Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 08/16/04 issue

The funding equation starts at 300

By Richard W. Walker, GCN Staff

A good business case is at the core of a project’s future, but it’s just the beginning

Agencies used to give their IT business cases the casual treatment.

“A few years ago, agencies could fill out a 300 in a few days without doing their homework and get passing grades,” said management consultant Jim Kendrick, president of the P2C2 Group Inc. of Kensington, Md.

That’s not surprising. The Exhibit 300 business case hasn’t been around that long. It is a progeny of the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996, which required agencies to take a more businesslike approach to IT investments and to ensure that those investments were selected according to mission needs.

The business case was codified a year later in a rewrite of the Office of Management and Budget’s Circular A-11, Planning, Budgeting, Acquisition and Management of Capital Assets.

“OMB focused initially on IT because those projects were increasingly important to program delivery and increasingly big-ticket items that ran into trouble,” said Jonathan Bruel, a senior fellow at the IBM Center for the Business of Government.

“Initially, business cases were much sketchier in what they provided, and OMB’s level of analysis was accordingly much less systematic and rigid,” said Bruel, who spent 20 years at OMB, his last 10 as senior adviser to the deputy director for management.

In recent years, creating a business case has become increasingly complex as OMB has overlaid new requirements and implemented an elaborate scoring system.

It also has become an integral element of capital planning and investment control.

“It’s really a living document,” said Debbie Flickinger, director of program control for Customs and Border Protection’s modernization office. “The business case is important not only for procuring funding. For us, it’s part of our investment management process. It’s a good vehicle for documenting what our program is and what we expect to get from the program in terms of outcomes and performance measures.

“It’s important that the business case is not just viewed as an exercise to satisfy OMB requirements,” she added. “It’s a key document from an investment standpoint.”



GCN Popup