Success Story - U.S. House Of Representatives National Budget System
Background
The complexity of the Federal Budget is staggering: trillions of dollars, thousands of expenditure accounts, hundreds of agencies and bureaus, and many complicated attributes (e.g., grant/non-grant, on-budget/off-budget). The historical process to create the budget was slow and unwieldy and required specialized operator/analysts with years of experience.
Consequently, the House Appropriations Committee (HAC) approved the creation of a new budget system with Essbase as the primary software platform, a large DC-based government consulting firm as the local project manager/contact, and LEX Software as the system architect and design lead.
Project Summary
As project architects (requested by Hyperion), it was clear to us that Essbase alone would be insufficient for the growing project requirements so we designed a hybrid relational/multidimensional data storage model. This data storage repository formed the bottom tier of a three-tier application architecture we created to accomodate complex user groups, roles, security, report access, metadata, etc. The user interface top tier provided dozens of forms and wizards to simplify and facilitate data entry and revision. This tier also displayed all the standardized and user-defined reports. The middle tier managed all the application logic, business rules, and metadata.
Results
When the final system rolled out after over a year of development, all users could immediately access data that was previously unavailable and often incomprehensible. The budgeting process became much easier and faster and analysts could now focus on budget issues instead of system issues. Based on the success of the budget system at the HAC, the Senate Appropriations Committee and Congressional Budget Office requested customized installations to replace their antiquated systems.
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