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october 2011

3 Government TechnologistCloud computing isn’t fast or easy, as evidenced by Homeland Security’snew contract

QUICKTAKES4 Bound For The CloudTwo NASA veterans launchcompeting ventures

5 Budget RealitiesFollowing an ambitious ITtransformation, the MarshalsService must deal withbudget cuts

6 Global TransparencyLeaders of 46 nations pledge to pursueincreased open government

October 2011 2informationweek.com/government

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4

CONTENTSTHE BUSINESS VALUE OF TECHNOLOGY October 2011 Issue 9

COVER STORY7 Federal IT PrioritiesWe surveyed federaltech pros to find outtheir most-pressing ITinitiatives and to seehow those projectsmatch up with OMB’spolicy objectives

CONTACTS17 Editorial and Business Contacts

MORE INFORMATIONWEEK GOVERNMENTServer VirtualizationAs government agencies close data centers, they mustdrive up utilization of their remaining systems. That requires a well-conceived virtualization strategy. informationweek.com/gogreen/081511GOV

Government In The CloudGovCloud 2011 lets government IT pros learn the lateston cloud options. Join us in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 25.informationweek.com/government/govcloud2011

IN-DEPTH REPORTSIT Project ManagementThe Office of Management and Budget is working to design a formal IT program management career path forfederal IT pros that’s on par with how things are done inthe private sector.informationweek.com/reports/govpm

Government Salary Survey 2011Federal IT workers are more confident in their job securitythan other IT pros, our annual salary survey finds.informationweek.com/reports/salarygov2011

Cloud Computing SurveyOur 2011 Federal Government Cloud Computing Surveyshows a big jump in the use of cloud services from a yearago, but security remains the biggest obstacle. informationweek.com/reports/govcloud

October 2011 3

The federal government’s cloud computingstrategy reached a milestone in Septemberwhen the Department of Homeland Securitybecame the first agency to use Apps.gov for in-frastructure as a service. The move should leadto better, cheaper, more flexible services in sup-port of the department’s public websites.But the road to this point wasn’t fast or easy,

and the process of acquiring cloud services onApps.gov isn’t what was envisioned back whenVivek Kundra, the federal CIO at the time, an-nounced Uncle Sam’s “apps store” a full twoyears ago. Government IT teams should pay at-tention, because it shows that we still havemuch to learn about how the cloud model mustbend to the idiosyncracies of government. The General Services Administration, which

operates Apps.gov, announced Sept. 29 thatDHS had awarded a five-year, $5 million contractto CGI Federal for infrastructure as a service.That’s right—it’s supposed to be a cloud ser -vice, but it requires a five-year contract. It soundsa lot like the old government model overlaidon cloud services. Plus, it took two years fromthe time Apps.gov was conceived to do it.

So, Apps.gov isn’t exactly the subscription-based model that lets Amazon EC2 customersget up and running in a few minutes. Is thatgood or bad? Let’s just say it’s different. Whilethe ability to bid on “micro spot instances” ofcomputing capacity and charge them to acredit card may appeal to startups, that’s nota viable approach for the feds. But we’re getting a better idea of what does

work for government, and, like everyone else,Amazon is making the necessary adjustments.In August, Amazon introduced AWS GovCloud,a version of its IaaS that’s designed to meetthe requirements of federal agencies. Spot in-stances aren’t an option on GovCloud, butAmazon cloud services—including EC2, S3,and Virtual Private Cloud—have received aFISMA “moderate” stamp of approval. There are other examples of the maturing

government cloud market. On Sept. 29, Terre-mark said its IaaS offering has been verified bythe Department of Defense’s certification andaccreditation process. This shows that, eventhough the FedRAMP program for govern-ment-wide security certification is moving

along at a snail’s pace, agencies don’t have towait. Google and Microsoft have both achievedFISMA certification for some cloud services.But there’s still much to work out as agencies

race to move three apps to the cloud over 18months—a requirement of the Office of Man-agement and Budget’s “cloud first” policy.

InformationWeekwill tackle the most-pressingissues on Oct. 25 at GovCloud 2011, a one-dayevent (not associated with Amazon, despite thecommon name) in Washington, D.C., that aimsto help agency CIOs, federal IT managers, andanyone else in government looking to plug intothe cloud. The program will include demos ofcloud apps, a session on lessons learned, discus-sion of private clouds and public clouds, a diveinto compliance issues, and more. Speakersfrom Defense Intelligence, GSA, NASA, NIST, andother agencies will share firsthand experiences. Cloud computing is part opportunity, part

challenge. Join us to learn how to make thatequation work in your favor.

John Foley, editor of InformationWeek Government, can bereached at [email protected].

The Race To Satisfy ‘Cloud First’ Isn’t Fast Or Easy JOHN FOLEY

governmentTechnologist


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Two veterans of NASA’s Nebula cloud com-puting project—Chris Kemp, former NASA CTOfor IT, and Joshua McKenty, former technicallead and cloud architect—are squaring off incompeting ventures less than 18 months afterleaving the space agency.The startups offer dueling approaches for run-

ning a private cloud computing environment.Both are built on the free, open source Open-Stack software for managing infrastructure as aservice. OpenStack is sponsored by NASA andRackspace, with Cisco, Citrix, Dell, Intel, and othertech vendors participating in the project.The two new companies are the latest exam-

ples in a long line of NASA technologies thathave made their way to the private sector, inareas from hip replacements to fiber optics.They reflect the goals of federally funded R&Dand tech-transfer efforts such as the Obamaadministration’s “Lab to Market” initiative.While at NASA, Kemp collaborated on proj-

ects such as Google Moon, to share lunarmaps and charts online, and Microsoft World-

Wide Telescope, to share images from theworld’s high-powered telescopes. He realizedNASA didn’t have the flexible, automated in-frastructure needed to host such efforts, so hebegan what became NASA’s Nebula project.McKenty was one of the first people hired towork on Nebula and was its original architect,though he left before the project was opera-tional. OpenStack is a manifestation of theNebula software.Kemp views open source as a model for the

government to follow to spur further commer-cialization. ”This should be the rule, not the ex-ception,” he says. McKenty’s company, Piston, and Kemp’s com-

pany, Nebula (borrowing the project’s name),both target companies running big data appli-cations on commodity hardware, but they takedifferent approaches.McKenty’s vision is a software-only approach,

with a USB key that carries the OpenStack soft-ware along with Piston’s cloud operating sys-tem, Piston Enterprise OS, to configure and

manage an enterprise private cloud. The key canbe used by administrators to configure cloudservers or can be plugged directly into networkswitches to install and configure the system onan attached rack of servers.Nebula will offer a top-of-rack appliance that

uses OpenStack to automatically configure andmanage servers as a private cloud environment. While the companies are examples of the

commercialization of government innovation,they’re also a reminder that it’s hard for the gov-ernment to keep good people. Kemp’s VP of en-gineering, Devin Carlen, had been a senior Websystems architect at NASA Ames, where Nebulawas born. Other NASA cloud computing vetsnow in the private sector include Rackable’sJesse Andrews, who was the technical lead onNebula. —J. Nicholas Hoover ([email protected])


OPENSTACK-BASED ALTERNATIVES

Former NASA Pros’ Cloud Startups Face Off

Quicktakes

Kemp: An opensource advocate[

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The U.S. Marshals Service is in the final phaseof a three-year IT project to provide its deputymarshals and internal departments with betterlaw enforcement tools. The challenge now is tocontinue those tech advances amid cost cut-ting that leaves little for new investment. “What I’m trying to do is sustain what we’ve

accomplished, not go backwards,” says LisaDavis, assistant director of IT and CIO of theagency, which was part of an across-the-board10% budget cut during the past year and nowfaces another 15% cut. “It’s extremely challeng-ing,” she says.The Marshals Service, part of the Department

of Justice, has made progress under an IT trans-formation strategy put into motion whenDavis joined the agency in October 2008. Stepsincluded replacing outdated PCs and software,centralizing the agency’s email servers andprisoner-tracking application, strengthening ITsecurity, and consolidating data centers into anew facility shared with and operated by theDrug Enforcement Agency.Headquartered in Washington, the Marshals

Service has 94 field offices. Its IT infrastruc-ture—including Active Directory and Ex-change servers and the Justice Detainee In-formation System—had been distributed toall those outposts. Not only was that ineffi-cient, but information sharing on JDIS was dif-ficult at best. What’s more, nearly 80% of the agency’s

desktop computers were so old when the proj-ect started that they were no longer underwarranty. Davis set out to put new PCs andother tools, including smartphones and tablets,into employees’ hands, while centralizing andconsolidating enterprise systems.Davis presented a business case to the Mar-

shals Service’s top management and got themoney needed to get the transformationunder way, including funds for PC replacement.Now, most employees have new Windows 7-based machines with Office 2010, Lync 2010,and SharePoint 2010. The Marshals Service’s mission is to protect

federal judges, oversee federal prisoners, andmanage seized assets. More than half of its

5,700 employees, includ-ing 4,000 deputy marshalsand investigators, are mo-bile workers. With those people in

mind, the agency launched a pilot project totest iPads, iPhones, and other mobile devices.The goal is twofold: to test the feasibility of thedevices for field work and determine whetherthey might be a cheaper alternative to PCsand laptops for some employees. “If I”m pay-ing $1,000 for a laptop, and I can spend $500for an iPad, I’ve driven down costs by 50%,”Davis says.The agency is teaming with the Bureau of

Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives on the trial. Agilex, a systems integrator, ishelping develop a mobile app store, whereusers can access language translation, loca-tion, and other types of apps. And, becausethe devices tap into Apple’s App Store, Appleis involved, too.Already, however, Davis is mulling what

might get cut. Help desk support had been ex-panded to 24/7, but that could be scaled back.Says Davis, “Something’s got to give.”

—John Foley ([email protected])


QuicktakesPrevious Next

TECH TRANSFORMATION

Marshals Service Invests In IT, Then Faces Cuts

Following modernizationproject, Davis mulls doing more with less[Table of Contents

President Obama is urging world leaders topush ahead with transparency and citizen en-gagement in their countries, calling open gov-ernment “the essence of democracy.” The occasion was the Sept. 20 launch of the

Open Government Partnership, in which 46nations agreed to pursue increased govern-ment transparency. The partnership issued an“open government declaration,” with mem-bers pledging increased transparency, citizenengagement, and access to technology.Officials from Brazil, Kenya, the Philippines, the

United Kingdom, and other countries gatheredat Google’s New York offices to discuss theirplans. The initiatives include new public-facingwebsites, pledges of government transparency,better access to public data, and more publicparticipation in the budgeting process.For its part, the White House rolled out an

open government “National Action Plan” thatrepresents the next phase of a policy that goesback to Obama’s first day in office, when he is-sued a memo calling on federal agencies to

“harness new technologies to put informationabout their operations and decisions onlineand readily available to the public.” That memo was followed in December 2009

by the Open Government Directive, which instructed agencies to develop open govern-ment plans and publish them. Flagship initia-tives included the launch of Data.gov andUSASpending.gov, an online “IT Dashboard,”and a presidential mandate in favor of a pre-sumption of disclosure for Freedom of Infor-mation Act requests.

Long-Term ImplicationsThe White House introduced several new ef-

forts under the umbrella of its National ActionPlan. One is an online platform called “We ThePeople,” where the public can submit petitionsto the federal government. A second effort, theExtractive Industries Transparency Initiative,aims to disclose details on the $10 billion inannual revenue the government gets from oil,gas, and mineral companies to develop sites

offshore and on federal land.The plan also includes records management

and data-disclosure policies with potentiallong-term implications. Among them: UncleSam will launch an initiative to reform itsrecords management, establish a new job cat-egory for specialists who administer Freedomof Information Act requests, increase the useof technology to search and process records,and pursue a multiagency effort to declassifyhistorically valuable records.The White House will push for other policy

changes related to private industry trans-parency, including passage of stalled legislationgiving more protection to whistle-blowers andlegislation to require corporations to disclosemore about who owns the company and theowners’ ties other companies when they form. Brazil will host the second high-level meet-

ing of the partnership in March, when dozensof countries that joined the partnership will re-lease their open government plans.

—J. Nicholas Hoover ([email protected])


NATIONAL ACTION PLAN

U.S. Joins Other Nations In Outlining Next Steps In Open Government

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FederalIT PrioritiesGovernment IT pros are juggling many mandates.

Our annual survey identifies their most-pressing projects—and how those align with White House goals.

mid ongoing political debate over federalspending, it’s difficult to know if the UnitedStates is entering a period of government

austerity or one of additional spending aimed at boosting the economy. Ei-ther way, one thing is clear: The only way the federal government can deliverimproved services, on the scale required, is by leveraging its huge investmentsin IT more effectively. The Office of Management and Budget is pushing a se-ries of initiatives with that goal in mind.To gauge how federal IT teams are managing OMB’s mandates and the

many other projects on their plates, InformationWeek conducted our third an-nual Federal Government IT Priorities Survey, which was completed in July by

[COVER STORY]

A

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By Michael Biddick

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131 federal IT pros. We asked survey respondents torate the importance of two dozen technology initia-tives, identify the factors driving their priorities, andassess barriers to execution.They rank IT security and cybersecurity No. 1 by a

wide margin. That’s consistent with last year’s surveyand reflects the harsh reality of ever-present threats,both internal (such as the Department of State’sleaked diplomatic cables) and external (the cyberat-tack known as Operation Shady RAT). Data center consolidation moved up on the priority

list, while the White House’s Open Government Initia-tive moved down. Here, too, the shifts have a prag-matic explanation: Federal IT teams are under the gunto close data centers in compliance with a plan beingclosely monitored by OMB. Meanwhile, their first- andsecond-round open government projects have al-ready passed muster, so that work is less urgent. This year, for the first time, we asked survey respon-

dents to rate the importance of smartphones and mo-bile applications. Surprisingly, both ended up welldown the priority list. Perhaps this is because employ-ees are bringing their own mobile devices and appsto the office, with or without the approval of IT. Thereshould be no doubt, however, that this trend has pol-icy and security implications that federal IT managerscan’t ignore. Our survey revealed gaps between a few key gov-

ernment-wide initiatives and respondents’ awareness

[COVER STORY]IT PRIORITIESPrevious Next

Get This And All Our Reports

Download our complete 2011Federal Government IT Prioritiesreport, free with registration. Thisreport includes more than 30pages of action-oriented analysis,packed with 26 charts.

What you’ll find:

> Ranking of two dozen tech initiatives, in order of importance

> What’s being done to bolster ITsecurity, the No. 1 priority

> Impact of leadership changes

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Table of Contents


of them. More than half of respondents wereunfamiliar with OMB’s TechStat project reviewprogram, and nearly half were unaware of theNational Institute of Standards and Technol-ogy’s requirements around continuous-mon-itoring systems. This report examines thoseand many other issues that came to light inthe survey results.

New LeadershipOne of the big changes in federal IT in 2011

has been the resignation of federal CIO VivekKundra, the architect of many OMB tech ini-tiatives. In August, Kundra was replaced bySteven VanRoekel, the former managing di-rector of the FCC and, before that, a 15-yearMicrosoft veteran. When VanRoekel tookover as federal CIO, he gave no indication ofany changes in direction in IT strategy, butfederal IT pros shouldn’t be surprised if Van-Roekel comes up with his own ideas abouthow things should be done.

In July, a few weeks before he left OMB, Kun-dra said in a briefing that federal agenciestend to focus on policy more than execution.“So one of the things we did from day one isset specific timelines,” he said. Yet belt tight-ening in Washington could have an impact onhow well agencies are able to meet such

deadlines. If funding dries up, the time framefor deliverables will almost certainly getpushed out. Kundra spent much of his time as federal

CIO trying to narrow the gap between federalagency and private sector IT. He sought in-creased innovation in the form of cloud com-


Data: InformationWeek 2011 Federal Government IT Priorities Survey of 131 federal government tech pros, July 2011

31%

3%

Other

Shortage of skilled staff

Poor project management

Legacy systems

Lack of transparency onproject performance

Lack of budget

Conflicting or poorly definedrequirements

23%

7%

8%

9%

19%

31%

%3%%3

23%

7%

8%

9%

19%

What’s The Greatest Barrier To Effective Execution Of IT Projects?Table of Contents


puting (including software as a service) and mobiledevices and applications. Despite that emphasis, only16% of survey respondents said they see significantongoing innovation in their agencies and 29% seevery little. On the other hand, we see growing evidence of

iPhones, iPads, and other popular technologies acrossfederal government, including the Pentagon. In fact,half of survey respondents reported a moderate levelof innovation occurring in their agencies. We’ll call thatprogress, albeit with lots of room for improvement.Kundra’s two years as fed CIO culminated in a 25-

point IT management reform plan, published in De-cember. The plan sets deadlines for specific objectivesover the following 18 months, but such broad reformwill likely take years to implement.Upon succeeding Kundra in August, VanRoekel an-

nounced new responsibilities for agency CIOs. In anAug. 8 memo, he laid out four new areas of focus foragency CIOs: governance, commodity IT, programmanagement, and information security. The goals in-clude lowering operational costs, terminating or turn-ing around troubled IT projects, and delivering mean-ingful functionality more quickly while enhancingsecurity. During the next year, agency CIOs will be re-quired to provide a progress report to the president’sManagement Council and the federal CIO Council. VanRoekel no doubt has found that federal IT teams

have a lot on their plates. After security/cybersecurity,


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their other top priorities are disaster recovery,data center consolidation, data records man-agement, and virtualization. Data center con-solidation moved up from fourth place lastyear, no doubt because it’s a priority for theOMB and the Government Accountability Of-fice. Yet our survey also revealed a disconnectwith other OMB policy directives, as projectmanagement, cloud computing, and processimprovement came in low on federal IT’s 2011priority list. These gaps must be narrowed ifthe government is to make progress with itsmany IT challenges.

GovernanceOMB’s IT reform plan restructured agencies’

investment review boards, requiring CIOs tolead project review sessions called TechStatreviews. The sessions must produce specificsteps to put projects on the right trackthrough completion, with a goal of terminat-ing or turning around one-third of all under-

performing IT Investments by mid-2012.IT management starts with governance.

From a high level, this means aligning agencystrategy and IT priorities, then ensuring thatexecution follows a well-defined process. The

most common governance frameworks usedby agencies, according to our survey, are SixSigma, ISO 9001, ITIL, and CMMI. The frameworks differ slightly depending on

what they’re trying to accomplish. For exam-


Data: InformationWeek 2011 Federal Government IT Priorities Survey of 131 federal government tech pros, July 2011

Do you plan to replace any infrastructure with the cloud in the upcoming fiscal year?

Yes; we’re implementing or planningto implement private clouds

34%

No 6%41%

19%

Yes; we’re implementing or planning to implementpublic cloud services and private clouds

Yes; we’re implementing or planning to implement public cloud services

34%

6%41%

19%

Cloud Computing PlansTable of Contents


ple, ITIL establishes a process to define a services strat-egy and all the tech components required to deliverthose services. Next, ITIL defines a process to design,transition, and operate the service. Finally, it introducesa mechanism to continually improve the service andevaluate the effectiveness for users. In January 2010, OMB launched TechStat to review IT

projects in progress. Here, OMB officials, agency CIOs,and other managers discuss a project’s status and,where needed, specify remedial steps. The National Sci-ence Foundation, for instance, used TechStat to reviewFastLane, a public-facing Web portal that’s part of NSF’sgrants management system. Andrea Norris, acting CIOat NSF, credits TechStat with helping the agency priori-tize change requests. OMB last year issued a TechStat toolkit to help agen-

cies conduct their own IT project reviews. Agenciesmust get better at identifying and tracking programrisks, well before they’re put under OMB’s spotlight.That requires establishing governance at the depart-ment level and below. In our survey, 14% of respondents indicated that their

agencies conduct their own TechStat-style project re-views, and 4% were aware of IT projects that werestopped or redirected because of TechStat reviews.However, not everyone is on board. Fifty-five percentwere unaware that the TechStat program exists. While TechStat is good at keeping projects on track,

it’s important that IT leaders ensure that planned proj-


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ects align with their agency’s mission before they getfunded. Only 36% of survey respondents follow theiragency’s strategic plan closely, while 43% deviate fromit regularly. Without the guidance of a strategic plan, IT projects,

from operations and maintenance to new initiatives, willbe difficult to prioritize and budget. Although an elabo-rate IT strategy isn’t necessary, governance does requirea way to prioritize the choices that leaders make. Gov-ernance frameworks will also help establish a path sothat checkpoints exist to keep programs on track.

Information SecurityThe No. 1 priority among federal IT pros, as it was last

year, is security, with 69% of survey respondents view-ing it as extremely important. That reflects OMB’s em-phasis on “well-designed, well-managed continuousmonitoring and standardized risk assessmentprocesses,” to be supported by sessions, dubbed Cy-berStat, run by the Department of Homeland Security.CyberStat sessions are TechStat-style reviews with a fo-cus on IT security. The goal is that continuous monitoring and Cyber-

Stat together will provide near-real-time security sta-tus information to agency officials and allow for im-mediate remediation. The Department of Educationpiloted CyberStat earlier this year, and OMB concludedit led to concrete actions and outcomes.NIST publication 800-137 provides guidelines for im-


Table of Contents


plementing continuous monitoring, includingnetwork- and system-level monitoring. While21% of survey respondents have imple-mented continuous monitoring, a surprising48% were not familiar with the requirements.While continuous monitoring can be difficultto implement and add complexity, it’s a foun-dation for getting a comprehensive inventoryof data center assets.The goal isn’t to prevent every attack—

that’s impossible—but to rapidly detect andrespond to threats. Continuous monitoring isessential, but the real challenge is respondingto attacks. IT teams must develop the abilityto rapidly switch network paths and serversto disrupt attacks and preserve capabilities.That’s costly to do in small environments, butfeasible in large, consolidated data centers.

Commodity IT Eliminating duplicative “commodity ser-

vices” and rationalizing IT investments are key

tenets of OMB’s IT reform plan. Services thatare sometimes redundant within agencies in-clude email, data centers, networks, identityand access management, security, Web infra-

structure, and finance and HR applications. Resources can be integrated, and duplicate

systems and apps can be consolidated. CIOscan also pool IT purchasing within an agency


20114.53.83.83.73.53.53.53.43.43.33.33.33.33.23.2

20104.53.83.63.83.5N/A3.43.43.53.43.43.32.9N/A3.0

Cybersecurity and securityDisaster recovery planning and continuity planningData center consolidationData records managementVirtualizationStorage solutions and data growthApplication performance managementEnterprise architecture and SOABusiness intelligence, AI, and data miningIT process improvement and ITILIT automationMobile communications and wirelessCloud computingIT project management and earned value managementTelework and mobility solutions

How would you rate these IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus, based on a scale of 1 (not at all important) to 5 (extremely important)?

Rate The Initiatives

Data: InformationWeek Federal Government IT Priorities Survey of 131 federal government tech pros in July 2011 and 154 in July 2010; meanaverage ratings given

Table of Contents


to drive down costs and improve services. Inlieu of IT silos, CIOs should steer towardshared services, either as providers or con-sumers of those services. To meet this shared-services objective,

agencies are turning to cloud computing(multitenant, pay on demand) and hosted en-vironments (dedicated, outsourced). In oursurvey, 53% of respondents have imple-mented or plan to implement private clouds.That’s a substantial percentage for a technol-ogy concept that emerged in 2008. The shiftto cloud computing and other types of sharedservices should yield substantial cost savings,letting agencies reallocate funding to whereit’s most needed. Yet developing a privatecloud isn’t a trivial task, and it’s not ideal forevery situation. Consolidating data centers as planned un-

der the Federal Data Center Consolidation Ini-tiative won’t be easy. OMB wants to close 800,or 38%, of Uncle Sam’s 2,094 data centers by

2015. As a first step, OMB asked the 24 partic-ipating agencies to submit data center inven-tories and consolidation plans by the end ofAugust. However, a GAO report released inJuly found that only one agency had submit-ted a complete inventory and none had deliv-ered complete plans. Data center consolidation ranked third

among all IT priorities in our survey. Forty per-cent of respondents indicated that their agen-cies had consolidated one or more data cen-

ters, and 31% were in the planning stages.

Program Management The IT reform plan calls for improving the

management of large federal IT projects byrecruiting and hiring people with programmanagement skills. Only recently did the Of-fice of Personnel Management establish “pro-ject manager” as a formal job category in fed-eral government. In our survey, 66% of respondents had a


57%

46%

44%

34%Data: InformationWeek 2011 Federal Government IT Priorities Survey of 131 federal government tech pros, July 2011

Organizational CIO or agency initiative

Federal CIO or OMB directive

NIST policy or standards compliance

Legislative requirements

What Are The Primary Drivers For Your Top IT Priorities?Table of Contents


project management office (PMO), an in-crease of seven percentage points from 2010.Nevertheless, most agencies still haven’t mas-tered IT project management. They oftendon’t place enough authority with the PMO,but rather use it to create templates and otherproject management documents. Contractorsare left to make decisions on how to moveforward with implementation. When we asked why IT projects go off track,

31% of survey respondents pointed to insuf-ficient budgets, 23% blamed conflicting orpoorly defined requirements, and 19% saidthey couldn’t obtain skilled IT staff. The project management challenge is com-pounded by long procurement cycles andlegacy development approaches. With the right approach, such as earned

value management, federal agencies can get better at IT project management. OMB’sIT Dashboard lets anyone drill down intohundreds of federal IT projects and examinetheir on-budget and on-schedule status, and get an overall rating from the CIOs be-hind them.But this type of project management deals

with data that may be outdated. To achievemore effective project management, accu-rate task and time keeping are needed at the

contractor level. Real-time data on projectstatus could be used toidentify and mitigatepotential problems.Unfortunately, fewagencies have thetools to make this typeof project manage-ment a reality.

Next StepsFederal IT teams must

also develop strategiesfor new types of com-puting devices. As more federal workers usetablets and smartphones, agencies must rec-ognize that some of their apps may be run-ning on employee-owned, and potentially un-secured, devices.A critical shift will be to move away from

perimeter-centric security to application- anddata-driven security. Expect to see more govern-ment applications that incorporate security intothe app itself and monitor the profile of users. Our survey identified other areas for im-

provement. Only 15% of respondents indi-cated they’re on schedule to meet all of the ITreform plan’s six-, 12-, and 18-month mile-

stones. More than half (57%) were of the opin-ion that their agencies’ initiatives were moreimportant than those set by OMB. That shouldbe a point of concern. The federal government’s ability to leverage

IT in pursuit of its various priorities will be amajor factor in how well it’s able to reducecosts and improve services. Thus, IT reformmust be more than a plan. For agency CIOsand their IT teams, success will hinge on con-tinued execution.

Michael Biddick is president and CTO of consultancy FusionPPT. Write to us at [email protected].


VanRoekel has redefined the roleof agency CIOs[

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District Manager, Cori Gordon (516) 562-5181, [email protected]

Inside Sales Manager East, Ray Capitelli(212) 600-3045, [email protected]

Strategic Accounts

District Manager, Mary Hyland (516) 562-5120, [email protected]

SALES CONTACTS—MARKETING AS A SERVICEDirector of Client Marketing Strategy, Jonathan Vlock(212) 600-3019, [email protected]

SALES CONTACTS—EVENTS Senior Director, InformationWeek Events, Robyn Duda(212) 600-3046, [email protected]

MARKETING VP, Marketing, Winnie Ng-Schuchman(631) 406-6507, [email protected]

Director of Marketing, Angela Lee-Moll(516) 562-5803, [email protected]

Marketing Manager, Monique Kakegawa(949) 223-3609, [email protected]

UBM TECHWEB Tony L. Uphoff CEO

John Dennehy CFO

David Michael CIO

Joseph Braue Sr. VP, Light Reading Communications Network

Scott Vaughan CMO

Ed Grossman Executive VP, InformationWeek Business Technology Network

John Ecke VP of Brand and Product Development, InformationWeek Business Technology Network

Beth Rivera Senior VP, Human Resources

David Berlind Chief Content Officer, TechWeb, and Editor in Chief, TechWeb.com

Fritz Nelson VP, Editorial Director, InformationWeek Business Technology Network, and Executive Producer, TechWeb TV

UBM LLCPat Nohilly Sr. VP, Strategic Development and Business Admin.

Marie Myers Sr. VP, Manufacturing

Rob Preston VP and Editor In [email protected] 516-562-5692

Lorna Garey Content Director, [email protected] 978-694-1681

Sek Leung Associate Art [email protected]

Chris Murphy [email protected] 414-906-5331

Jim Donahue Chief Copy [email protected]

Stacey Peterson Executive Editor, [email protected] 516-562-5933

Mary Ellen Forte Senior Art [email protected]

Business Contacts

John Foley Editor, InformationWeek [email protected] 516-562-7189

J. Nicholas Hoover Senior [email protected] 516-562-5032

Online, Newsletters, Events, Research


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