Page 17 - FCW, May/June 2018

Clockwise from left:
Steven VanRoekel, former U.S. CIO Casey Coleman, former GSA CIO
Tony Scott, former U.S. CIO
Richard Spires, former DHS CIO
U.S. CIO Suzette Kent
Terry Halvorsen, former DOD CIO
Linda Cureton, former NASA CIO
Karen Evans, former e-gov administrator
The federal government spends nearly $100 billion every year on IT and has embarked on a mis-
sion of modernization that will only put the technology and its ringleaders closer to the spotlight.
It wasn’t always this way.
A common observation within the community is that before the Clinger- Cohen Act of 1996 codified many of the CIO authorities that have come to define the role, CIOs were viewed by agency leaders as glorified versions of tech support rather than C-suite execu- tives charged with steering critical aspects of mission delivery.
“If you go back even more than 10 years ago, the CIO was seen as pro- viding commodities — the desktops and the phones,” said Maria Roat, the Small Business Administration’s CIO. “I think over the last decade that has really changed to where the CIO is seen as a partner to the business.”
Roat and others argue that the role of technology in government has steadily shifted since the rise of the internet from being a tool on the periphery to playing an essential role in delivering services and achieving mis- sions. CIOs are now weighing in on aspects of agencies’ budgets, procure- ment activities and human resources capabilities. As a result, many CIOs cite good working relationships with chief financial officers and visibility into budget and procurement decisions as essential to their jobs.
Rod Turk, who serves as acting CIO at the Commerce Department, said today’s CIO needs to be “a 360-degree” executive — someone who under- stands not just technology but also contracting, communications, budget- ing, policy and cross-agency collabora- tion. A failure to competently operate in any of those arenas can be fatal to a CIO’s career.
“That’s not necessarily bits and bytes,” Turk said. “It’s somebody who
T echnology is king in government. has a technical understanding but then
applies it to those softer disciplines like financial management, commu- nications, change management and contracting to get you what you need.”
David Wennergren, who served as CIO at the Department of the Navy and vice chairman of the CIO Council, said there is a hunger to fill in many of the gaps in knowledge and capabilities that have arisen from this spurt of technol- ogy adoption, but that desire has yet to solidify into a coherent modern role for CIOs.
That drive has in some ways boost- ed CIOs’ profile and powers, but Wen- znergren said it has also diluted those powers. As evidence, he pointed to the proliferation of other technology leaders at agencies, such as chief infor- mation security officers, chief privacy officers and chief data officers.
“Every time a new imperative comes up, we oftentimes try to address it by creating another chief,” said Wenner- gren, who is now a managing director at Deloitte Consulting. “While it helps sometimes to have a named leader who’s going to put energy behind some- thing new, at some point it’s time to rationalize: What is it that you want your information leader to do?”
The most obvious answer would be to oversee and manage the gov- ernment’s use of technology. Yet many former and current CIOs complain that they still lack visibility into and control over their agency’s IT spend- ing decisions, even though lawmakers have passed legislation over the years designed to address those limitations.
CIO in name only
Tony Scott, who served as U.S. CIO during the final years of the Obama administration, was one of many for- mer and current government IT lead- ers who said the siloed nature of many federal agency operations remains a primary impediment for CIOs.
“There are some agencies where
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