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GCN Home > 10/11/04 issue

From complex to the commonplace, EPA calls its own numbers

By Jason Miller, GCN Staff

The Environmental Protection Agency’s finance and budget workers used to spend late nights and weekends trying to decipher the agency’s budget figures.

The Oracle Corp. system they used collected data from program offices around the country, but when the numbers in the system didn’t match what the offices had reported, EPA employees spent hours and sometimes days reconciling the differences.

But what officials called the most tedious part of an arduous process came to an end when EPA installed its Budget Automation System.

“We used spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the real numbers are, but now we have real-time budget information across the entire agency,” said Terry Ouverson, director of systems, planning and integration in EPA’s Office of the Chief Financial Officer.

“We now have budget discussions without all the miscommunication that used to happen. We all look at the same data now.”

The system’s impact on the agency was almost im- mediate, officials said. It helped standardize data inputs and outputs, provided accountability down to the person who entered the data into the system, provided insight into how much program offices were spending versus how much they forecast and matched spending to performance results.

The system lets us “deliver information to managers in a timely manner so they can make decisions,” Ouverson said. “We are using financial management data to support our day-to-day work.”

Using that data to measure performance helped EPA become one of the first agencies to receive a green score for improved financial performance on the President’s Management Agenda scorecard. Green is the highest grade on the red-yellow-green scale the Office of Management and Budget uses.

EPA also is one of only eight agencies able to close its financial books in six weeks instead of the six months most agencies take.

The agency developed the system in 1997 with KeyLogic Systems Inc. of Columbia, Md., and finished implementation in 2000 at a cost of $5.5 million.

More news on related topics: Business Process Management, Content / Record Management, Great Managers, Knowledge Management, Management



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