Page 25 - FCW, April 2017
P. 25

3.6 million people are receiving duplicative identity theft protection services
from OPM
Agencies backsliding on FITARA
According to some experts, agen- cies’ progress on IT management, CIO empowerment and technology modern- ization has stagnated.
“We have taken some steps back- wards on progress in these areas toward the end of the prior adminis- tration and with the recent
change in administrations,” said Dave Powner, director of IT management issues at the Government Accountabil- ity Office.
Powner said the Office of Manage- ment and Budget must make sure CIOs have the authority they need.
Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) said the desire to make sure CIOs have adequate responsibil- ity and accountability for IT projects
is “very clear coming out of the White House.”
President Donald Trump said soon after taking office that he “would hold my Cabi- net secretaries and agency heads...totally accountable for the cybersecurity of their organizations.”
in part because only three of the 24 key agencies have a policy requiring CIOs to certify the use of incremental development, a mandate of FITARA.
“Recent history tells us that when OMB is involved in this oversight, prog- ress occurs,” Powner said, adding that “Congress needs to push OMB on this critical role.”
The challenge is complicated by the fact that “many agencies do not man- age inventory of software assets very well,” said Richard Spires, former CIO at the Department of Homeland Secu- rity. Agencies “are not going to replace tens of millions of lines of Cobol code anytime soon...but what we can do is modernize the infrastructure that stuff runs on and move much more to the cloud.”
Spires, who is now CEO of Learn- ing Tree International, said prioritiz- ing infrastructure upgrades over legacy application overhauls would help cut costs, simplify agencies’ business prac- tices, consolidate data and improve cybersecurity.
— Chase Gunter
critical systems, but Cutler said DLA is evaluating all options, including com- mercial solutions, to find the right bal- ance of cost, speed and agility.
As all those efforts progress, DLA will begin to realize significant cost savings, Cutler said, adding that she also expects some repurposing of DLA’s workforce once the agency is buying services instead of providing them in-house.
Furthermore, DLA recently added a chief data officer position, and officials are re-evaluating their approach to data.
“We really are not leveraging data as an asset, so we’re trying to change this whole mind-set within our organi- zation,” Cutler said.
— Chase Gunter
Testifying before the
House Oversight and Govern-
ment Reform Committee’s IT Subcommittee on March 28, Powner said that although the Federal IT Acqui- sition Reform Act has raised the pro- files of some agency CIOs, “many are still not viewed as part of the executive team.”
“More than half of the 24 CIOs reported they do not have authority over IT acquisitions,” he said, adding that “about one-third of the CIOs told us...they did not have the authority to stop any project that’s not going well.”
Dave Powner
Defense Logistics Agency goes virtual
The Defense Logistics Agency is in the process of divesting itself of its IT infrastructure. Agency officials plan to reach that goal with the help of the $6 billion J6 Enterprise Technology Ser- vices contract, awarded in December 2016 to 142 vendors in 21 task areas.
“What we expect to achieve with this particular contract is more agility so that we can have different providers provide different solution sets depend- ing on what our needs are,” said Kathy Cutler, DLA’s director of information operations and CIO, at an AFCEA NOVA event on March 30.
Cutler said DLA is transitioning to a virtual desktop model and moving away from laptops. It issued iPhones
to employees last year and continues to add business apps and functionality to the devices.
“[We] will be deploying some more of the capabilities associated with [Microsoft] Office 365,” she said. “We already have Skype everywhere. We have email just about complete. We will then be moving to Office online tools, SharePoint and OneDrive later this year.”
Cutler added that DLA intends to consolidate its data centers down to two by the end of the next fiscal year, and eliminating even those two centers is not out of the question.
For now, the Defense Information Systems Agency hosts DLA’s mission-
But Rep. Robin Kelly (D-Ill.), the subcommittee’s ranking member, said Trump’s hiring freeze and delay in fill- ing key IT positions, including the nam- ing of a permanent U.S. CIO, are hav- ing a negative impact on agencies’ IT capabilities.
Powner told the committee that only about 60 percent of agency IT projects rely on incremental development, which is the key to improving deliv- ery. He said the figure is not improving,
April 2017 FCW.COM 9































































   23   24   25   26   27