Trump faces a significant challenge in tackling the broader problem of moving federal agencies off of legacy systems and where to start.
“If you look at everything from the need for modernization of air traffic control to continuing work on the IRS’ modernization efforts, across the board, any kind of real, effective effort to improve on government’s operations has simply got to build on IT modernization,” according to Don Kettl, professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
“The question is not going to be so much whether to continue it, because it has to, but which of the initiatives gets higher priority. In particular, given the difficulty of trying to work with Congress to determine where the funding is going to go.”
There is legislation in Congress to set up funding structures for agencies to procure new IT, but it’s uncertain whether it will pass before Trump takes office.
Another question is how the next administration will approach how to update IT services, choosing whether to continue senior executive oversight of the systems or outsource them to contractors.
“It is both a budget challenge that the next administration is going to face as well as a management challenge,” said Alan Chvotkin, executive vice president and counsel of the Professional Services Council. “Both candidates talked about the importance of government run effectively and efficiently. I think there is only an element of a degree [between them].
“Mr. Trump might tend to look more to the private sector for solutions rather than to government agencies or government employees, including CIOs, for those answers. Or he may want to bring in, and probably would bring in, those with creative private sector experience to rely on a larger extent on commercial market experience rather than legacy government experience.”
There isn’t much else in the wind on Trump’s positions when it comes to IT modernization. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation crafted a research paper breaking down the president-elect’s positions on various facets of innovation and technology policy.
Apart from strong stands on using technology to reform the Department of Veteran Affairs, the paper could offer little other insight into Trump’s positions on e-government initiatives or broader IT modernization.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Carten Cordell
Quelle/Source: Federal Times, 10.11.2016
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