Page 34 - FCW, August 2017

White House pushes TBM for
IT savings and smarter spending
At a half-day summit onTechnology Business Management, government and industry executives stressed the benefits of better data on IT investments
BY TROY K. SCHNEIDER
Chris Liddell, director of strategic initiatives at the White House, said he believes the federal gov- ernment might be spending as much as $200 billion on IT each year — far more than is generally acknowledged. Better data and metrics are critical to bringing that number down, he added.
“We think there’s a huge amount of money to be saved,” Liddell said at the White House Summit on Technology Business Management (TBM) in July. “The fact that we don’t have the right information...is one of the biggest issues that we face.”
The half-day summit brought togeth- er CIOs and chief financial officers from the public and private sectors, along with federal acquisition experts and other stakeholders, to explore ways to encourage agencies to adopt the TBM framework for categorizing and manag- ing IT investments.
“We have to keep in mind the end- game,” Acting U.S. CIO Margie Graves told attendees. And that endgame is “try- ing to answer the mission questions that our business owners have, [to] describe the impact and outcome for the mis- sion space.”
Michael Brown, Exxon Mobil’s vice president for IT and a TBM Council board member, offered an example of the payoffs that TBM can bring. When he took his current job, he said, only 11 percent of the IT projects in his portfolio generated a return for the company’s
shareholders. The rest he described as “keeping-the-lights-on stuff.” Last year, however, 70 percent of projects improved the bottom line.
“Is that all TBM?” he said. “Of course not. Is TBM foundational to what we did? Absolutely.... That is a big chunk of us understanding cost.”
In an interview after the event, Graves said federal IT, acquisition and finance leaders must work together to gather and analyze the data to help mis- sion owners determine “how to most effectively spend their dollars.”
“If we do that, then we’re having the business conversation,” she said. “We’re not having an IT conversation.... It’s ‘What am I doing to buy down cyber risk?’ And ‘How do I make sure that my next dollar is going to the most impor- tant thing?’ That’s what the CFOs want to know, that’s what your business leads want to know.”
Graves and U.S. Deputy Controller Mark Reger both acknowledged that simply gathering the required data is difficult, let alone standardizing it. Reger said implementation of the Data Accountability and Transparency Act and other efforts have created a back- bone for coding and comparing data, but “what we really have to do is figure out what data we want to collect...and get that information out to everybody.”
He and Graves added that federal contractors could play an important role in moving the effort forward. Reger
said the Defense Department is work- ing with vendors to determine “what the code structure is that they need to incorporate on their invoices when they submit [them]. It may not be a complete code, but it’ll help tremendously.”
“If you don’t have a lot of the data in the federal space, start with your contractors,” Graves said during a post-event conversation with report- ers. “If you can give them a way to do their invoicing or a way to gather their costs...then you can start there. It’s all about establishing a standard...and then meeting the agencies where they are in the maturity model.”
The government has a long history of pushing reporting requirements onto its vendors, and industry has often com- plained that it deters many companies from seeking federal business. Former U.S. CIO Tony Scott, however, said cod- ing purchases to facilitate TBM should be easy to do.
“I think this is a fairly simple mat- ter,” Scott, who attended the summit, told FCW afterward. “If the govern- ment issues a [purchase order] with the right codes on it and specifies that it in turn expects to see those codes on the invoice that is turned in to get paid, it will all work. Once these flow through the various systems, you can really start to get a better picture of what is going on.”
He added that “this is what the stan- dardized taxonomy was all about — the
28 August 2017 FCW.COM