Page 18 - FCW, May/June 2018

IT Leadership
you had very strong sort of historical norms and cultural ways of doing busi- ness that just weren’t going to change overnight because you...passed a law saying IT is important,” he said.
Indeed, some CIOs still struggle to control or explain IT spending deci- sions made by their agencies. IRS CIO Gina Garza shocked and angered law- makers when she testified in October 2017 that her office did not know about or sign off on a $7 million bridge con- tract to Equifax for identity manage- ment services that was awarded less than a month after the firm announced a major data breach affecting hundreds of millions of Americans.
At the same hearing, Dave Powner, director of IT management issues at the Government Accountability Office, was asked to square Garza’s statement with the authorities that the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act vests in CIOs. He replied that there are “walls between these organizations.”
That disconnect between a CIO’s authorities on paper and in practice is not uncommon. A GAO report released in January states that auditors identi- fied billions of dollars in underreported IT obligations. Over half of the 22 agen- cies reviewed did not follow Office of Management and Budget requirements for CIO review of IT acquisition plans. In a randomly selected sample of 96 IT contracts, only 11 went through the CIO’s office for approval.
“FITARA was a good step in empow- ering our CIOs, but one of the things we found was CIOs were getting push- back from CFOs and weren’t getting the support they needed from agency and deputy agency heads,” said Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas).
That realization was one reason Hurd drafted a provision in the Mod- ernizing Government Technology Act that gives CIOs more budget flexibility in the form of working capital funds for IT modernization priorities. “You can’t hold the CIO accountable if he or she doesn’t have all the tools they need to
do their job,” he said.
The Trump administration has also
taken a crack at the problem by issu- ing an executive order on May 15 that is designed to further strengthen CIO authorities.
In a background call accompanying the order’s rollout, a senior adminis- tration official said strengthening CIO authorities to better align with their responsibilities was “something that previous administrations had made some progress on but clearly hadn’t solved.” The new order gives CIOs more input in the hiring of personnel, direct reporting relationships with agency leaders and better visibility into IT spending at their agencies.
Matt Lira, a special assistant to
“There are some agencies where you had very strong sort of historical norms and cultural ways of doing business that just weren’t going
to change overnight because you... passed a law saying IT is important.”
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the president and the White House’s point person for government IT, said the lack of coordination within agen- cies has been a major impediment to modernization efforts and that more must be done if the administration is to accomplish one of the largest IT trans- formations ever attempted.
“We believe very strongly that struc- ture dictates behavior and that behav- ior ultimately determines results,” Lira said. “And one of the key structural problems we identified last year is that the role of CIOs at agencies was...too often on a spectrum. Some agency CIOs are incredibly empowered and incredibly central to decision-making, [while others] are CIO in name only.”
TONY SCOTT, FORMER U.S. CIO