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USCIS Transformation: Improvements to Performance, Human Capital, and Information Technology Management Needed as Modernization Proceeds

GAO-07-1013R Published: Jul 17, 2007. Publicly Released: Jul 17, 2007.
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Highlights

GAO and Inspector General (IG) reports have noted that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) efforts to modernize over the last 4 years have been unfocused, conducted in an ad hoc and decentralized manner, and, in certain instances, duplicative. In 2006, USCIS decided to reexamine its modernization effort within the context of an agencywide organizational and business transformation initiative. The agency embarked on a transformation of its business processes and technology aimed at increasing national security and integrity, improving customer service, and achieving operational efficiency. We agreed with this approach and recommended that USCIS employ key practices for successful organizational transformations to better ensure the success of its efforts. USCIS plans to complete its transformation by 2013 at an estimated cost of up to $536 million, mostly funded by fee revenues. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Appropriations Act for fiscal year 2007 mandated that GAO review USCIS' transformation plans before the agency can obligate $47 million in funding for the transformation. Congress also requested that specific information be included in USCIS' plan: all resources associated with transformation efforts (appropriations and fees), including a detailed breakout of costs for fiscal year 2007, and the impact of availability of fee revenue; alignment of the transformation process with DHS' enterprise architecture; and details on expected project performance and deliverables. Pursuant to the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2007, USCIS, in May 2007, submitted to the congressional appropriations committees its Transformation Program Strategic Plan and Expenditure Plan. As required by the act, we reviewed these plans. Our objectives were to (1) describe the extent to which USCIS' plans incorporate key practices identified by GAO for organizational transformations, and (2) describe if and how USCIS' plans include congressionally requested information.

Recommendations

Recommendations for Executive Action

Agency Affected Recommendation Status
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services To improve its transformation strategy and fully address congressionally requested information, the Secretary of Homeland Security should direct the Director of USCIS to document specific performance measures and targets for the pilots, increments, and the transformed organization that are outcome-oriented, objective, reliable, balanced, limited to the vital-few, measurable, and aligned with organizational goals.
Closed – Implemented
In March 2011, USCIS finalized a balanced set of four performance measures and established fiscal year 2012 targets that align with transformation goals for customer satisfaction, decisional accuracy, timeliness, and efficiency.
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services To improve its transformation strategy and fully address congressionally requested information, the Secretary of Homeland Security should direct the Director of USCIS to increase USCIS' focus on strategic human capital management for the transformation, including increasing coordination between TPO and the Office of Human Capital (OHC) to ensure transformation and human capital change initiatives are aligned.
Closed – Implemented
In response to our recommendation, the Office of Transformation Coordination (OTC) indicated in August 2010 that it had established regular meetings with the Chief Learning Officer to address training-related transformation issues. The OTC also increased its coordination with Human Capital and Training (HC&T). HC&T subject experts have helped OTC with a series of activities to determine the people requirements for the transformed environment, to select the system users, and to provide users with the support they needed to perform their work. This included activities such as cataloging the roles required to perform the transformed business processes; mapping these roles to current and new positions; and identifying training needs for each position.
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services To improve its transformation strategy and fully address congressionally requested information, the Secretary of Homeland Security should direct the Director of USCIS to increase USCIS' focus on strategic human capital management for the transformation, including planning for the number and types of human resources required in TPO to carry the transformation through 2012.
Closed – Implemented
In May 2010, USCIS Transformation's approved staffing level was increased from 67 to 101. This staffing increase was intended to improve government oversight of the contract staff and activities that are required to design and build the first scheduled release while beginning work on the second release. As of June 2012, the number of authorized positions has been reduced to 94, of which 10 remain vacant for a vacancy rate of 11 percent. This is comparable to the vacancy rate of 8 percent for USCIS program offices and about 12 percent for the agency as a whole, as of April 2012.
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services To improve its transformation strategy and fully address congressionally requested information, the Secretary of Homeland Security should direct the Director of USCIS to increase USCIS' focus on strategic human capital management for the transformation, including planning for obtaining and developing the IT human capital necessary to support the transformation.
Closed – Implemented
As of July 2011, while vacancies still existed, the Office of Information Technology (OIT) had more than doubled its on-board staff since the time of our review. Further, OIT indicated that OIT supports the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service's (USCIS) transformation effort with dedicated staff and contractors as well as access to additional OIT staff and contractors on an as-needed basis. According to OIT, this posture allows OIT to maintain consistent coverage of base transformation needs while responding to ad-hoc or surge transformation needs without requiring substantial personnel overhead.
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services To improve its transformation strategy and fully address congressionally requested information, the Secretary of Homeland Security should direct the Director of USCIS to increase USCIS' focus on strategic human capital management for the transformation, including determining the critical skills and competencies that will be needed to achieve future programmatic results as well as strategies to address gaps in employee numbers, deployment, and skills and competencies.
Closed – Implemented
To address the skills needed, in November of 2010, the Solutions Architect for transformation developed the Release A Training Needs Assessment. The assessment provides an analysis of the types of skills needed to operate in a transformed environment and how the training will be developed and rolled out. In addition, as of May 2011, an Enterprise Training Plan had been updated for release A. The plan describes the systems and techniques for collecting training requirements, analyzing needs, and designing learning for the transformation. Also, as of June 2011, the Organizational Change Management and Policy Division within the Office of Transformation Coordination (OTC) had completed an analysis in which the roles that had identified as needed for the transformation were mapped to current positions to determine if any gaps in workforce capacity exist.
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services To improve its transformation strategy and fully address congressionally requested information, the Secretary of Homeland Security should direct the Director of USCIS to increase USCIS' focus on strategic human capital management for the transformation, including addressing continuity in key transformation leadership positions and addressing impacts to time frames when key personnel leave.
Closed – Implemented
As of September 2011, all but one leadership position within the Office of Transformation Coordination (OTC) had been filled.
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services To improve its transformation strategy and fully address congressionally requested information, the Secretary of Homeland Security should direct the Director of USCIS to increase USCIS' focus on strategic human capital management for the transformation, including using performance expectations and competencies to hold USCIS executives and employees accountable for achieving the goals of the transformation.
Closed – Implemented
In April 2011, Office of Transformation Coordination officials indicated they were aware of plans to incorporate the transformation objectives into the individual performance agreements of US Citizenship and Immigration Service senior executives. These expectations would then cascade down to lower levels of leadership. In November 2011, USCIS put in place standardized supervisory goals for all supervisors that include expectations related to the transformation.
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services To improve its transformation strategy and fully address congressionally requested information, the Secretary of Homeland Security should direct the Director of USCIS to continue to develop an enterprise architecture that sufficiently guides and constrains the transformation plans, as DHS works to address limitations in its own enterprise architecture and alignment processes.
Closed – Implemented
In April 2009, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) provided GAO with an Enterprise Architecture (EA) that describes: (1) target performance measures for business segments, (2) a business reference model that identifies enterprise segments, lines of business within each segment, and business functions for each line of business, and (3) a service reference model and SRM services. In addition, the architecture describes other key target EA elements: data objects, data assets, application/service components, infrastructure systems, and security services. Furthermore, the architecture describes USCIS current environment: fiscal year 2008 operational performance, mission essential functions, current workflows, organizational activities, work locations, a logical data model, and application systems, infrastructure topology, and information security issues. Moreover, the architecture describes some elements of a transition strategy for moving from the current to the target environment. For example, it stated that it performed a redundancy and gap analysis to identify systems with overlapping capabilities and provided a roadmap for achieving a secure environment. Beyond this important progress in addressing our recommendation, USCIS plans to take additional actions to improve its EA. In particular, it plans to further define its target business architecture by decomposing target business functions into workflows and activities, enhancing linkages between business activities and performance measures, validating the logical data model, identifying Department of Homeland Security security services that can be integrated into USCIS security environment, and developing the Citizenship segment of the EA. In addition, it plans to expand the EA to include non-mission functions, and to build out and update the transition strategy as refinements are made to the target architecture. As a result, USCIS has largely implemented our EA recommendation.
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services To improve its transformation strategy and fully address congressionally requested information, the Secretary of Homeland Security should direct the Director of USCIS to complete a comprehensive communication strategy that involves communicating early and often to build trust, ensuring consistency of message, and encouraging two-way communication. Further, the communication strategy should address plans for communicating implementation goals and timelines to demonstrate progress.
Closed – Implemented
On July 31, 2009, the USCIS Transformation Program, Office of the Transformation Coordinator (OTC) released a Communications Plan, prepared by the Solutions Architect (SA). The plan addresses how USCIS will communicate transformation implementation goals and timelines to demonstrate progress. According to the plan, prior to the release of each segment of the new system, the SA will develop release-level communication plans, recognizing that each release will brings a new set of impacts that need to be strategically communicated to a specific set of stakeholders. In addition, an on-line information clearinghouse will be used to communicate information such as release schedules and frequently asked questions.
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services To improve its transformation strategy and fully address congressionally requested information, the Secretary of Homeland Security should direct the Director of USCIS to complete a comprehensive communication strategy that involves communicating early and often to build trust, ensuring consistency of message, and encouraging two-way communication. Further, the communication strategy should address plans for formally engaging internal and external stakeholders throughout the transformation, and tailoring information to meet these stakeholders' specific needs.
Closed – Implemented
On July 31, 2009, the USCIS Transformation Program, Office of the Transformation Coordinator (OTC) released a Communications Plan, prepared by the Solutions Architect (SA). The plan addresses how the TPO will formally engage internal and external stakeholders throughout the transformation and how it will tailor information to their different needs. For example, the plan outlines three outreach programs for USCIS's major stakeholder communities, defined as "Mission Support and Mission Delivery, Customers & Advocates, and Enterprise Partners." In addition to outreach programs, the plan calls for a dedicated "Stakeholder Care Manager" from the SA for each stakeholder community. Stakeholder Care Managers will maintain expertise in the stakeholder community they align with and will provide transformation office counterparts with a single point of contact for key activities associated with mission support, mission delivery, customers and advocates, and enterprise Partners.
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services To improve its transformation strategy and fully address congressionally requested information, the Secretary of Homeland Security should direct the Director of USCIS to complete a comprehensive communication strategy that involves communicating early and often to build trust, ensuring consistency of message, and encouraging two-way communication. Further, the communication strategy should address plans for a long-term, detailed strategy to share information with employees and stakeholders over the course of the transformation.
Closed – Implemented
On July 31, 2009, the USCIS Transformation Program, Office of the Transformation Coordinator (OTC) released a Communications Plan, prepared by the Solutions Architect (SA). The plan addresses how USCIS will communicate transformation implementation goals and timelines to demonstrate progress. According to the plan, prior to the release of each segment of the new system, the SA will be develop release-level communication plans, recognizing that each release will brings a new set of impacts that need to be strategically communicated to a specific set of stakeholders. For example, the plan describes the communication that needs to take place for each stakeholder group 9 months prior to a release, 6 months, 3 months, and so on.

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Topics

Best practicesCitizenshipFederal agency reorganizationHomeland securityPerformance measuresReporting requirementsStrategic planningBusiness transformationPolicies and proceduresProgram implementation