Dr. Ashish Joshi, in collaboration with Dr. David Paschane, propose a Federal Performance Architecture (FPA) for information management and decision-making support throughout the Federal Enterprise

Date Posted: - 6/23/2009

Baltimore, MD – More than 3 million federal employees work within the Federal Enterprise that comprises nearly 50 Federal Agencies*. The challenges of managing information in this vast organization, replete with a number of disparate processes for analyzing and reporting, require robust architecture capable of evaluating performance and empowering workers to do their jobs more efficiently and in a uniformed manner that is pervasive across the Federal Enterprise. The architecture of information management, the underlying design for knowing who is doing what with tax payers’ money, should enable Federal managers to exploit rigorous analytic capabilities; leading to responsive, coordinated, cooperative, and reliable improvements in policy outcomes—accountable to stakeholders and constituents. To this end, Dr. Ashish Joshi of UMBC’s Department of Information Systems and a Research Director of the Consortium of Information Technology and Health Outcomes Research (CITHOR) have collaborated with colleague Dr. David Paschane, key advisor and collaborator to the Consortium of Information Technology and Health Outcomes Research (CITHOR) to submit a paper which proposes a Federal Performance Architecture (FPA).

“As we are now nearly 10 years into the 21st Century, the need for more mature performance architecture across the Federal enterprise—one that also creates a learning environment for workers and managers—is imperative,” say co-authors Drs. Joshi and Paschane. “Our architecture proposes traditional reporting and oversight practices into interactive, dynamic learning environments that ensure effective analyses are available and useful to managers at all levels, from the project lead to the President of the United States.” The call for a contemporary Federal Performance Architecture, one that is adaptable to future work processes, coincides with the President Obama directing all Federal agencies to be accountable and transparent; with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director calling for greater empirical evaluation of programs’ effectiveness; and with the Federal CIO promoting innovation, cost effectiveness, and a transparent engagement with citizens. Dr. Joshi says, “Our proposed FPA is based on applying a common framework that mirrors best practices associated with implementing a Corporate Performance Management (CPM) framework, one that accounts for both technological and human outcomes perspectives.”

The proposed FPA would be a tangible, reusable infrastructure of methods and tools, and knowledge products and services resulting from a more CPM implementation. The key premise of a FPA is that all managers, from the bottom to the top of the Federal enterprise, are able to make full use of timely, causally-related, insightful information about the operations within their domain of responsibility. Likewise, employees, contractors, constituents, and stakeholders all have access to the learning environment through an online experience that is appropriate for their engagement. Drs. Joshi and Paschane believe their model for analytic maturity focuses on the ability for leaders to examine the causes of outcomes in targeted policies, with emphases on geographic and inter-functional analyses. Their goal is to encourage Federal leaders to pursue repeatable, scalable, and universal methods that clarify and simplify knowledge, verify and validate evidence for decision-making, and reuse light-weight evaluative capabilities that fit workforce and business components. Currently, the proposed FPA paper is under review by Chief Architects of the Federal Government and Gartner Advisors to Federal CIOs.

Dr. Joshi’s research interests also include health care informatics, designing and evaluating tele-health systems for chronic disease management, analyses of large clinical, administrative health care databases.

Dr. Paschane is an Applied Scientist, specializing in behavioral, organizational, and geographical analyses for performance management, business strategy, public policy, and technology innovation. His current work concentrates on the performance capabilities of Federal healthcare solutions, especially those serving disabled veterans.

To review the unabridged paper, Federal Performance Architecture, follow this link: http://www.is.umbc.edu/cithor.