Page 30 - Federal Computer Week, July 2019

Modernization
Yet although the federal IT budget is huge, it is far from monolithic. Spending is fractured and distributed like large crumbs across all agencies. And therein lies the problem. With all the money flowing to agencies in comparatively small increments, American taxpayers, Congress and even the White House lose visibility into the spending in a way that’s not commensurate with its importance. Imagine if the State Department was three times its current size and had no Cabinet-level person to lead it, little oversight and limited individual accountability.
Meanwhile, the government is hemorrhaging good money by trying to hold together antiquated IT systems. According to the Government Accountability Office and
the Office of Management and Budget’s 2019 budget docu- ment, over 80 percent of all IT spending goes to operations and maintenance (O&M) of “aging legacy systems, which pose efficiency, cybersecurity and mission risk issues, such as ever-rising costs to maintain them and an inabil- ity to meet current or expected mission requirements.”
O&M spending is over $64 billion a year — the cost of running more than three NASAs and more than seven Commerce Departments.
Appointing a modernization czar
Given this dismal reality, the government needs to get serious about technology modernization so it can stop
CIOs need a seat at the mission-critical table
By David Powner
Faster tax return processing, bet- ter telehealth services for veter- ans, new air traffic patterns that save fuel costs, streamlined com- mand and control for our military.
Think of any mission-critical challenge facing any government organization today, and technology is invariably a part of the solution. Technology — properly applied — has the potential to make massive improvements.
Of course, improperly applied, technology can cause costly and highly visible mistakes. And when mistakes happen, all too often it turns out that the agencies’ CIOs were not involved enough in making mission-critical decisions. Business leaders saw them in the “just keep the email systems working and lights on” role. Truth be told, some CIOs see them- selves in that role, too. And that’s part of the problem.
But just as important are the lost opportunities for making dra-
matic gains on mission objectives. CIOs and their staffs and col- leagues, including CTOs and chief information security officers, are the in-house technology experts. They are best equipped to under- stand not only how new technol- ogy will work within their organiza- tions, but how to extract the most value to support organizational mission changes around the new technology.
By and large, the private sector has recognized the problem, and corporate CIOs are now work- ing more closely with business units. And the U.S. government has made inroads, primarily pow- ered by the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA).
But there’s still a great deal of room for improvement. And this is a two-way street: Just as the business leaders within agencies need to give their CIOs a seat to solve mission-critical problems, the CIOs must be prepared to
take that seat.
In recent years, FITARA has
improved the role of CIOs relat- ed to reporting structures and authorities, relationships with chief financial and chief acqui-
sition officers, a more incremental approach to IT acquisitions, opera- tional efficiencies of
key infrastructure and business systems, and the transparency and risk management of both acquisi-
tions and operations.
FITARA has brought more vis- ibility to the CIO role and achieved con- siderable savings
by eliminating inef- ficient and duplica- tive infrastructure and business sys- tems. However,
30 July 2019 FCW.COM