As the nation focuses on restoring our economy, government agencies are faced with unprecedented challenges to respond to aggressive deadlines and usher in a new level of government transparency and accountability.  And yet IT and line-of-business leaders within the government see that they have both an opportunity and an obligation to leverage near-term compliance into long-term, sustained transformation of public-sector functions.

Leveraging its proven success in Enterprise Architecture, Data Management, and Web application development, Citizant is helping its agency partners meet ARRA requirements related to Recovery.gov Reporting; Grants.gov; and Data.gov, while integrating these responses into existing strategies and architectures through a federated  approach with other agency leaders.

Recovery.gov Reporting

ARRA mandates that the 27 federal grant-making agencies report how grant money is distributed by state and that agencies send data automatically to Recovery.gov under aggressive reporting deadlines. 

Leveraging Web 2.0 and mapping technologies, Citizant has created a grants data reporting system that graphically depicts grant data such as grant types, recipient information, and usage for each state, accessible through a U.S. map interface.  The solution also will transmit the required spending and performance data to Recovery.gov via RSS feeds.  For long-term tracking and reporting needs, Citizant’s customizable, Web-enabled financial system allows financial managers to quickly track and report funding sources and disbursements. This system is already deployed within a federal agency.

Grants.gov

The ARRA legislation is expected to increase the use of Grants.gov, the online application portal for federal grants, by 60 percent. With information on more than 1,000 competitive grant programs and access to approximately $500 billion in annual awards, Grants.gov is already showing signs of stress.

Using a phased approach, Citizant’s SOA and IA solutions teams are quickly implementing a grants intake solution to relieve the surge pressure on Grants.gov.   Beyond the triage required to meet ARRA requirements, Citizant is helping agencies reinvent and integrate grants management systems and underlying data structures to make them more efficient, effective, and sustainable over the long term.

Data.gov

Data.gov will make available to the public all federal information that is not private or restricted for national security reasons. In addition to facilitating great public access, the site’s goal is to promote and facilitate information sharing and collaboration among federal agencies – to unlock data from proprietary systems and formats  and create open data standards that lead to new public and private products and services.  This  initiative represents a significant departure from traditional government practices and will require a massive transformation of systems, rules, and cultures.

Citizant is actively engaged on the joint government-industry panel that has been formed to develop data architectures, security practices, and federated approaches to information sharing between agencies and with the private sector.  Citizant’s solution directors are creating workshops to brief CIOs, Chief Architects, and Program Managers on up-to-the-minute developments concerning Data.gov.

Citizant’s integrated Data Management approach – already implemented at several federal agencies – employs repeatable processes based on best practices to ensure federal customers deliver accurate, adequately protected information on-demand to their information sharing community partners. These repeatable processes include: Authoritative Data Sources (ADS) Framework; Data Quality Management; Data Acquisition and Provisioning; and Data Governance, Stewardship and Tools.

Citizant received its ISO 8000:110 Master Data Quality Manager certification in 2008 from the Electronic Commerce Code Management Association (ECCMA). This data quality standard embodies accepted best practices for exchange of master data between organizations.