HHS Unified Financial Management System (UFMS) Investment
Investment ID: 009-000001397
Overview
Program Title
HHS Unified Financial Management System (UFMS) Investment
Description
UFMS provides HHS a secure, stable platform for processing and tracking its financial and accounting transactions. UFMS is the core accounting system for 10 OpDivs and 18 StaffDivs, with accounting centers maintained by CDC, FDA, IHS and PSC. UFMS integrates with 50+ business systems, creating a robust financial management environment to support HHS' diverse programs. UFMS operates on a COTS platform - Oracle EBS - to support data standardization and facilitate Department-wide reporting. It is hosted by a FedRAMP-certified cloud service provider, and a recent upgrade to Oracle EBS 12.2.6 positions the COTS system on an up-do-date software version fully supported by the vendor. Projects target incremental improvements to mature the financial systems environment. Ongoing O&M activities ensure the infrastructure and applications are kept up-to-date, providing a secure, reliable, and highly available platform for processing and tracking financial and accounting transactions.
Type of Program
Major IT Investments
Multi-Agency Category
Financial Management
Investment Detail
UFMS investments have improved system security, performance, and reliability, establishing a more effective and efficient platform for financial management. In addition to supporting federal priorities and improved compliance with Federal laws and mandates, specific investment benefits include:
Improving Security, Availability, and Reliability
* Maintains a system that is physically and technically secure, reliable, and highly available
* Establishes a fully redundant network with no single points of failure
* Complies with federal and HHS IT security cloud service provider is FedRAMP-moderate certified with a control baseline that meets standards for systems categorized as high under the provisions of FIPS 199 and 200
* Improves the security controls environment by implementing/strengthening/maintaining controls for which there are previous audit findings and/or identified vulnerabilities in determining that HHS no longer had an IT material weakness (for the first time ever in the history of the HHS CFO Act Audits), auditors cited that, Differential investments in key financial systems (i.e. UFMS access control / segregation of duties redesign) have provided a more mature controls baseline that allows for reliance on the application.
* Positions primary and disaster recovery data centers 700+ miles apart (vs. previous ~30 miles)
* Related Metric(s): UFMS System Availability >99.8%
Maximizing Return on Investment
* Provides a high-performance network and hardware which will be refreshed every four years to maintain performance complete hardware refresh in 2019 was completed as part of the negotiated base hosting cost (no additional cost to HHS), representing a cost avoidance of $9.17 million
* Offers a high-degree of scalability and elasticity (storage, memory, and computing power)
* Reduces system complexity by minimizing customization -- decreasing the costs to run and maintain applications
* Related Metric(s): Cost Variance <10%
Enhances Effectiveness and Efficiency
* Improves federal accounting functionality, reducing data reconciliation and manual processing
* Implements opportunities for standardization, sharing, and consolidation
* Related Metric(s): Deployment Schedule Variance <10%; Critical Incident Resolution >90% in 3 Days; Critical Incident Response >95% in 4 hours.
UFMS is meeting its performance goals, and annual operational analyses support continued investment to support the HHS mission and mitigate potential risks to the security, reliability and efficiency of HHS's financial systems environment. Further, UFMS directly supports:
Legislative Mandates
* CFO Act, FFMIA Developing/maintaining an integrated agency accounting and financial management system, including financial reporting and internal controls.
* FITARA - Ensuring: 1) coordination with the HHS OCIO through the HHS EPLC and associated gate reviews; and 2) oversight by executive-level governance bodies with CIO representation, including the HHS FGB and AMD ITSC.
Outstanding Audit Finding or Material Weakness Remediating identified vulnerabilities, identifying root causes and implementing complete solutions to strengthen security/controls.
Published Agency Strategic Plan Supporting Goal 4 of the HHS Strategic Plan: Increase Efficiency, Transparency, and Accountability of HHS Programs.
Presidential Directive Supporting PMA focus on modern information technology and data, accountability, and transparency.
Improving Security, Availability, and Reliability
* Maintains a system that is physically and technically secure, reliable, and highly available
* Establishes a fully redundant network with no single points of failure
* Complies with federal and HHS IT security cloud service provider is FedRAMP-moderate certified with a control baseline that meets standards for systems categorized as high under the provisions of FIPS 199 and 200
* Improves the security controls environment by implementing/strengthening/maintaining controls for which there are previous audit findings and/or identified vulnerabilities in determining that HHS no longer had an IT material weakness (for the first time ever in the history of the HHS CFO Act Audits), auditors cited that, Differential investments in key financial systems (i.e. UFMS access control / segregation of duties redesign) have provided a more mature controls baseline that allows for reliance on the application.
* Positions primary and disaster recovery data centers 700+ miles apart (vs. previous ~30 miles)
* Related Metric(s): UFMS System Availability >99.8%
Maximizing Return on Investment
* Provides a high-performance network and hardware which will be refreshed every four years to maintain performance complete hardware refresh in 2019 was completed as part of the negotiated base hosting cost (no additional cost to HHS), representing a cost avoidance of $9.17 million
* Offers a high-degree of scalability and elasticity (storage, memory, and computing power)
* Reduces system complexity by minimizing customization -- decreasing the costs to run and maintain applications
* Related Metric(s): Cost Variance <10%
Enhances Effectiveness and Efficiency
* Improves federal accounting functionality, reducing data reconciliation and manual processing
* Implements opportunities for standardization, sharing, and consolidation
* Related Metric(s): Deployment Schedule Variance <10%; Critical Incident Resolution >90% in 3 Days; Critical Incident Response >95% in 4 hours.
UFMS is meeting its performance goals, and annual operational analyses support continued investment to support the HHS mission and mitigate potential risks to the security, reliability and efficiency of HHS's financial systems environment. Further, UFMS directly supports:
Legislative Mandates
* CFO Act, FFMIA Developing/maintaining an integrated agency accounting and financial management system, including financial reporting and internal controls.
* FITARA - Ensuring: 1) coordination with the HHS OCIO through the HHS EPLC and associated gate reviews; and 2) oversight by executive-level governance bodies with CIO representation, including the HHS FGB and AMD ITSC.
Outstanding Audit Finding or Material Weakness Remediating identified vulnerabilities, identifying root causes and implementing complete solutions to strengthen security/controls.
Published Agency Strategic Plan Supporting Goal 4 of the HHS Strategic Plan: Increase Efficiency, Transparency, and Accountability of HHS Programs.
Presidential Directive Supporting PMA focus on modern information technology and data, accountability, and transparency.