Page 24 - FCW, January 2016
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FCW Roundtable
as many as 15 people for a larger department.
No one expected adequate staffing anytime soon, however.
“We’re going to have to get creative,” one CIO said. “There won’t be as many people as we want this year.”
For larger agencies, a FITARA headcount of eight seemed to be a realistic, if ambitious, goal. But “I don’t know how we’re going to do that,” another CIO said. “Today, there’s nobody whose job it is to do this, or it’s everybody’s job. We need more resources under FITARA to look at all those acquisition oppor- tunities and look for efficiencies.”
Others held out hope for help from the Office of Manage- ment and Budget.
“In our pass-back, this year and last year, we got money for digital services,” one agency participant said. “That’s great. We would love to have resources for digital services. But there is more value in having some resources apply to FITARA and ensuring that we’re doing the things we say we’re going to do.... My hope for OMB and others is [that] they look at this and reconsider as well. Is there flexibility in how we get some of those resources?”
A CIO who represented a large federated agency said his team might look to the components for help. “Can we cajole the agencies into funding a small portion of that contract [to
cover FITARA implementation] and have some sort of reim- bursable agreement?”
A non-CIO at the table urged her colleagues to turn to acqui- sition teams for help. “Don’t throw your requirement with your contracting office,” she said. “Invite the contracting office to come sit with your team. [They] really want to help you.”
Several participants said more budget expertise is needed in CIO shops. “A very, very important part of what’s going to separate success from failure here is having that skill and that expertise in the organization,” one executive said. “To be suc- cessful, IT shops are going to have to have budget people who are as good as the agency budget people are — and better in the sense that they know IT backwards and forwards.”
That reality check is sorely needed, a government participant agreed, because “we have good budget models, which are not to be confused with how IT really works.”
CIOs voiced frustration at having so many needs with no way to fund them. “FITARA is an unfunded mandate,” one said. “And if I want to move some people around, I’ve got to look forward to nine months of paperwork to get these people over into the other side.”
Still, an industry participant said, “we can’t let the fact that you’re not going to get all the resources in the CIO shop stop
Why agencies don’t know what they spend on IT
The Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act
puts agency CIOs in charge of their organizations’ IT spending, but there’s a catch: Most agencies have no clue how much IT is being purchased or at what cost.
Transportation Department CIO Richard McKinney has been especially candid about the challenge.
When asked during a December panel discussion how he would know when FITARA was working, McKinney replied: “I’ll define success when I can look my leadership in the eye...and say I understand my costs.”
Although years of experience in both the public and private sectors have given him
a “seat-of-the-pants sense” that FITARA- mandated changes will save money, he said, it’s impossible to point to numbers that can prove it. “I want to have real data.”
Thanks to an industry/government collaboration that’s been underway since last spring, real data is now a real possibility.
McKinney, Interior Department CIO January 2016 FCW.COM
Sylvia Burns, Agriculture Department Deputy CIO Joyce Hunter and others have been working with theTBM Council — a Bellevue, Wash.-based industry group devoted to better technology business management — to hammer out a standard taxonomy for categorizing federal IT costs. The council has a taxonomy and toolkit tailored to Fortune 500 companies, and
a small working group has been meeting monthly since June 2015 to adapt those resources for federal agency use.
The effort has been dubbed the Federal Commission on IT Cost, Opportunity, Strategy andTransparency — or the Federal IT COST Commission.
McKinney said the TBM Council reached out to the Office of Management and Budget and offered to share its work. While on the West Coast in May, several federal
IT executives sat in on aTBM Council board meeting and were sold on the taxonomy’s potential.
“The private-sector CIOs just kept saying to me, ‘Richard, you’ve got to get to where
you can understand your costs,’“ McKinney said. “‘Until you understand your costs, you just can’t have good conversations with the business units.You’re not going to be able to prove your point.’“
He added that all the industry CIOs
had stories of how they’d identified cost discrepancies and opportunities for significant savings — and were suddenly viewed by their CEOs as strategic business partners rather than “cost anchors.”
Suzanne Chartol, who is theTBM Council’s director for the Federal IT COST Commission, told FCW that the group is focusing on four workstreams:
1. A central taxonomy. This will help agencies group “IT costs for apples-to- apples comparisons,” Chartol said. There are towers and sub-towers for the categories
of IT, as well as cost pools and sub-pools. “As you go up each layer, you’re rebundling and reclassifying the costs so you can do accurate benchmarking,” she said.
2. Investment workstreams. They
will help agencies track IT assets over time,


































































































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