Information Week Government 2010 02

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FEBRUARY 2010


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2010 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved. Adobe and the Adobe logo are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries.

Find out all the ways Adobe is helping government agencies

become more open and transparent, at adobe.com/opengov

ADOBE OPENS UPWASHINGTON


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February 2010 3informationweek.com/government

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24 IT LeadershipRedefinedCollaboration and retaining

talent are big challenges

12 CIOs In PersonIT Management As Team Sport

Deputy CIO for Defense

oversees the biggest IT

organization anywhere

14 Post Office In Your HomePostal Services CIO seeks out

innovation

COVER STORY

16 A Mandate To Open UpFederal agencies must

increase transparency

and learn to engage the

public in new ways

16

4 GovernmentTechnologistThe ROI Of Being Open

By John Foley

Evaluate open government

based on its hard returns

6 QuickTakesObamas IT Budget

2011 budget proposal would

cut IT spending while steps

to cut costs get implemented

8 Real-Time CloudAir Force taps IBM for secure,

reconfigurable cloud

10 Who Will Lead DOEs Tech?CIO and deputy CIO both

plan to retire

Command Center For Navy

U.S.Fleet Cyber Command

will defend Navys IT systems

against cyberattacks

CONTENTSTHE BUSINESS VALUE OF TECHNOLOGY February 2010 Issue 1

32 Editorial Contacts 34 Business Contacts

12

This is an all-digital issue ofInformationWeek Government


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4 February 2010 informationweek.com/government


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comes to mindputting agency leaders and government IT folks on

notice that performance must be gauged as they take on database, inte-gration, collaboration, and Web development projects in the pursuit of

open government.

At least one government IT exec whos in the thick of planning is al-

ready thinking along these lines. The ultimate measure of success

should be improvement in the fundamental efficiency and effective-

ness of government,Todd Park, CTO of the Department of Health and

Human Services, tells InformationWeek.We should aim to publish

clearer and more comprehensive indicators of government perform-

ance, which should be impacted positively by our actions. (For moreon what Parks agency is doing to align the mandate for openness with

his agencys broader mission,see A Mandate To Open Up,p.16.)

Thats exactly the kind of brass-tacks approach thats needed.The fed-

eral IT Dashboard, which is geared toward big-ticket IT projects, could

serve as a model for reporting how open government initiatives are per-

forming.Federal CIO Kundra told me in December that the IT Dashboard

has forced agency CIOs to get a better handle on their IT projects and

feel the pressure of public scrutiny. Lets stop dancing around open

government as if its some sort of skunk works and treat it as the busi-ness imperativethe business of governmentthat it is.

The information generated by close monitoring of open government

efforts would be key to understanding whats effective,and whats not,

as agencies push ahead.Projects with ballooning costs or unclear ben-

efits could be phased out, while those with a high return on openness

would become the top priorities.

President Obama has a stake in how this plays out, of

course.With every dollar of federal spending under scrutiny,

he must show that open government actually does lead toefficiency and effectiveness, that its not just lip service. As it

stands, the promise is there,but the evidence is hard to find.

John Foley is editor of InformationWeek Government. You can write to him at

[email protected].

informationweek.com/government

IN THIS ISSUE

Obamas Tech Budget p. 6

Q&A With Defense CIO p.12

Open GovMandate p. 16

Top Fed Priorities p.24

Table Of Contents p. 3

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President Obamas proposed fiscal 2011 budget sees a 1.6% dip in IT

spending, to $79.4 billion. The budget promises that the cost-savings

steps federal CIO Vivek Kundra studied in his first year on the jobsuch

as eliminating data centers and sharing infrastructure and software

will start being implemented in the coming fiscal year.

The budget includes $364 million to run the Department of Home-

land Securitys National Cyber Security Division, a 30% increase for theFederal Aviation Administrations next-generation air traffic control sys-

tem, new spending on health IT, and doubled funding for the Justice

Departments centralized IT department.

Data center glut is a major problem for the federal government,with the

number of data centers jumping from 432 in 1998 to more

than 1,100 last year,and the administration hopes to reverse

the trend,it notes in the budget.The Office of Management

and Budget plans to release a strategy to cut the number

and cost of data centers,though it doesnt say when.The budget paints cloud computing with a broad brush,

suggesting that this year will bring implementation, not

just analysis.After evaluation in 2010,agencies will deploy

cloud computing solutions across the government, the

budget says, pointing to the General Services Administra-

tions Apps.gov Web site, from which agencies can sub-

scribe to and manage software-as-a-service offerings.

The administration plans several government-wide

shared IT services for nonmilitary agencies,a strategy largely untappedin the past.One is a collaboration platform to be deployed in 2011, and

another is a geospatial data platform.The budget projects that sharing

IT services could prevent billions in increased costs across the federal

government over the next few years.

Open government remains a key goal of the administrations IT efforts.

U.S. FEDERAL BUDGET

Implementation Time For Shared IT


$364 M:Homeland

Security cyber-security division

>> $215 M: Advancedimaging at airports

>> $78 M: To spurhealth IT adoption

>> $12 M:To commer-cialize governmentresearch
http://prevpage/http://prevpage/http://prevpage/http://prevpage/


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The budget includes plans to relaunch

USASpending.gov with new data on gov-ernment spending, expand the use of

Data.gov, and develop a CitizensServices

Dashboard to provide transparency into

customer service. The budget includes

plans to launch a Web-based Challenge Platform to let citizens help

solve particular government problems.And it promises a new Web site

devoted to regulations,more data on R&D spending, and reviews of the

Paperwork Reduction Act and the federal cookies policy.

Early Warning System

The budget notes that Kundra has begun holding TechStat sessions

with agency leaders, using the IT Dashboard to try to spot IT problems

earlier in hopes of reducing waste and upping the project success rate.

In cybersecurity, the budget includes plans for a dedicated dashboard

by the spring to track cybersecurity spending and new metrics for use in

2010 Federal Information Security Management Act reporting.The De-

partment of Homeland Security wants to invest nearly $900 million in proj-

ects that, in addition to its cybersecurity division,include continuing datacenter consolidation and improving an Internet-based system for employ-

ers to check potential employees legal work status. It would spend $215

million to put 500 advanced imaging machines at airport checkpoints.

In Health and Human Services, theres $78 million for programs to pro-

pel health IT adoption and use,a 28% increase.

Not all IT budgets rise.The Department of Veterans Affairs

would get a 20% boost overall, but the IT piece would be

flat at $3.3 billion.Its part of a VA plan to bring better project

management to the agency under CIO Roger Baker.Beyond IT,the administration proposes $66 billion in non-

defense R&D, a 5.9% increase over last year. Obama would

also make the research tax credit permanent and give $12

million to a new program to commercialize innovations tied

to government R&D. J.Nicholas Hoover([email protected])


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IN THIS ISSUE


Q&A With Postal CIO p.14

Open Gov Mandate p.16


Table Of Contents p.3

Here comes

the budget[

Reuters/JasonR

eed/Landov


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The Air Force has hired IBM to design and demonstrate a cloud com-

puting environment with security capabilities that meet the require-

ments of the U.S.military.

In a 10-month project, IBM will create a prototype cloud in its Be-

thesda, Md., research lab that employs real-time analytics software to

monitor the cloud and, as necessary, reconfigure it on thefly.David McQueeney, CTO of IBMs federal business, says

cybersecurity and IT resiliency are driving factors behind

the effort.Thats the biggest difference herereal-time

analytics on how the cloud is performing and making

real-time changes to that,he says.

Any cloud platform developed as a result of the deal

could be used by other government agencies,he adds.

John Foley([email protected])



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The IT leadership shake-up continues at the Department of Energy.

Deputy CIO Carl Staton has signaled plans to retire.This comes a week after

CIO Tom Pyke announced his retirement and associate CIO for cybersecu-

rity Bill Hunteman was reassigned to head smart-grid cybersecurity efforts.

In an e-mail,Staton said he will retire sometime around April. Staton has

been at the DOE since 2006, and previously was at the National Oceanic

and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service.

The deputy CIOs departure raises questions about who will replacePyke when he steps down at the end of February. One name thats been

tossed around, a DOE source says, is Rosio Alvarez, CIO of the Lawrence

Berkeley National Laboratory. J.Nicholas Hoover([email protected])



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epartment of Defense Deputy CIO David Wennergren oversees

the largest IT budget and organization anywhere,spending more

than $30 billion annually on IT. Recently, he talked with senior

editor J.Nicholas Hoover about the challenges of the job.

InformationWeek: You manage the largest IT budget of any single or-

ganization out there.How do you keep track of it all?

Wennergren: Spending IT dollars effectively is a team sport. First,you

have to have the right policy in place,and then you have to have com-pliance mechanisms.It starts with an alignment to the strategic plan

to the Department of the Defense,which is built with the help of the

component CIOs and reflected in their own plans, and then requires

alignment to the enterprise architecture.Then, even if the CIO has put

in place the right policy, strategy, and vision, you still need a partner-

ship with the people who are responsible for getting things done.

InformationWeek: Where do you stand on cloud computing?

Wennergren: Where cloud computing really has promise is in dy-namically scaling and provisioning. Thats why Im really excited

about the Defense Information Systems Agencys Rapid Access and

Computing Environment.This idea that if I need to do some big

modeling simulation exercise or testing or rapid development or a

Web site, I can dynamically scale,bring it up, bring it back down, pay

IT ManagementAs A Team SportDavid Wennergren



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for what I use, rather than be stuck with a lot of infrastructurethats

really important.

InformationWeek: Do you foresee any particular public cloud scenarios?

Wennergren: Were seeing great power in using mainstream social

networking services when you want to have a dialogue with external

partners.It will eventually be like the question of using the public

communications infrastructure or not.Do you have your own infra-

structure or do you use the public infrastructure but [with] encryption

and segmenting to keep yourself walled away?

InformationWeek: Whats the most important thing to you right now interms of cybersecurity?

Wennergren: Secure information sharing.The security efforts of the

department and the sharing efforts of the department have to be

looked at as a consistent set of activities that allow you to raise the bar

for security and share your information with unanticipated users.

InformationWeek: Walk us through your thinking on open source.

Wennergren: Theres value in open source.More and more,youve

got to be able to look toward the power of peer review, both for opensource stuff and not-open source stuff,to bring more scrutiny and at-

tention to the software. Dont avoid good solutions that will help you

move with speed and agility.

InformationWeek: Whats your take on enterprise search?

Wennergren:We live in a world where the infrastructure

needs to be joined.An Army guy needs to be able to get on

a Navy computer and find Air Force stuff. Its about moving

into a different way of using our infrastructure,using thetechnology we already have,like our access cards,to create

and use attributes about methe clearance I have,the

kind of work Im doingthat allow me to see information.

Write to J.Nicholas Hoover [email protected].


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IN THIS ISSUE

Obamas Tech Budget p.6






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he scope of the U.S.Postal Service is vast203 billion pieces

of mail delivered in 2008, 618,000 employees, 221,000 vehicles,

36,000 post officesand its challenges are in proportion to its

scale.Editor John Foley spoke with CIO and senior VP Ross

Philo,who oversees the Postal Services IT operations.

InformationWeek: What are you doing in IT to help the Postal Service

manage through this tough business environment?

Philo: We see two elements of how were trying to help the PostalService address business challenges.The first is to introduce greater

automation, bringing new levels of service to the postal operations,

while also delivering innovations that may open up new business

opportunities.

InformationWeek: What are some examples of new levels of automa-

tion and other innovations?

Philo:The most critical one is the Intelligent Mail program. Intelli-

gent Mail allows us to track a single piece of mail from its origin to itsdestination in much the same way that you might think that our

competitors would track packages, but here youre talking about a

completely different scope and scale, where youre dealing with bil-

lions of pieces of mail each year. Its going to completely transform

the way the mail can be used by large mailers.

The Post OfficeIn Your HomeRoss Philo



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InformationWeek: What are some of your other top IT initiatives?

Philo: We need to embrace the Internet in all of its aspects.We want to

give consumers the ability of having a post office in their homes or intheir hands by providing Web-based functionality,so that they can do

just about every transaction thats required from PCs or smartphones.

InformationWeek:Tell us about your broader greeninitiatives.

Philo: Weve done a huge initiative on virtualization.Weve managed to

reduce our footprint of individual servers dramatically by going through

virtualization in all hardware environments and by reaching out to indi-

vidual users,managing printers and reducing the amount of consum-

ables in that area, as well as providing the sustainability group with waysof tracking power consumption in our facilities around the country.

InformationWeek: What work is under way in your data centers?

Philo: We have two major data centers.One is located near Minneapo-

lis and the other is in San Mateo,Calif.We look at what we can do to

optimize power consumption and cooling.One of the advantages of

being in Minneapolis is that during the winter our cooling require-

ments are fairly low.We have a program under way to look at what we

could do to develop a data center that would be located in such a waythat we could leverage renewable energy sources and potentially

even be in a position to inject energy back into the grid.

InformationWeek: Whats your view on cloud computing?

Philo: Weve been following it with great interest. In some ways, our ap-

proach to virtualization within the data centers is a way

for us to respond in an agile way and create essentially

an internal cloud approach when it comes to providing

computing resources.While weve been looking at exter-nal cloud offerings,we do have concerns, in terms of reli-

ability and security. It does look appealing,but at this

stage were not ready to pursue it any material way.

Write to John Foley [email protected].


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IN THIS ISSUE







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With the release in December of Presi-

dent Obamas Open Government Direc-

tive, the requirement for openinggov-

ernment processes and databases hasshifted from planning to implementa-

tion. Federal agencies face an aggressive

timeline for releasing data,engaging the

public in new ways, and publishing the steps they will take to promote

transparency and public participation in government.

The directive, released on Dec. 8, lays out 45-, 60-, 90-, and 120-day

milestones that federal agencies are expected to meet. Two deadlines

have already passed, and the others are rapidly approaching. As a first

step, agencies had to release three high valuedata sets.Then,by Feb. 6,they were required to launch Web sites to inform the public of their

open government activities, and the White House was due to introduce

a Web dashboard for assessing their progress.By April 7,agencies are to

publish their overall plans for complying with the directive.

There are signs of progress, but also plenty of bumps along the way.

AMandate To Open UpFederal agencies must increase transparency

and engage the public in new ways.Heres how

theyre doing it. By J. Nicholas Hoover



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Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, in a December inter-view, recalled how he initially met resistance

when seeking to release certain healthcare data

from government databases.Its not done,cant

do it, Kundra said he was told. And there were

technical issues in surfacing data that had long

been squirreled away.

Now, however, the Department of Health

and Human Services is moving full throttle

in developing and executing an open government plan, says CTOTodd Park.The Open Government Directive put an injection of en-

ergy and White House support behind things that we think are criti-

cal, says Park, whos now spending more than half of his time on

these efforts.

HHS has established a working group, headed by Park and acting as-

sistant secretary for public affairs Jenny Backus, to develop its open gov-

ernment plan. Park is mindful that open government projects must

align with his agencys broader mission. In one example, an online

health mapunder development will let citizens,employers,and othersbetter understand the healthcare systems in their local communities

and how they compare with systems elsewhere. HHS has been working

with McKinsey & Co., the nonprofit State of the USA, and the National

Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine to work through which data

sets to release,and how.

Part of the challenge is getting stakeholders on board.

You have to ask, Whats the behavior model? How do

we trigger awareness? Park says. HHS plans to engage

business and community leaders to raise its chances ofsuccess.

What determines success in open government? The re-

lease of data sets and launch of gov 2.0 Web sites with

collaboration and other social media tools are only part

of it.The ultimate measure of success should be im-

IN THIS ISSUE






Park: HHS going

full throttlewitopen planning

[


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provement in the fundamental efficiency and

effectiveness of government,says Park.

But Park counsels patience in the early going.As required, HHS posted new data sets on

Data.gov last month, including a list of animal

drug products, two summaries of Office of

Medicare Hearings and Appeals data,insurance

contacts for Medicares prescription drug bene-

fit, and summary data on Medicare claims. Yet

some of that data is still buried in zipped Excel

spreadsheets on HHSs site, rather than in ma-

chine-readable XML form on Data.gov.Itll be aprocess of constant, ongoing iteration and im-

provement, says Park.

From The Top

The White House in December issued an open

government progress report, with more than

two dozen examples of steps federal agencies

have taken. They include Virtual USA, a system

in development by the Department of Home-land Security, eight states,and first responders to share information on

power and water lines, helicopter landing sights, and other emergency

information.Another example is the Department of Treasurys release of

IRS statistics that show the migration patterns of tax-return filers as they

move from state to state.

The White Houses open government dashboard (due to

have launched by Feb.6) shows how well agencies meas-

ure up to the directive. In its initial iteration,the dashboard

shows whether an agency has named a data integrity leadand created an open gov Web site. In the spirit of open-

ness,it will encourage public input.

Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra wants to make sure that

meeting the requirements set by the White House isnt

merely a check-the-box compliance exercise. Indeed,



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and ask for comment.We dont want to presuppose anything in the be-

ginning, says DHS chief of staff for management Chris Cummiskey, whos

heading up the agencys open government efforts.

Risks Of Openness

While the power of releasing data and increasing public engagement

are evident to many agencies, so too are the security risks.You always

have to balance openness with the things our enemies could use

against us, things that could affect privacy,White House cyber coordi-

nator Howard Schmidt said in a January speech.Every data set we gen-

erate is going to require someone to look at it with a critical eye.

Security restrictions that affect open government efforts include the Fed-eral Information Security Management Act and a near-absolute ban on

permanent Web cookies,making it difficult if not impossible to create per-

sonalized Web pages for individuals.And much government data is sensi-

tive and has to be scrutinized before its released.That includes attention to

how data sets from different agencies might be used in combination.

Its not as simple as saying, lets strip out all personal information,

HHS CTO Park says, noting that researchers were able to identify users of

Netflixs movie delivery service from anonymous rental data by match-

ing it with other data available on the Web.Were doing this at a tacticallevel as we go through initial data sets, but we are hard at work on a

process that triple checks to make sure data is being made available in a

way that doesnt breach privacy and security considerations.

Homeland Security manages reams of sensitive information, and its

office of the CIO is putting into place a governance structure to deter-

mine what kind of information can be made public.We

need to be sensible about what we can and cant do and

set expectations up front,Cummiskey says.

Data quality and formatting are other issues that govern-ment IT pros have to grapple with as they expose data that

once stayed behind the firewall.The directive calls on agen-

cies to ensure that the information they release conforms to

Office of Management and Budget guidelines for informa-

tion quality and to assign a senior official responsibility for


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IN THIS ISSUE







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data quality and objectivity of information on federal spending.

Organizational resistanceas federal CIO Kundra experienced first-

handis the other complicating factor. Federal personnel tend to berisk averse.For that reason, its important that agency leaders drive the

message that increased openness, collaboration, and public participa-

tion require real change to processes and behavior.

At Homeland Security, Secretary Janet Napolitano and Deputy Secre-

tary Jane Holl Lute have made transparency part of their personal busi-

ness. Just last week, Lute convened a meeting of DHS agencies to dis-

cuss open government and information sharing.

Some policy issues as well have yet to be resolved, from compliance



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with accessibility regulations to how open government meshes with

the Paperwork Reduction Act, which requires a drawn-out approvalsprocess before engaging in online dialogue with citizens.

Get Involved

The White House will use some of the policy levers it has to reward

agencies that embrace open government, to remove barriers that hold

them back, and to put in place platforms that help agencies replicate

the successes of others, federal CTO Chopra says.

Chopra has suggestions on how government IT pros can get involved:

>> Find opportunities where the release of data and public engage-ment can advance policy objectives.

>> Be proactive in where you think new tools might advance the

cause. Dont wait for someone to ask for them.

>> Seek an organizational structure that gives you a voice in the

process and exposes you to agency priorities.

>> Volunteer to be an early adopter of new tools or a

beta site for GSA in scaling those that work.

Two months have passed since the release of the Open

Government Directive,so the time for those and other stepsis now. Says Chopra:If your plan provides for alignment

with the key priorities and the tools,principles,philosophies

of open government,thats the heart of the directive.

Write to J. Nicholas Hoover at [email protected].


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IN THIS ISSUE






GSAs crowdsourcing tool:

What do you want to see?[


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The Obama administration is aiming to change the thinking of fed-

eral IT leadership. Transparency, citizen participation, and agency col-

laboration are in; silos, cost overruns,and project stagnation are out.Those are the open government marching orders intended to make

federal agencies more efficient, accessible, and connected to the peo-

ple they serve. To get there, government IT leaders must rethink the

management approaches they take and the technologies they employ,

including the use of Web 2.0 technologies to support government 2.0

initiatives.

InformationWeek AnalyticsTechnology Leadership in Gov-

ernment Survey of 177 federal technology professionals re-

veals a wide range of technical and management challenges.Confronting them will require government IT leaders to em-

brace new ideas and approaches.

When asked to identify the one area federal CIO Vivek Kun-

dra should pay more attention to, for instance, survey re-

spondents top answer was cross-agency collaboration (see

IN THIS ISSUE

Obamas Tech Budget p. 6



Open GovMandate p. 16


Government IT Leadership

Redefined

Cross-agency collaboration,hiring and retaining top talent,and automating processes are

some of the biggest challenges,according to our survey

By Michael Biddick


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chart, below). Many federal IT leaders recognize that they reinvent the

wheel far too often, and when money is tight, that approach isnt sus-

tainable.In addition,security requirements of the Defense Departmentand the intelligence agencies make collaboration even more difficult.

With three-quarters of government contract spending going to De-

fense, this is a huge concern.

Pockets of collaboration do exist.For example, the TM Forum Defense

Interest Group consists of several agenciesincluding the Defense In-

formation Systems Agency, the Air Force, and the National Security

Agencyfocused on exploring new areas of standardization and en-

hancing existing process standards.

Beyond sharing ideas and good practices,however, few shared systemsexist across the federal government. The General Services Administra-

tion recently launched one such system:the Apps.gov service, which pro-

vides a central location where agencies can buy applications, mostly

cloud-based ones like Salesforce.com,online from third-party resellers.

Self-service ordering systems can automate many of the manual

February 2010 25

Data: InformationWeek Analytics Leadership in Government Survey of 177 federal government technology professionals

If you could ask federal CIO Vivek Kundra to provide increased attention to one area, what would it be?

IT Wish List

Promote cross-agency cooperation

Development of moregovernment IT staff

Expanding need for biggerIT budgets

Help overhauling IT procurement

More shared governmentIT services

Policies for smartphone usein government agencies

Other

30%

15%

15%

15%

13%

4%

8%

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informationweek.com/government


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processes involved with routine functions,like new-

employee processing, smartphone and laptop pro-

visioning,and even non-IT requests such as businesscard ordering. Simple items can be ordered easily,

while complex, multicomponent bundles can be

packaged together.

These systems can strip out much of the ineffi-

ciency in government procurement and drive

tremendous cost savings. They give IT leaders the

ability to develop service- and operating-level

agreements with providers that can be measured

and enforced. Demand and costs can be trackedand reported in a fee-for-service, chargeback,or ac-

counting environment.

The move toward standardization will ultimately

be the biggest cost reducer for IT organizations,

and the ability to centrally procure IT services us-

ing an actionable, self-service service catalog is a

step in that direction.

Security DisconnectIn terms of technology challenges, our survey

found that theres some disconnect between open government

goals and the IT challenges that federal IT leaders say are most

daunting. For example, 53% of respondents say security is the top

test they face. However, theres innate tension between transparency

and data security.

As many private-sector organizations have

found, data security can be a major roadblock

to even lightweight IT system deploymentsthat promote participation and collaboration.

There are legal, privacy, and policy issues that

can get in the way of a more open govern-

ment. Add in the need to ensure data safety,

and things get complicated. From a technol-

IN THIS ISSUE






Download Our FederalIT Leadership Report

Get all the analysis of our survey

of government tech leadersfree for a limited time. Go to

informationweek.com/analytics/

gov2 for nearly 30 pages of

action-oriented analysis, packed

with 17 charts.

What youll find:

> Complete listing of technolo-

gies deemed most promising

> Discussion of important attrib-

utes of government IT leaders

> Detailed data from our survey

[LEADERSHIP REDEFINED]



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ogy perspective, every new initiative,no matter how popular, must pass

muster from a data assurance standpoint.

Management Challenges

When it comes to management issues, 41% of respondents say hiring

and retaining technical talent is their top challenge (see chart, below).

Thing is, the government has no one to blame for this but itself.

Twenty-five years of policies promoting outsourcing have resulted in

an exodus of IT knowledge to the private sector. The Bureau of Labor

Statistics and other sources estimate that the number of private con-



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tractors is four times the number of federal employees.After a few years

in government, federal workers often parlay their skills and knowledge

into significant salary bumps in the private sector.With so much outsourcing going on,agencies find they lack much of the

intellectual property required to run their own IT organizations. Federal IT

leaders must find ways to get back much of this intellectual property.

Changing this structure is hard. Agencies have little incentive to do

the hard work of developing in-house talent. Its quicker and easier to

outsource and operate as contract management shops.But this model

delivers short-term savings while sacrificing institutional knowledge.

And savings arent assurednearly 30% of survey respondents say that

delivering projects on time and on budget is a challenge.Cutting off all outsourcing isnt the way to go, either. But agency lead-

ership must heed the lessons of the past decade and realize that as the

government becomes more transparent, heavy use of IT contractors will

become more visible. Substantial policy reform will likely place more

control back in the hands of government, but the issue of finding and

retaining talent wont go away. It will become even more problematic as

demand for critical technologies like virtualization and cloud comput-

ing increases in both the public and private sectors.

Better Buying

Another management challenge government IT leaders face is pro-

curement reform. Many in the public sector use cost-plus contracting,

where the government pays the costs incurred by the contractor plus a

modest feesay, 5% to 8%for profit.Cost-plus contracting was seen

as a way to cut through artificially high rates under the

time-and-materials system and provide transparency to

the contracting office. But theres a catch: Contractors

arent on the hook to deliver anything.They can add peo-ple and stretch timelines, with no incentive to complete

the work.

Contractors arent the only ones at fault. Government

program offices often fail to adequately define require-

ments and manage programs. Theyre frequently


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stretched too thin and lack technical depth in key IT areasoften as a

result of excessive outsourcing.

Only 36% of survey respondents say they think the federal governmentwill rely less on contract personnel for IT projects in the future; 53% say it

wont.Therefore,IT leaders must do a more thorough job of defining what

they want from projects and then managing contractors to those results.

By using earned value management,project and portfolio management,

and similar tools,project managers can do a better of job tracking the suc-

cess of projects and identifying problems before they impact deliverables.

Instead of cost-plus contracts, IT leaders should move toward firm-

fixed-price ones.This approach puts more of the risk and burden on the

contractor to deliver what was promised. If timelines slip as a result of in-efficiencies or mismatched skill sets, the contractor must correct the is-

sue.For its part, the government must ensure that bureaucratic dither-

ing and inefficiencies dont cause delays. If they do, the agency will pay

a price when the contractor demands compensation for changes in

work scope.

As with outsourcing, as government becomes more transparent,con-

tract issues will become more apparent. CIOs should implement re-


Get ready for transparency: Use data

in machine-readable formats and offer user-

friendly Web sites. Figure out ways to recon-

cile security with transparency goals.

>> Communicate clearly: Ensure man-

agers and staff as well as partners and con-

tractors know IT objectives.>> Dont depend too much on out-

sourcers: Make sure to retain in-house skills

to keep critical systems and services online

if an outsourcer goes south.

>> Reform procurement: Eschew cost-

plus contracts for fixed-price deals that hold

contractors accountable to deliver on time

and on budget.

>> Use project management tools:These

can help you track status and avoid missing

the forest because youre too busy watchingthe trees. Automate, automate, automate.

>> Implement self-service catalogs: Use

them to order everything from business

cards to cloud services.This is the future.

Where To Take Action

TO-DO LIST
http://prevpage/http://prevpage/http://prevpage/http://prevpage/


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forms now to avoid future embarrassment. These moves also reflect

good governance and will free up funds for other technology programs.

Processing The Future

Another challenge IT leaders face is having the right IT processes to exe-

cute initiatives,run the operational environment,and report on the success

of the organization.Here,many agencies are turning to established indus-

try frameworks or using hybrid approaches to process methodologies.

In our survey, there was no clear favorite framework, although ITIL, at

37%, had a slight edge over Six Sigma (35%), CMMI (28%), and ISO 9001

(27%).Emerging standards like ISO 20K and COBIT finished toward the bot-

tom.More interesting,however, was that 28% of respondents say none ofthe process methodologies in our survey is relevant to their organizations.

Frankly, thats disturbing given the huge amounts of cash agencies are

spending.

Lets be clear: The government IT environment has never been more

dynamic,and quality initiatives and good practices for running IT units

are critical to success.In large organizations,the ability to clearly define,

optimize,and eventually automate IT processesparticularly complex

onescan substantially cut ongoing expenses, reduce mean time to

repair and outages resulting from human errors, help meet compliancerequirements, and aid in tracking discrete tool costs.

Instead of using point products to automate processes between sys-

tems, automation will likely find its way into core technologiesven-

dors just need to hurry up and get there.The more manual the process,

the more difficult it will be to implement and ensure accuracy. This is

especially true in large organizations.Any successful pro-

cess improvement initiative must include a directive to

automate as much as possible. If a process cant be auto-

mated,CIOs should look for ways to at least automate en-forcement and compliance to ensure that the right

checks and balances exist in their organizations.

Michael Biddick is president and CTO at Fusion PPT, a consulting and IT

services company. Write to him [email protected].


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