Governments of the world are facing national and global demands for greater levels of transparency that allow citizens and other nations to hold them accountable.

These pressures and responses are fueled by innovations in information and communication technologies (ICTs) and expanding technological capabilities and efficiencies.

Advances in ICTs have enabled governments to make digital data available to the public through the Internet.

Making such data available to the public is an important first step in achieving government accountability through improved transparency.

An example of global government accountability efforts is in spending transparency. Demands for spending transparency often take the form of national-level legislation, international agreements, or Web-enabled access to information. Examples of each include the spending reporting requirements mandated in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act), the US and Brazil led Open Government Partnership initiative and USAspending.gov. 

 

 

Making government spending data available to the public through new collection, integration, and sharing strategies requires new organizational and technological capabilities.

Governments need innovative information management and cross-boundary governance strategies. Information management innovations include effective use of information technologies and a culture of information stewardship that embraces the public value of government data. Cross-boundary governance innovations include new policies and processes that enable disparate agencies that own or maintain spending data to make decisions across traditional organizational boundaries. Combined, these capabilities allow organizations to create, collect, integrate, and share public information in ways that support organizational purposes and transparency goals.

New York State overcame challenges it faced in implementing the Recovery Act's spending reporting requirements. These experiences provide valuable insights into the types of information management and governance practices that worked. These practices can help governments, at all levels, deliver multi-level, multi-jurisdictional spending transparency reporting and sufficient, timely, and accurate data for citizens to hold government accountable.

 

 

The Recovery Act 

The Recovery Act reporting was a first-of-its-kind effort to collect real-time spending data on all tiers of awards and sub-awards issued by the US federal government. Recipients were required to report, not just expenditure data, but accountability and outcome measures such as job creation.

CTG UAlbany conducted a series of forums with NYS agencies to identify and document important implementation insights and lessons learned from Recovery Act reporting experiences.

With little or no federal assistance for new infrastructure or processes to meet this requirement, New York, like most states, had to rely on a mix of existing and newly developed resources, relationships, and processes to track and report expenditures and results. These efforts affected IT systems, business processes, and relationships across government and private recipients.

For states with many Recovery Act awards, reporting requirements generated transformative information management and governance practices. Those have become institutionalized beyond the Recovery Act period. However, states with few awards used unsustainable workarounds to respond to what the treated as a one-time federal mandate.

Examining what happened during the Recovery Act reporting periods is necessary to ensure that efforts going forward will build on capabilities created in the process of creating a new level of spending transparency.

 

A Warrant for Innovative Information Management and Cross-Boundary Governance Strategies 

The level of reporting mandated by the Recovery Act was not unprecedented; in fact, the federal government has been requesting this type of information from state agencies who receive federal money for decades. The novel aspects of the Recovery Act reporting included:

• the collection of information from a variety of different program areas,
• creation of a single, central spending data repository between states and the federal government,
• data collected directly from sub-recipients,
• the quick turn-around of data on a quarterly basis, and
• a mandate to make information more accessible and transparent.

While agencies with a small number of grants could focus on minor process changes and use spreadsheets to meet the novel aspects, for those receiving hundreds of grants with hundreds of sub-recipients it was clear that new investments in IT and other capabilities had to be made.

The NYS Department of Transportation (NYS DOT) recognized that a brute force strategy of manually reviewing hundreds of spreadsheets to collect, verify, and report data was not a workable strategy. As an official noted, “Spreadsheets would have killed us; we would have been buried in that approach.”

NYS DOT brought together business units to make decisions around data and to establish new data governance capability to better understand the collected information. NYS DOT turned to their IT department to build the necessary Web interfaces to gather the data into a data warehouse, this allowed for reliable data from existing systems (right).

The first of three CTG UAlbany Forums allowed NYS DOT and other agencies to share their stories. The pressure of quarterly deadlines prompted innovative transformations by state agencies who:

• developed new data reporting structures,
• established new communication channels,
• made business cases for enterprise technology solutions,
• reinvigorated an enterprise focus on data quality and governance capabilities
• gained a new appreciation for the value of integrated information and reporting from a business analytics perspective.

The insight of attendees provided a window into the complex relationships of IT and organizational innovation under pressure.

 

 

Information Management 

Beyond its role as a trigger for renewed attention to data and transparency, the reporting requirements of the Recovery Act highlighted the importance of information management with a culture of information stewardship.

Information stewardship is the practice of treating government data as a resource or asset that has organizational, jurisdictional, or societal value to a wide range of different ‘consumers.’ Therefore, it is important to treat data as an asset when collecting, sharing, and storing it.

The new emphasis on transparency resulted in new users, and uses of, the information. Some agencies created spending barometers and geo-coded contracts, and displayed them using maps along with additional contextual information about spending through related data links.

Many new uses of data depended on having the appropriate information about the context of data collection. Both program and IT professionals spoke of the importance of understanding data use from the user’s perspective. Agencies began rethinking how existing and new information technologies could accommodate the requirement for real-time data consumption and spending transparency.

 

Cross-Boundary Governance 

Right - At CTG UAlbany's first forum, Tom Johnston, Manager of the Business Solutions Bureau and IT Lead on NYSDOT’s Recovery Act project team, shared information technology solutions developed by NYSDOT to manage Recovery Act reporting for the first reporting deadline, October 10, 2009.

Beyond information management considerations, agencies shared how each found new ways to coordinate internal work and new relationships with external organizations and agencies.

Many created ad-hoc governance structures that allowed cross-organizational teams to share information needs and work practices among divisions that otherwise did not coordinate.

Some agencies used virtual collaborative software to organize internal efforts and facilitate communication across functional teams. These techniques smoothed interactions among reporting units, but had different work practices, desired levels of information quality, and uses for information, such as internal controls, auditing, and risk management process.

Agencies noticed many data quality issues, such as the volume of data being collected and the rapid turnarounds required for reporting.

Governance became a critical issue.

Collaborating organizations realized data quality was no longer just an IT issue department, but a business issue that cut across all facets of spending reporting.

The need for consistent, timely data required new real-time processes for review and approval. Pressure to avoid public exposure of mistakes in data added to this need.

The federal government created some of the necessary structure by instituting reporting schedules. These schedules enabled data correction after reporting deadlines passed. However, agencies devised new data entry processes for sub-recipients to avoid data entry issues that were inherent in past reporting methods. Others created new processes that allowed sub-recipients to enter data directly into a Web-enabled form.

 

 

Beyond the Recovery Act 

The requirements outlined in the U.S. Recovery Act for tracking spending and delivering spending information to the public are the start of new requirements and expectations for government spending transparency and accountability.

The lessons learned through the Recovery Act reporting experience provide a boost for governments around the world as they begin to lay out new strategies for achieving spending transparency.

The challenge ahead is for federal, state and local agencies and private contractors to learn from the experiences of Recovery Act reporting and to use that knowledge to guide the creation of necessary capabilities to meet citizen expectations regarding spending transparency.

 

 

Natalie Helbig, Senior Program Associate
Theresa Pardo, Director
Donna Canestraro, Program Manager