FTC offers a free business case template
The Federal Trade Commission has developed a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet template that it will let other agencies use to submit business case data to the Office of Management and Budget.
'Since I needed to do a submission anyway for the FTC, we built this template and shared it with all the other small agency CIOs,' said FTC CIO Stephen Warren.
Last year, OMB began requiring agencies to encode data from all Exhibit 300 forms in the Extensible Markup Language, a formidable task for smaller agencies with little XML expertise.
FTC contracted with CaseTech Inc. of Washington to design an Exhibit 300 business case template in Excel with a macro to test data against the OMB schema and generate an XML output file. The template, which cost about $16,000 to design, also highlights the fields that small agencies must complete.
Free copies of the template were distributed at a Small Agency CIO Council meeting in Washington this summer, and it is available on the SAC's intranet, said Warren, who is also co-chair- man of the council.
Warren hopes to update the form so small agencies can use it, gratis, for next year's submissions, too.
About the Author
Joab Jackson is the senior technology editor for Government Computer News.