Government organizations face unique challenges. Accountable to citizens for every tax dollar spent, they must make effective and efficient technology investments. That balance is not always easy to achieve, and we met with a panel of government technology experts to discuss how they approach this challenge.
What are the challenges you need to overcome to be successful?
Every organization is different, but it’s common to not have a central tool to manage technology investments. We frequently see individuals maintaining their own spreadsheets to track performance and email being used to provide status updates. As you can imagine, those “systems” result in a lack of clarity around what’s happening and no accurate understanding of the benefits that investments deliver. Everything takes too long and there is no trust in the information.
How do you go about addressing those problems?
An integrated solution is the only answer to these challenges. It must provide the ability to manage discretionary IT budgets from a central location and a single source of truth for all work. That solution must also be able to integrate with other functions within IT. It needs to support other branches of government and to easily and effectively provide stakeholders and auditors with reports on what is happening.
What do you do, and how does it help?
We chose Clarity by Broadcom Software for all our projects. Clarity not only provides us with a single central repository and the ability to manage all our projects, but also is flexible enough to expand to other use cases. We already support cost plan management for other branches of government through integration with Clarity’s investment functionality. We use forms and workflows for statement of work requests, and we have integrated Clarity with our Service Desk tool to flow request and avoid reentry.
We’re also looking to expand our use of workflow in the solution, and we love the fact that Broadcom is responsive to us when we have ideas for how they can improve Clarity to be even more effective for us. We’re looking at implementing a new reporting tool on top of Clarity’s database, and we have plans to use roadmaps and hierarchies in the near future.
Clarity gives us what we need to manage investments and demonstrate financial accountability to our stakeholders. We’re now more effective and efficient, and our staff are spending their time delivering solutions instead of fighting spreadsheets.
How is this driving your success?
We now have control over what’s happening. Everything has improved, from better decision-making based on more accurate, complete, and timely information, to better financial accountability. Instead of becoming frustrated by the hours they previously had to spend manually maintaining data across multiple locations, our staff are now working on things that deliver value.
We’re more productive, more efficient, and make better decisions. And that makes us better custodians of the tax dollars that we have to invest to generate benefit for our citizens.
