Page 24 - FCW, August 15, 2016

HOW IT WORKS
idea of water use on a monthly timestamp, but that’s many years down the road,” she said.
A $5.8 billion
It would require significant improvements to data collection and estimation techniques, but states seem keen on improving their water data, she added.
argument for better
“The response has been over- whelming,” Dalton said. “States are very eager. The response to the program has been phenom- enal.”
IT management
As part of the program, USGS organized stakeholder meetings and conference calls to connect teams from around the country. The agency will continue mak- ing grants, now on the basis of merit, in the coming years.
More than 40 states applied for federal money to write their work plans, and dozens of state aides join the USGS conference calls.
“One of the things we heard was that there’s not really an outlet for state water-use people to talk about water use and the work they do,” Dalton said.
Fishman said he imagines even bigger possibilities for fed- eral water data. He said the gov- ernment could develop a water version of the Energy Informa- tion Administration, which was created during the 1970s energy crisis.
“The goal is simple: We need to get the most out of the water we have available, at the most reasonable cost,” Fishman said. “We can’t possibly do that without information about who is using water and how much they’re using every day.” n
The IT COST Commission has released a new taxonomy and metrics for managing IT spending and says big agency savings can result from better data
22 August 15, 2016 FCW.COM
BY TROY K. SCHNEIDER
For more than a year, agency CIOs, Office of Management and Budget staffers and other federal IT experts have been working with top corporate technology executives to hash out a taxonomy and metrics for managing IT spending. On July 21, the group unveiled its report and recom- mendations — and asserted that a full embrace of “technology business man- agement” could save agencies $5.8 bil- lion over five years.
The Commission on IT Cost, Oppor- tunity, Strategy and Transparency is an effort to bring to government the standards and practices developed by the TBM Council for the private sec- tor. TBM Council President Chris Pick told FCW that the report involved hun- dreds of interviews across many agen- cies and monthly meetings with IT and finance executives, all devoted to tai- loring commercial best practices to the needs of the federal government.
The $5.8 billion estimate, mean- while, came from Forrester Research’s analysis of agency IT spending and the sorts of efficiencies current users of the TBM model have realized.
“This is really about...optimizing federal cost and value in the age of \[the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act\],” Pick said. He called the report “a purpose-built set of recommenda- tion for the federal landscape.”
Central to the report is the Federal TBM Taxonomy — what Pick called a four-layer cake of standardized cat- egories for cost pools: “IT Towers” such as computing power and stor- age, applications and services, and the programs or business units that spend the money and benefit the IT resources.
The goal, as the report puts it, is to create “a common language so that the terms ‘server’ and ‘compute,’ for example, are understood by every-