By 2022, increase the use of evidence to inform budget, program planning and design, and management decisions. By 2022, increase engagement with local partners to strengthen their ability to implement their own development agenda. By September 30, 2019, USAID will have increased the use of collaborative partnering methods and co-creation within new awards, measured by dollars and percentage of procurement actions (to be determined after baselines established in FY2018). (APG) By September 30, 2019, meet or exceed Federal targets for Best-In-Class (BIC) cont 

Modern Infrastructure

Provide modern and secure infrastructure and operational capabilities to support effective diplomacy and development  

The Department of State and USAID coordinate closely to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives. Mission execution is supported by multiple operational platforms with minimal leveraging of shared services. Harmonizing mission support functions for both agencies will leverage economies of scale, improve process visibility, enhance technology integration, and improve the quality and the speed with which the agencies deliver support services. The Administration’s support for benchmarking results, as well as staff perceptions shared during the Secretary’s listening tour, emphasized the need for the Department and USAID to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of management support functions, including the global logistics and supply chain. This includes improving staff ’s customer satisfaction with mission support services while also reducing costs. This will entail more consistent evaluation of support services results to ensure the Department’s global supply chain meets or exceeds established service standards. Our geographically dispersed staff requires technological tools to work and collaborate from anywhere at any time using any mobile or fixed device. For staff to work more efficiently, data and information technology (IT) security policies and procedures must be aligned to support the conduct of diplomacy and development assistance. The Department and USAID’s IT risk management approaches should also be clear and flexible enough to allow for the expeditious testing and piloting of emergent tools. Connecting the agencies’ infrastructure and services will reduce the complexity and long-term costs of the agencies’ IT systems. We will pursue a collaborative approach to improving IT and data governance processes to adopt interoperable processes, standards, and tools. Both agencies are committed to accomplishing IT goals in order to better support overarching diplomacy and development strategies. For the Department, this commitment is outlined in the IT Strategic Plan objective “Modernizing IT Infrastructure,” which states that the Department will “deploy a modernized IT infrastructure that enables seamless access to information resources.” In turn, in USAID’s IT Strategic Plan, its Goal 2 ”Secure Operations Excellence” states that “IT operations and information security is improved, and the infrastructure supporting all of our IT services is reliable, efficient, and meets their service level agreements.” The Department of State’s Impact Initiative and USAID’s ReDesign will contribute to achieving this objective. Enhancement of the Department’s Integrated Logistics Management System has been ongoing since 2015, and will continue into the foreseeable future. In addition, the Department and USAID’s respective efforts to implement action plans to comply with the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA), Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), and Federal IT modernization efforts will also substantively contribute to a modern and secure technology infrastructure. Strategies for Achieving the Objective The Department and USAID will promote and share services where appropriate to deliver cost effective and customer focused services and products. Informed by analysis grounded in data, the agencies will consolidate where appropriate and improve logistics. Improving the quality of data will be a priority. We will increase data quality assurance measures, such as enforcing enterprise data standards, conducting periodic data quality audits to assess data validity, and mitigating root causes of systemic errors. The Department and USAID will prioritize cloud-based tools for collaboration and web based systems that improve the accessibility of timely, relevant data to staff and decision makers. Wireless access to data will enhance productivity within agency offices. To facilitate centralized control of IT resources, the Department will improve the governance processes to ensure its Chief Information Office (CIO) is positioned to meet legislative requirements for control over Department-wide IT spending and systems -- an effort that has already occurred at USAID. Tiered trust security will allow access to data based on the level of trust established by user identification, device, and location. The Department and USAID will modernize legacy systems and software, which will include efforts to reduce the number of disjointed data warehouses. Employing business intelligence tools will allow the aggregation, analysis, research, and evidence-based assessment of U.S. foreign policy and development work for data scientists. The Department will continue to expand and improve its global supply chain platform, the Integrated Logistics Management System (ILMS). We will train more staff at posts to use ILMS to reduce their use of resources, monitor for fraud, and streamline logistics and procurement processes. The Department may develop new ILMS modules to expand posts’ capabilities further, for example by producing new types of reports that analyze different data. Other agencies have shown interest in using this logistics platform. We will encourage them to participate in this shared service, which would reduce costs to each agency. However, the inability to conduct pilot tests, site visits, and training could potentially hinder the Department’s ability to expand the ILMS platform and gain the efficiencies that come from it. Cross Agency Collaboration The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), House Oversight and Government Reform (HOGR) Committee, Foreign affairs agencies that operate under Chief of Mission authority overseas, and the American public and businesses that rely on accurate Department and USAID data. Risk Modernizing legacy systems and training staff on these systems present risks to the agencies. Additionally, this will likely have higher costs up front, but the initial investment will lead to long-term payoffs and cost savings. There may be a risk in spending money to maintain old services rather than investing in newer cost saving technology.