In August, Steve VanRoekel took over the reins from Vivek Kundra as the federal government’s CIO. In a recent interview, VanRoekel said he intends to keep Kundra’s 25-point plan in place, including cost containment measures such as the “cloud first” policy – moving to cloud-based technologies and applications – and consolidating data centers. He already knows that he’s going to face budget fights; TechAmerica just released its five-year forecast of federal IT spending, predicting cuts in discretionary budgets and intense scrutiny of poor-performing programs.
Yet he also has to wrestle with the lack of management authority many agency CIOs have over elements of their own programs. A new GAO report found that of the “13 areas of IT and information management” that CIOs are mandated by law to be responsible for, only five areas are indeed being handled by those CIOs (with another couple of areas handled by many – but not all – of them).
And Congress has weighed in once again. Senators Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins issued a statement on the heels of the GAO report, suggesting that agency CIOs be given greater responsibility for their IT budgets and priorities.
Mr. VanRoekel would like to speed up the government’s adoption of new technologies, to help close the “productivity gap” – his words – between government and the private sector. This would not only help with productivity, but also recruiting of talented professionals; government employees need to be able to use the same technologies in their agencies as they would working for a company, or as they do in their personal lives.
For us here in the contracting community, this will bring increased attention to the claims we make about our metrics and measuring our performance. We’d better be prepared to “walk the talk.”
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