Agency: The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) plays an essential role in United States (U.S.) foreign policy. The Agency represents the U.S. abroad by working to establish a self-sustaining and continually improving living environment and to fairly and equitably distribute humanitarian assistance to those nations working to recover from disaster, escape poverty, or engage in democratic reforms. USAID also serves the interests of the U.S. and host nations by providing assistance in agriculture, democracy and governance, economic growth, the environment, education, health, global partnerships, and humanitarian aid. USAID operates in more than 80 countries, working to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives.
USAID Need: A comprehensive management solution to provide a complete picture of the activities carried out by USAID in specific geographic regions. The automated management solution will enable the strategic planning, design, budgeting, procurement, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of USAID’s portfolios of projects, activities, and supporting management functions.
Agency Challenges: The Agency is often challenged to provide high-quality portfolio and performance data at the Agency level to Congress, OMB and other stakeholders in a timely way. Examples of common Agency level challenges include:
- Analyzing funding by country, region, or sector (e.g., Feed the Future, Malaria), showing associated implementing mechanisms and results.
- Understanding the status of procurement of implementing mechanisms across a sector portfolio (e.g., Education) to analyze a pipeline of funding.
- Providing a summary of indicators and results by country, region, or technical pillar.
- Improving IATI compliance, improved compliance with (OMB) Bulletin 12-01 on open data, and increased transparency in how USAID fulfills its mission.
- Increasing FISMA scores, security risk mitigation and improved compliance with Federal Government information security policy and mandates.
Solution: Technik, Inc. is helping develop the Development Information Solution (DIS), to address agency challenges by following agile practices, user-centered design best practices, and research principles that focus on addressing prioritized needs of both key user groups both internal and external to USAID. DIS will enable Operating Units and Washington operating units to map project locations, manage performance indicator data, plan acquisitions and assistance, and manage detailed operational budgets. Our work includes all requisite:
- Planning,
- Technical assessments,
- Architectural design,
- Systems engineering and integration, by following
- Software development,
- Data migration from AIDTracker+,
- Providing a data migration tool to support migration from other existing performance management systems along with training materials to support the operating units in this process,
- Configuration management,
- System testing,
- Operations and Maintenance,
- Information Assurance (IA) artifacts development and maintenance,
- UX testing and support,
- Training and system deployment support to the training and deployment contractor, as required to complete the successful deployment of the DIS.