With threats of too little money, delays, resistance from affected agencies and other problems, it appears uncertain whether the information technology projects will be completed as planned by the end of the Bush presidential term. In addition, the Bush administration, now approaching the final year of its term, is behind in getting agency IT managers to fully adopt other management goals:
- Agency IT managers are struggling to assign qualified project managers to IT projects.
- Many say they cannot use the complicated methodology imposed upon them to track successes and failures of their projects.
- Many complain they cannot afford to certify their networks and databases as being secure against hackers and viruses.
While there have been some setbacks, the administration has made important progress as well:
- Agencies appear to have made great use of enterprise architectures to map out modernization needs and develop smarter IT plans.
- Managers are regularly building business cases to defend their IT project plans, ensuring they are well-planned and support priority agency missions.
Some projects intend to automate government transactions with the public, businesses and state and local governments. Others look to consolidate and modernize administrative processes such as payroll and processing security clearances.
“Agencies don’t want to turn over functions they consider vital to their missions to a project managed by another agency,” said Cheval Opp, federal systems manager at IBM of Armonk, N.Y. Opp led a survey team for GEIA that interviewed dozens of agency IT executives this summer.
An example is GovBenefits, an e-government project that will allow the public to apply for federal benefits from a central Web site managed by the Labor Department.
George Wollner, former program manager for GovBenefits at Labor, said agencies tried to block the program by refusing to share information about their benefit programs. Agency staffs “felt that it wasn’t in their self-interest to cooperate,” he said. Not one of the 50 federal benefits program managers he contacted met the Jan. 31, 2002, deadline to submit the information needed for the project, he said last year.
Wollner instead took advantage of the enthusiastic support the projects had at the time from agencies’ political appointees. He sent e-mails documenting the lack of progress to the deputy secretaries of the departments he needed information from.
“Within minutes after sending that e-mail, information started coming in,” Wollner said.
But now deputy secretaries are questioning whether supporting governmentwide projects during a time of tight budgets is the best use of their agencies’ scarce discretionary dollars. At meetings of the President’s Management Council, made up of deputy secretaries, debates over whether agencies should be forced to participate in the projects are becoming more heated.
“There have been some pretty raucous discussions at council meetings lately on whether agencies should be expecting to spend so much money on these projects,” said an Agriculture Department official familiar with the council’s meetings.
Karen Evans, administrator for e-government and information technology at the Office of Management and Budget, said deputy secretaries have not stopped supporting the e-government projects. “They are questioning what they are getting for the money and asking us to make a case that we are delivering value. And we are doing that,” Evans said.
But even some of the managers who are leading the projects are questioning OMB’s commitment to funding the projects.
“They need to either put their muscle behind making agencies contribute to the projects or get Congress to ante up more cross-agency money. If they don’t, the e-government projects are doomed,” said a manager of one of the larger e-government projects.
Evans said that agencies contributed 97 percent of the $239 million spent on the projects in 2003. The rest of the money was appropriated directly to the lead agencies by Congress or came from the central $5 million electronic government fund.
But as the projects move from the concept stage to development, the bills are going up, and so far Congress has been reluctant to fund projects that serve multiple agencies. For instance, the administration asked for $45 million for the projects in fiscal 2003 and Congress approved only $5 million. A similar cut is likely for fiscal 2004.
Business Cases
Other parts of the administration’s IT agenda are also running into opposition. Agencies have finally acquiesced to the administration’s demand they write business cases for all large IT projects. However, agency managers are now angry that the requirements for the long, detailed documents keep changing.
“We find out two days before it’s due that they want different information in a different format, and we can’t possibly make those changes with so little notice,” said a Navy project manager who asked not to be identified. “So all we can do is just make up the data they are asking for.”
David Muzio, procurement policy analyst at OMB, said such last-minute changes are unavoidable. “We have our own processes we have to go through,” Muzio said. “But they know there will be last-minute changes so they should be prepared to make them. Preparing for the unexpected is part of good project management.”
The Navy manager said he does prepare in advance for the last-minute changes. “I keep people on standby, won’t let anyone take vacations and then spend thousands on overtime redoing the business cases,” he said. “It is a waste of taxpayer dollars and is setting a terrible example for the agencies. OMB keeps telling us to plan ahead and then doesn’t bother to do that itself.”
Enterprise Architectures
Another time-consuming reporting requirement from OMB — that agencies develop IT modernization plans called enterprise architectures — has been better received.
“Agencies are finding out that architectures save them money because it helps them see redundant and duplicative systems,” IBM’s Opp said.
But some agencies that have developed extensive architectures are upset that the governmentwide IT modernization plan OMB has created will force them to change all their own modernization plans.
“The agencies that dragged their feet and are just now starting their architectures are better off because they won’t have to do as many changes,” Opp said.
Project Management
The administration’s insistence on better project management has also met with mixed success. About 35 percent of the business plans submitted for the 2004 budget did not name the project manager as required, and agency managers are bewildered by the way the administration wants project managers to track the progress of projects. Developed by the Defense Department, the method uses complicated formulas to track how much money has been spent on a project compared with what has been accomplished.
“We are still trying to figure out exactly what it is and how to do it,” said John Sullivan, chief architect at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Information security assessments are another bone of contention. Even though agencies have been required to conduct formal assessments of the security of their major IT systems for the last two years, the assessments can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and some agencies still refuse to budget funding for assessing older systems.
“This year, if there is not funding listed for [the assessments], the request will not be approved,” OMB’s Muzio said.
Quelle: Federal Times, 11.11.2003
