Summary
The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) relies on about 55 million paper-based files to adjudicate applications for immigration status and other benefits. Ensuring the currency and availability of these manual files, referred to as alien files, or A-Files, is a major challenge. To address this challenge, USCIS has initiated efforts, both long and near term, to automate the A-Files. The long-term effort is now being re-examined within the context of a larger USCIS organizational transformation initiative. In the near term, USCIS has begun a digitization program, which it estimates will cost about $190 million over an 8-year period to electronically scan existing paper files and store and share the scanned images. GAO was asked to determine whether USCIS was effectively managing its A-Files automation efforts.
USCIS's effectiveness in managing its long-term effort for automating the A-Files cannot yet be determined because the scope, content, and approach for moving from paper-based to paperless A-Files has yet to be defined. Nevertheless, GAO believes that USCIS's recent decision to re-examine prior agency plans for a strategic A-Files automation solution within the context of an agencywide transformation strategy appropriately recognizes the integral support role that information technology plays in organizational and business transformation. GAO also believes that the success of USCIS's organizational transformation depends on other key supporting practices, such as having a comprehensive and integrated transformation plan (goals and schedules) and results-oriented performance measures. With respect to USCIS's near-term A-Files automation effort, known as the Integrated Digitization Document Management Program (IDDMP), effective planning is not occurring. In particular, USCIS has not developed a plan governing how it will manage this program and its contractors, and it has not developed an evaluation plan for its ongoing digitization concept of operations pilot test, even though it has either awarded or plans to award contracts totaling about $20 million for this pilot. In addition, USCIS officials told us they do not yet know which A-Files immigration forms will be scanned. Without a defined scope and adequate planning, this program is at risk of falling short of expectations.
Recommendations
Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.
Director:
Team:
Phone:
Randolph C. Hite
Government Accountability Office: Information Technology
(202) 512-6256
Recommendations for Executive Action
Recommendation: To better ensure the success of USCIS's long-term transformation efforts, to include A-Files automation, the Secretary of Homeland Security should direct the Director of USCIS to ensure that the key elements to successful organizational and business transformation cited in this report are employed.
Agency Affected: Department of Homeland Security: Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services
Status: Open
Comments: The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agreed with the recommendation and reported that it has taken several actions consistent with the recommendation. (1) It has established a Transformation Program Office (TPO) that reports directly to the USCIS Deputy Director and oversees and manages the transformation, and a Transformation Leadership Team, which is the primary decision-making body for the program and consists of senior officials from various offices within USCIS. (2) USCIS has established a mission, vision, and strategic goals in its Strategic Plan to guide the transformation. (3) It has identified 10 principles to guide internal decision making throughout the course of its transformation, identified a set of priorities, including national security, customer service, and operational efficiency, that are reflected in its transformation strategic goals, and it has defined a set of core values with which to guide the transformation and help build a new agencywide culture. (4) USCIS established and shared its implementation goals and transformation timeline with senior management; however, it has not yet finalized plans to communicate this with all employees and relevant stakeholders to show that progress is being achieved. (5) USCIS has established a centralized management structure to oversee all transformation activities within USCIS. Specifically, it has involved stakeholders through its Federal Stakeholder Advisory Board to advise USCIS on transformation activities. The Board held its first meeting on August 2007. (6) USCIS further reported that performance plans for TPO officials and selected senior agency executives include expectations related to the transformation. However, these officials have not been formally evaluated using these performance plans, and the agency does not plan to develop transformation-related performance expectations for employees throughout USCIS. (7) USCIS has established a Change Management Division (CMD) within TPO, which is responsible for managing communication with stakeholders and has developed an overall Transformation Communication Strategy and Plan. However, the CMD is not fully staffed and the plan does not contain a clear, long-term approach for communicating with stakeholders. (8) USCIS has taken several actions to involve employees in the transformation, including obtaining employee ideas through focus groups and interviews and incorporating the feedback into its transformation efforts, and engaging employees to serve as project team members, subject matter experts, and pilot testers. (9) USCIS has taken initial steps towards becoming a world-class organization by conducting benchmarking and best practice reviews across comparable commercial and governmental organizations. However, USCIS's planning efforts do not adequately incorporate other important practices such as implementing strategic workforce planning, developing clear and measurable performance measures and targets to show progress against goals, and fully developing an enterprise architecture.
Recommendation: To better ensure the success of USCIS's long-term transformation efforts, to include A-Files automation, the Secretary of Homeland Security should direct the Director of USCIS to ensure that both a program management plan and a pilot evaluation plan are expeditiously developed and approved for IDDMP, along with a reliable estimate of funding requirements.
Agency Affected: Department of Homeland Security: Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services
Status: Closed - implemented
Comments: USCIS has developed a Digitization Pilot Project Management Plan, which includes, among other things, the scope of program activities, stakeholders, and roles and responsibilities of key members that oversee the schedule and deliverables of the Integrated Digitization Document Management Program (IDDMP). Also, USCIS has developed an IDDMP Pilot Evaluation Plan that includes specific evaluation criteria for records digitization, user satisfaction, data collection and reporting methods, evaluation schedule for major performance measurement activities, and overall objectives. USCIS has also taken some initial steps to develop a reliable estimate of funding requirements, which are consistent with our recommendation and, if implemented, should satisfy the intent of our recommendation. For example, USCIS plans to use input from various pilot evaluation activities, such as collecting data on file size and storage capacity to estimate future levels of effort, technical, and cost requirements; use the IDDMP cost variance measure to assist in regularly monitoring the status of development and operational costs; and conduct a thorough analysis of funding estimates through a business case analysis.
