Background
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) plays a critical role in safeguarding the nation's physical and cyber infrastructure. Within CISA, the Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO) supports this mission by ensuring effective financial management and strategic resource allocation. The OCFO’s Business Transformation Unit (BTU) is a key driver of innovation, responsible for developing and implementing technology-enabled solutions that promote transparency, enhance accountability, and empower leadership with data-informed decision-making tools. Tasked with exploring emerging technologies and reimagining operational processes, BTU leads the charge in creating forward-looking technical roadmaps and modernizing capabilities across the OCFO. This includes evaluating and integrating existing systems, demonstrating new technologies, and rapidly deploying tools that address the agency’s most urgent financial management needs. One of the BTU’s core objectives is to ensure the efficient and accurate stewardship of CISA’s multi-billion-dollar annual budget. However, legacy systems presented a number of challenges, including fragmented data environments, reliance on manual data entry, limited reporting capabilities, and an absence of centralized oversight. To address these issues, CISA partnered with OPTiMO to design and deliver the Budget Formulation Portal (BFP)—a secure, cloud-based platform that modernizes and unifies CISA’s budget formulation and execution processes.
The Challenge:
CISA’s existing budget formulation processes were highly manual and fragmented, relying on spreadsheets, redundant data entry, and disparate tools. These inefficiencies introduced risks in data quality, delayed decision-making, and limited transparency and governance. Key challenges included:
- Lack of standardization across business processes
- Siloed data sources and duplicated manual efforts
- Data quality issues affecting financial reporting accuracy
- Limited analytics and reporting capabilities
- Decentralized user authentication and authorization, creating governance concerns
CISA needed a secure, scalable, and centralized system that could streamline its operations, improve transparency, and meet stringent federal compliance standards.
The Solution:
OPTiMO developed and delivered the Budget Formulation Portal (BFP) a cloud-based solution built using Microsoft Power Platform tools. This platform replaced legacy spreadsheet-driven processes with modern, automated workflows, centralized data, and powerful analytics.
Key features and innovations included:
- Enabled accurate, long-term budget planning and forecasting, by implementing automated, driver-based and inflation-driven budget formulation models
- Improved decision-making through faster, more reliable reporting, using dynamic variance analysis and custom query capabilities
- Unified financial visibility across the agency, by creating a centralized “Single Pane of Glass” integrating all disparate data sources
- Accelerated time-to-value and reduced risk, by achieving ATO on first attempt with full NIST and FedRAMP compliance
- Saved thousands of labor hours annually, through workflow automation that eliminated repetitive manual tasks during peak budget cycles
- Enhanced strategic alignment and communication, through advanced visualization tools that supported workforce planning, budget forecasting, automated reporting, and stakeholder engagement
The Impact:
The launch of BFP dramatically transformed CISA’s budget operations, earning accolades from leadership and delivering measurable improvements across the agency.
- “Fastest and highest quality budget formulation effort ever!” – CISA Budget Chief, 2023
- Saved over 2,340 hours annually through automated workflows during peak formulation cycles
- Reduced manual errors and budget formulation cycle times by more than 40%
- Enabled management of $10B+ in annual budgets across multiple divisions, with full transaction-level visibility
- Improved data accuracy, transparency, reporting, and customer service.
- Enhanced financial analysis and variance tracking, supported by business rule validation and dynamic data queries
- Achieved ATO on the first attempt, meeting NIST and FedRAMP standards for secure government systems
OPTiMO’s platform has improved the day-to-day operations of CISA’s budget team and set a new standard for financial management. The solution has facilitated optimized spending, consolidation of resources and requirements, enhanced tracking of requirements, and increased flexibility to meet evolving needs.