Streamlined Response System Takes the Pain Out of Data Requests

Data requests – or data calls as they are sometimes dubbed -  have been an everyday fact of life at OIT for decades. They range from the simple to the complex, from single email-submitted questions to recurring multi-layered informational requests and periodic updates from federal government branches. 

Responding to these requests involved some 250 steps, mainly in the form of reviews, approvals and rereviews. But that’s no longer the case. 

A streamlining effort four years ago took note of all the pain points in the process and systematically removed the roadblocks that prevented quick responses. Today answering data requests has been simplified to just five steps to give subject matter experts (SMEs) more time to develop responses.  As a result, most data queries are answered in a few days or less, which is well under OIT’s mandated two-week turnaround time.    

The streamlining effort, which was a precursor to much of the human-centered design work that is occurring now within IT, focused on eliminating barriers that prevented respondents from answering queries.

“The goal then was to figure out how we could give responders as much time as possible and make the process as simple as possible,” says Joe Gaiser, Senior Advisor for the IT Capital Planning Group. "So we put 20-plus people in a room for a couple of days, including many who answered data calls. We plotted where the bottlenecks were, where they failed to add value, and where we were doing something just to do something. We cut a lot of that out."

The initiative quickly targeted the root cause – too many employees at every level of the organization – were involved in the response process. 

The subject matter expert at the end of the chain charged with hammering out the data and writing the response had little to no time for either because requests would first have to be channeled from one supervisor to another.

“It was like a phone tree,” says Brian Jennings, Director of the Division of IT Investment, Management, and Policy at OIT. "The person who had to answer the question had no time to do it because their time was wasted with all these trickle-downs throughout the organization. It was crazy, so we just took a big red marker, not just to the review process, but to the entire process."

Now when Jennings receives a data request, it is immediately reviewed and sent directly to the internal subject matter expert who is best positioned to answer it, not his or her supervisor or supervisor’s manager. The SME must return the answer a day before it is promised back to the requestor. This gives the respondent the maximum amount of time to prepare the data and formulate an answer. Jennings then shares the response with his CIO before it is sent back to the requestor by the due date.   

“That’s it in five steps,” Jennings says. “There is no more complex process. We’ve eliminated nearly 250 nonsensical steps that involved hundreds of people in the process for no reason at all. Now the person who answers the question has plenty of time to do it and we get the answer back to the person who needs it.”

The process continues to be fine-tuned even further to take advantage of technological capabilities. For example, instead of sending individual documents to respondents, links to SharePoint files containing the documents are shared. 

“We continue to refine the process at any chance we get,” Gaiser says.