipe of excellence, where they implemented best practice, but it was done in a vacuum. This is changing now. He explains:

For example, the CFO is building a multi-year budgeting tool that will feed into our investment system, helping us for the first time establish a multi-year budget and acquisition program baseline that ties together directly. There’s a direct real-time relationship between what we’re seeing in our acquisition system versus the financial system.

The next one we’re working on, but still implementing, has multi-year budgets and plans tied together across all CXOs to include human resources, information technology, finance, acquisitions, etc.

tips for success

Sindel also provides some advice for other organizations that may use Service Now to integrate organizational planning, budgeting and operations. These are not technical problems, but the need for constant engagement and communication across tasks. He says:

Really spend a lot of time figuring out how to best portray your problem. When you show it to leadership, make sure it is clear and concise, and then link that problem to a real-world event. We paid particular respect to the lack of CXO integration and planning, and how it hinders our ability to be proactive and really have plans against which we can judge progress.

Also, keep everyone busy while iterating towards the solution. We meet with all of our key stakeholders and leadership at least once a week to move towards an integrated CXO and a larger community. It keeps them engaged and makes them part of the solution.

You can view UCIS sessions on the Service Now At Work virtual event page. For all of Diginomica’s coverage from Now At Work, check out our dedicated Events Hub here.