Chief information officers are expected to report Jan. 19 to the CIO Council on their progress carrying out the reforms. Meanwhile, White House officials are citing some agencies' strategies as models for others.
One model is the Interior Department, where Secretary Ken Salazar named Bernard Mazer as the department's only CIO in December, giving him authority to terminate failing IT projects without having to negotiate with other offices. The order sets a six-month deadline for creating a plan to move all IT infrastructure, services and personnel "to the organization, management, ownership and control" of the CIO. Lawrence Gross was named the agency's only deputy CIO.
Currently, Interior has 27 bureau-level and 10 deputy CIOs. Under the reorganization, each bureau will choose a senior executive, who will report to and advise the bureau head on the use of technology to achieve the mission, said Andrew Jackson, Interior's deputy assistant secretary for technology, information and business services. They also will oversee the transition of IT infrastructure, including hardware, software and services, to the department CIO.
The plan also calls for reducing rented office space and reducing or reassigning some of Interior's 3,600 IT workers to other duties.
The department expects the restructuring to save $500 million by 2020.
Interior "is going to be the model for the rest of the government," federal CIO Vivek Kundra said in an interview with Federal Times.
One of the White House's reform goals is to redefine by June the role of the CIO Council and all agency CIOs to give them greater authority over their IT projects and investments.
At the Homeland Security Department, any program over $2.5 million must be approved by CIO Richard Spires. All major DHS components have a CIO, and that likely will not change under the new reforms. That's because they have better insight about bureau-level needs, said DHS spokesman Larry Orluskie.
Another department cited as a model for IT reform is the Veterans Affairs Department. Jeffrey Zients, White House chief performance officer, in November cited VA's two-year IT budgeting cycle as an example of the types of budgeting flexibilities the administration wants to test at other agencies.
At VA, CIO Roger Baker can shift funding within a program or pull back funding on a failing project until the following year if needed. This allows VA to make final decisions on its IT projects closer to their deployment dates, Zients said. The normal budget cycle requires agencies to plan detailed budgets for projects years in advance and provides little flexibility for moving funding within projects.
The administration is open to two-year and other budgeting options to improve IT investments, Kundra said. The IT reform plan calls for 12 pilot programs to be established by June to test various budget options. Three of the pilots will be at the Homeland Security, Energy and Agriculture departments, Kundra said.
Since announcing the plan for IT reforms, Kundra has begun meeting with CIOs and deputy CIOs, including those at DHS and the Energy and Agriculture departments. These one-on-one sessions will continue over the coming months to focus on executing the plan in ways that serve each agency's needs.
One reform deadline is March, when CIOs at each department must identify three systems that can move to cloud operations, enabling them to shut down agency-owned servers. Cloud services will help agencies meet another reform goal: to reduce data centers governmentwide by 40 percent.
Some agencies are starting the move to cloud services by transitioning their e-mail systems:
- The General Services Administration by October will move 17,000 e-mail accounts of employees and contractors to a cloud-based system.
- The Agriculture Department is consolidating 21 messaging and collaboration systems into one cloud-based system that will support 120,000 users.
- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission plans to launch a cloud-based notification system to alert employees via their mobile phones or work and personal e-mails of building closures and severe weather. The agency is considering migrating its 4,000 e-mail accounts to the cloud, but the lack of several features may halt that process. For instance, some offerings don't have read receipts or allow users to attach documents to meeting invitations, said NRC's deputy CIO Thomas Boyce.
Boyce meets regularly with an IT senior advisory committee to hammer out an agency-specific plan for shutting down legacy systems, moving services to the cloud and consolidating three data centers down to one.
- VA is considering shifting 400,000 to 500,000 e-mail accounts to the cloud. The agency has a senior executive or GS-15 employee overseeing and developing plans for each area of the administration's reform plan. The work of selecting cloud services starts this month.
Kundra predicts that e-mail and collaboration platforms, such as calendars and messaging, are likely services that will transition to a cloud operation by the end of the year. Back-office functions, such as financial services, and various software applications will eventually transition to the cloud.
Max Peterson, vice president and general manager of Dell Federal, anticipates agencies will use combinations of both public and private cloud services, where the government can keep its secure IT needs behind its firewall and make it accessible only to authorized users. An outside entity could provide shared services, such as e-mail or storage.
"We can nibble around the edge with e-mail ... but that's not where you're going to get the biggest bang for the buck," Peterson said.
That will come when agencies are further along with data center consolidation and begin moving more software applications to the cloud.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Nicole Blake Johnson
Quelle/Source: Federal Times, 21.01.2011
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