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in CIO authorities that would be addressed in the administration’s May 15 executive order.
“We’re still working on empowering CIOs with the full authority to affect the outcome for which we’re holding them accountable,” Kent said. “I mean things like setting the technology direc- tion, authority to hire for the skills that are needed, authority to manage the budget and the opportunity to sit at the table with agency and government leadership.”
Of course, both Clinger-Cohen and FITARA were designed to achieve much the same goals. The result, though, has been a fragmented real- ity in which many CIOs are regularly
“What’s important is not only being able to elevate and pull out the best of what’s already happening in government, but to bring some of those private-sector practices and implement that discipline more broadly.”
ogy-related contracts. Yet as GAO has pointed out, that is often not the case. Wennergren said creating statute after statute won’t solve the prob- lem if the culture within an agency remains unchanged. “To me, the issue revolves more around: What does an agency think a CIO is there for and what do they want that CIO to work on?” he said. “Because if you think about it — I don’t say this in a deni- grating way...FITARA was just sort of a reiteration of the message of Clinger-Cohen: Does your CIO have
a seat at the table?”
Furthermore, “you see all manner
of things in federal agencies right now,” he added. “You see CIOs bur- ied deep in an organization, CIOs who are direct strategic leaders reporting to the head of the agency, you see CIOs who are sort of stuck in the net- work administration and compliance regime of the agency, and CIOs who are viewed as transformation change leaders. I think more laws [and poli- cies] don’t necessarily help solve this. But a recognition that the way we acquire and deliver IT has changed and what we are doing to actually embrace that change inside our orga- nizations — that is more important.” n
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SUZETTE KENT, U.S. CIO
locked out of key technology decision- making processes.
Dave McClure, who served at GAO and the General Services Administra- tion, helped write the Clinger-Cohen Act in 1996. While drafting the law, he said, there was “a general confidence that if the CIO had a direct reporting relationship to the agency head, he or she would be empowered, listened to and naturally given greater responsibil- ity in the budget area of IT.”
That didn’t happen, said McClure, who is now director of CIO advisory services at Accenture, and lawmakers eventually revisited the topic with FIT- ARA in 2014. That law explicitly gives CIOs the authority to approve their agency IT budgets and major technol-
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