NASA OCIO Cost Transparency

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Executive Summary

 In 2024, NASA partnered with Rios Partners to conduct its largest-ever IT cost assessment, covering over $2.5 billion in annual IT spending. Rios developed a comprehensive framework to map, benchmark, and analyze IT expenditures across three fiscal years. The engagement produced:

  • A custom Power BI dashboard with 30+ visuals for executive insights.
  • A baseline of IT spend across 138 activities and 8 domains.
  • A peer benchmarking analysis across 10 federal agencies.
  • Identification of 10 efficiency levers with up to $342 million in potential savings.

This initiative empowered NASA to make data-driven decisions, optimize contracts, and align IT investments with mission needs.

Background

Under previous contracts, Rios Partners helped NASA to establish its Cost Transparency function and complete savings assessments for multiple business functions. In 2024, NASA contracted with Rios to support its IT cost assessment – the largest effort undertaken by the organization to date, covering more than $2.5B in annual IT spending.

Team Rios supported NASA OCIO’s cost transparency initiative by creating a standardized approach to index IT costs across the enterprise, mapping all IT costs over 3 fiscal years, developing a dashboard tool for NASA stakeholders to leverage IT spend findings within future discussions, comparing NASA IT spending across peer agencies to contextualize spending behaviors, and generating cost savings and avoidance opportunities for NASA to implement moving forward. Successful project completion included multiple workstreams:

Our Approach

Activity-Based Framework

The ABF provides NASA with a hierarchical structure to categorize types of enterprise-wide IT spend. It consists of 8 major domains and 138 specific IT activities presenting a previously unavailable level of granularity. To develop the ABF, Team Rios leveraged existing organizational structures, brought in industry frameworks, and met with OCIO stakeholders to understand how they could encapsulate the full range of enterprise IT spend. Utilizing the OCIO service structure, Technology Business Management (TBM) tools, and stakeholder conversations, Team Rios expanded existing resources to categorize NASA’s full IT spend and standardized federal IT categories linked to NASA’s capital planning process. The TBM framework introduced a categorization of spend to a common set of services and activities across the IT industry. The resulting ABF can be leveraged by NASA to map enterprise-level IT spend in future fiscal years to an exhaustive framework and to maintain an understanding of enterprise IT spend drivers and spending behaviors. Therefore, NASA can ensure IT spending is adequately and efficiently distributed to meet mission needs. 

The baseline captures and categorizes enterprise-wide IT spend from FY22-FY24, mapping it to the ABF functional levels and the TBM Cost Pool framework, providing previously unobtainable visibility into IT spending activity. It acts as the basis of executive visualizations, performance comparisons, benchmarking, and identification of efficiency levers. Multiple data sources informed the baseline, including: NASA financial warehouse data, contract data and budget formulation data (planning, investment, and budgeting estimates).  Using Alteryx, Rios ingested and merged all data sources and developed logic for automated mapping, classification, and analysis of data – covering millions of line items, $2.5B in annual spend, and 1,200+ business rules to support accurate assessments.

Team Rios developed the IT Cost Transparency Dashboard, a custom Power BI solution that provides executive insights, performance indicators, benchmarks, and in-depth analytics. Team Rios leveraged Software Development Life Cycle principles to develop the dashboard iteratively, beginning with key business questions derived from 20+ stakeholder interviews. Before developing the dashboard in Power BI, the team developed low-fidelity wireframes in PowerPoint, enabling early alignment and low-cost iteration. The resulting dashboard featured 30+ visuals and 10 custom views across three tabs: Spending Insights, Vendor Utilization Insights, and Risk & Compliance Insights. Additionally, an Executive Overview tab contextualizes high-level spending statistics against industry-recognized performance targets, and a Data Finder tab enables deeper, transaction-level analyses. Across all tabs, 6 dynamic filters empower users to customize the visuals to address their specific needs. Ultimately, the IT Cost Transparency Dashboard will elevate IT spending insights to inform NASA’s internal processes.

The Benchmarking activity compared identified NASA IT spending data to 10 peer agencies across 9 metrics, assessing where NASA IT spending is similar to its peers and where it diverges from peers. The findings allow NASA to contextualize their spending across these metrics to supplement future spending decisions. These insights serve to provide spending and non-spending considerations for NASA and help to identify efficiency levers to inform the next activity.  Benchmarking was a 5-step process that required both internal iteration and client review and feedback: 1) Defined business questions and metrics based on qualitative and quantitative research, 2) Identified 13 relevant and comparable NASA peers, 3) Collected peer data, 4) Compared NASA baseline to peer data, and 5) Developed insights to understand and contextualize NASA performance against defined metrics and aggregated key findings and opportunities to provide high-level takeaways for NASA stakeholders.

To maximize value from the IT Cost Transparency effort, NASA needed more than an understanding of its recent IT spending—it needed actionable opportunities to transform spending and ensure its mission needs are adequately and efficiently funded.

Utilizing line items from FY24 IT baseline data, the team identified areas with the highest savings potential and combined this analysis with insights from 19 NASA experts and contracting office representatives (e.g., from the Software License and Asset Management Team). From this effort, the team successfully analyzed the impact and feasibility of each lever, resulting in 10 selected levers with significant savings potential, 4 of which were prioritized as the highest fidelity.

In total, the levers represented a combined $342 million in potential savings and cost avoidance across the enterprise. One specific, high-fidelity lever—cost-plus contract negotiation—involved optimizing the agency’s 5 enterprise IT contracts to minimize labor costs, reduce price variation, and lower unnecessary fees without compromising existing service level agreements (SLAs). Alone, this opportunity accounted for $65-$97M in potential savings—with an estimated cost investment of just $3M.

Through forecasting and spend analyses, the team validated the size of the 4 highest fidelity levers, pressure-testing these analyses with the baseline data. For NASA to best realize these cost savings and avoidance opportunities, Team Rios developed step-by-step instructions complete with potential actions and maximum potential annual savings for each. These instructions included details on the necessary investments required for each lever (e.g., labor and technology).The 10 recommended efficiency levers are potential opportunities for NASA to weigh going forward, balancing both Team Rios’ outside analyses with the agency’s internal insights. If pulled, the levers represent the potential to reduce IT spending without sacrificing mission needs or the quality of services delivered.

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Solutions and Outputs

Business Intelligence & Data Analytics

  • Developed Alteryx-powered workflows to automatically ingest and analyze contract data
  • Developed a custom Power BI dashboard to visualize $7B+ in IT spending and elevate insights to stakeholders across the enterprise
  • Developed 10 new dashboard tabs/sub-tabs with 30+ unique data visualizations that were not included in MSD’s existing dashboard template
  • Allows users to dynamically filter spending across several categories to meet their needs

Spending Pattern & Cost-Savings Analysis

  • Created an activity-based framework to provide a standardized tool to categorize enterprise-level IT data and a common nomenclature for IT-related discussions across the enterprise
  • Isolated ~$2.1-2.5B of IT spend from ~$25B of NASA enterprise spend annually comprising 1.05 million transactions over 3 fiscal years
  • Categorized IT spend into +130 IT activities based on NASA IT service capabilities and mission-specific IT systems
  • Developed quantitative assessment of NASA against their peers to provide contextualization of IT spending
  • 50 preliminary metrics were identified and then narrowed down to 9 key metrics for analysis based on discussions with NASA stakeholders and IT SMEs
  • 10 peers were compared to NASA, and data was sourced from 7 sites and over 10 datasets

Contract Optimization & Strategic Sourcing

Recommended 10 total efficiency levers with a maximum savings and cost avoidance potential of $342M including cost-plus contract renegotiation without reducing SLAs, and improved software management

Implementation & Training Support

Provided a User Guide and Maintenance Guide for the BI dashboards which will provide on-going support by promoting ongoing uptake/utilization, necessary upkeep, and, ultimately, enduring value for NASA

Ready to unlock transformative savings?

Rios Partners helps public sector organizations like NASA uncover millions in cost savings through data-driven analysis and strategic sourcing. Let’s explore how we can elevate your IT spend visibility and efficiency.

👉 https://riospartners.com/contact/ to schedule a free initial assessment.