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GCN Home > 08/16/04 issue

There’s more to the game than knowing the rules

By Richard W. Walker , GCN Staff

To win the funding game, you’ve got to know the rules. But knowing the rules isn’t enough—there’s much more to getting your IT initiative underwritten. Knowing the rules never hit a ground-rule double or put a 20-foot putt in the hole.

You’ll find the rules in the Office of Management and Budget’s Circular A-11. They’re all there. Agencies have to address every aspect of the proposed project, from cost and benefits to acquisition strategy and security.

The Exhibit 300 business case, an A-11 requirement in which agencies detail their capital plans, is a critical component of the process. And it’s become more important in recent years as OMB has piled on new and more intricate requirements.

Program managers also must indicate how they’re going to meet an ever-growing assortment of directives, goals and mandates implemented under laws such as the Federal Information Security Management Act and the Government Paperwork Reduction Act, to name two.

And you have to align your business cases with the Federal Enterprise Architecture, OMB’s latest requirement for 2005 fiscal year funding.

That’s a mountain of work for agencies, but it’s pretty straightforward. It shouldn’t be that hard to get an overall five—the top score—if you follow the rules, right? Maybe you could even get somebody else to do it.

No so fast. Following the rules to a T doesn’t guarantee funding, as far as OMB is concerned.

“You could hire a contractor who knows how these things are going to get scored, who uses all the right words and who says all this good stuff so your business case scores as a five,” said Karen Evans, OMB administrator for e-government and IT. “But you’ve only mastered the art of writing a term paper, not the ability to execute.”

Indeed, the ability to execute is an attribute that transcends the business case.

“A five on the business case doesn’t necessarily mean that the project is going to be successful,” Evans said.