In my last post, I discussed a speech given by Jeffrey Zients, the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), to the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC).
In the speech, Mr. Zients discussed the new programs being endorsed by the Obama Administration that would require agencies looking for new IT development to look at cloud solutions first before pursuing the in-house creation of new datacenters. In my post, I discussed how this could go a long way towards cutting down government spending in the face of a deepening federal budget deficit.
However, this wasn’t the only good point that Mr. Zients made about the state of IT in the federal government. I wanted to take some time to discuss the other points that he made, and places that he felt the government is falling down in the adoption, acquisition and implementation of new technologies.
One of the areas that the Obama Administration sees significant room for improvement is in the IT acquisition system. Currently, agencies are required to submit requests for IT projects two years in advance. After submitting requests and receiving budget approval, the process of acquiring and implementing the technologies can take over a year to accomplish.
That’s three years to get through budgeting and procurement. Everyone with an IT background realizes that it might as well be a lifetime. Any technology that the government was looking to acquire would most likely be archaic by the time the acquisition process was complete.
In an effort to cut down that ridiculously long three year timeframe, the Obama Administration, OMB and other organizations are looking to streamline the appropriations and procurement processes. They’ve already worked to create Apps.gov, the portal where IT buyers at government agencies can shop for approved cloud-based technologies, and are working to put other pilot programs in place that will help to cut through the bureaucracy surrounding IT acquisitions.
Other areas where Mr. Zients and the Obama Administration see room for improvement are the way federal IT buyers interact with industry and the way the government evaluates and monitors IT projects.
Currently, IT managers in the federal government are often hesitant to interact with experts from the private sector and technology vendors because they are unsure about the propriety of such interactions. In many cases, IT managers will often take a “better safe than sorry” approach and avoid these people all together.
To help combat this issue, the Administration is working to put together a “myth busting” campaign to ensure that federal IT managers know what kind of interaction is allowed, and to better align the federal government with private industry. By better educating IT managers, the Administration hopes to foster better collaboration between federal agencies and private industry.
In the area of oversight, the Administration is looking to streamline government accountability, first by overhauling the agency review board policy. Currently, the review boards meet once a month for two hours to review the entire agency IT portfolio, which isn’t nearly adequate. Instead, the Administration wants them to focus more on using data and analytics tools to review projects.
In fact, the Administration’s tech team has already set up an online dashboard to track the spending and progress of IT deployments across the government. These dashboards are designed to generate more detailed reporting data to help government officials identify underperforming projects and decide if they should be rehabilitated or terminated.
I agree completely with Jeffrey Zients and the Administration’s tech team. The budgeting, provisioning and acquisition of new IT technologies is crawling and keeping the government for implementing the tools that will help them operate more effectively and efficiently. These reforms will increase collaboration with the private sector, streamline the acquisition process and better manage government IT projects. In doing so, the Administration will make headway in fixing what is currently a lumbering system that is hurting our country.
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: | acquisition reform, acquisition workforce, cloud, IT, Jeffrey Zients, Northern Virginia Tech Council, Northern Virginia Technology Council, NVTC, Obama Administration, Office of Management and Budget, OMB, President Obama
[...] Vivek Kundra, the country’s CIO, is looking for ways in which the federal government can improve its IT acquisition process and adopt technologies that can make the government operate more effectively and [...]