Less than one year into the White House Centers of Excellence initiative, the first pilot agency is already saving money.

“So far, we’ve realized around $26 million in cost avoidance and savings and now we’re moving on to phase 2, which is the actual implementation of the plan we developed over the past six months,” said Agriculture Department Deputy Secretary Stephen Censky, speaking last week at the Imagine Nation conference in Philadelphia.

The two-phase CoE effort focuses on five areas: customer experience, cloud adoption, infrastructure optimization, contact centers and service delivery analytics.

The first phase of the program focused on developing the modernization strategy for those key areas through a collaboration between personnel from the General Services Administration, Agriculture and consulting partners brought in through contracts.

The second phase, which Agriculture will now undertake, involves carrying out the strategy and implementing the tech tools and services the department purchases.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2018/10/usda-saved-millions-so-far-due-centers-excellence/152063/