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Initial Organizational Definition and Strategic Planning
USCIS faced the challenge of significantly improving their technology services despite dated systems, fragmented investment management practices, and the requirement for faster, better and more secure results. When a new Office of Chief Information Officer (OCIO) was created in 2004, the first CIO turned to InfoZen to help plan, implement and manage the new organization.

As USCIS established a significant transformation program to leverage sophisticated technology for promoting national security, eliminating backlogs, and further improving customer service, effective and rapid technology deployment became essential. To ensure that the organization's technology capabilities were positioned to enhance and enable its mission accomplishment, the OCIO commissioned an immediate strategic assessment and action planning effort.

The objectives of the project included:

• Clarifying the high-level technology requirements of USCIS's business objectives
• Rapidly assessing the CIO organization, business processes and supporting infrastructure
• Reviewing the portfolio of technology projects underway, their progress and their contribution to USCIS's objectives
• Establishing the organization's structure, priorities, action items and agenda for the CIO to best support the mission of USCIS

InfoZen Approach
To meet the objectives of USCIS, the InfoZen team documented the "As-Is" Organizational Assessment and formulated the final strategy and assessment using the following approach:

• Translating the mission of USCIS and operational objectives into business imperatives for the office of the CIO. Focusing included supporting Field and Service Center Operations, the National Customer Service Centers, the expanding range of services provided over the Web and the efforts to improve and integrate the network and IT infrastructure.
• Conducting rapid "as-is" assessment of the USCIS infrastructure and improvement projects to understand their contribution to the organization's performance objectives.
• Reviewing key CIO business processes, including business case development, IT investment review board, IT program management capabilities and IT infrastructure management to determine fit with CIO performance objectives.
• Reviewing CIO organization capabilities to ensure that the skills, structure, staff and performance management aligned with CIO needs.
• Developing an organization structure as well as a roadmap, communication and change programs to adjust CIO priorities, performance, operations and organization to better align with the USCIS mission and objectives.

Results
This effort yielded a clear definition of priorities, programs and organizational structures needed to launch an effective OCIO to address CIS needs in a timely manner. The organizational structure provided a framework for adding critical resources on an interim and, later, final basis. The roadmap provided an enterprise-wide, consistent decision management tool to array priorities, methodologies and interrelationships among concurrent programs, oftentimes competing for scarce resources.