Dear colleague,
Your office and mine have each been asked, separately, whether an agent could help with the grants reports that go to the board and to the oversight committee. I would like us to answer together, and this letter is my attempt to say what I think each of us should own.
What the agent would actually do
The agent would draft the reports. It would read the grants platform, the financial system and the case files, pull the award amounts, the drawdowns and the milestone dates, and assemble them into the format the board expects. It would list every place where two systems disagree. It would not decide whether a grantee is in compliance, and it would not approve any payment. A person on your staff would review each draft and a person would send it.
I raise this because the first conversation I had about it was framed as a technology project. It is not one. The records belong to your office and the connections belong to mine, and the report belongs to both of us.
What I will own
My office will own the connections and the security review. Nothing is attached to a system of record until it has been through the agency's authorization process, and the agent will get read access only, scoped to the grants data it needs. We will keep the log of what the agent read and drafted, and we will make that log available to you and to the auditors without a request. If a system changes its structure, we will tell you before the report does, because a silent change in a field is the most likely cause of a quiet error.
I will also own the question of what happens when the agent is wrong in a way that comes from the connection and not the content. A report built on stale data is my problem even when the numbers on the page look sensible to everyone.
What I am asking you to own
I am asking you to own the definitions. When the agent writes "obligated" or "drawn down", the meaning has to match what your office means, and today I suspect the grants staff and the accounting staff use those words differently. I would like your people to write the definitions once, in plain language, so the agent and the reviewers work from the same text.
I am also asking you to name the reviewer. Not a role in general, a person, with a named alternate. The reviewer reads the draft against the records, corrects it, and approves it. The approval is theirs, and it should be recorded under their name. The agent will make mistakes, and the review is how we find them before the board does.
What neither of us should do
We should not let the first version include every report. I would start with the one that gives your staff the most reconciliation work and extend from there once the reviewers trust the flags. We should not let anyone describe the agent to the public or to the grantees as making decisions, because it does not. And we should not let a draft go out without the reviewer's mark simply because it looks finished.
A request
If you are willing, let us each write one page: yours on the definitions and the reviewer, mine on the connections and the log. Then let us put the two pages in front of the deputy director together. I think we will find we disagree on less than either of us expected.
With respect,
Your counterpart in information technology