Page 28 - GCN, May 2016

SECURING THE ENTERPRISE
Executive Viewpoint
ONE-ON-ONE WITH DAVID POWNER
GAO’s Director of Information Technology Management Issues describes his agency’s progress on infrastructure.
DAVID POWNER
DIRECTOR OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT ISSUES, GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE (GAO)
The federal government’s
“Cloud First” policy is supposed
to be the governing mandate on
how agencies acquire and deploy information technology systems. However, a number of agencies are not yet on that path or are not very far along. David Powner, Director of Information Technology Management
Issues at the Government Accountability Office (GAO), studies federal government infrastructure issues from both the agency and interagency levels. Powner recently spoke with journalist Francis Rose
Powner: No, we don’t have as clear a picture of the extent to which federal agencies are in the cloud, or which agencies are utilizing cloud services more than others, as we do on the data centers. We know we’re transitioning to the cloud somewhat, but the extent is unknown. We clearly know we’re not in the cloud to the extent we should be.
There are still too many agencies that don’t have credible transition plans. There are about ten agencies we see that really don’t have any plans, and we have made recommendations
in our latest report for those plans to be put in place. Some agencies commented they had already conducted their consolidation and savings to date. They expected few additional consolidations and savings going forward. We went back to some of those agencies and said, “You can say you’re done, but you’re really not, because the metrics actually show you’re far from optimizing your centers.”
Rose: You mentioned the intention of FITARA to remedy the issue of who’s in charge of IT projects at agencies. The role of ensuring that happens falls to Congress. That could be potentially very difficult to do in the next nine to 12 months as we go through a presidential election and a transition from this administration to another.
Powner: There are several key things here. We’re expecting a new scorecard on FITARA implementation to come out in May. We also expect Congress is going to ask the GAO to do a series of reports looking at FITARA implementation issues through the transition period.
A lot of good things are happening at OMB. They’re doing a lot of solid planning. When you look at the strategic sourcing initiative the Administrator of Federal Procurement Policy Anne Rung has put in place, and many of the things that Federal CIO Tony Scott has put in place, you see great plans to implement the FITARA law. It’s that combination of the legislative and executive branch working together that ensures we don’t lose momentum throughout the transition period.
This interview continues at carahsoft.com/innovation/one-on-one-powner
about what he sees government doing now with infrastructure and what he sees agencies doing moving forward.
Rose: Data center consolidation is the dominant IT infrastructure issue in government right now. Where does that effort stand? Do the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and GAO have
a handle on the number of data centers yet? Are the numbers even the most important metric to understand in data center consolidation?
Powner: We’re starting to get a good handle on the numbers. The inventory changes are slowing down. We’re always going to find a few things here and there, but that’s starting to solidify. Obviously, the focus so far has been on those inventories, what we’re closing, and the dollars we’re saving. That’s all well and good, and we still want to have some of that. But there’s also been a real shift toward focusing on the appropriate metric. Going forward, we really want to utilize the facilities efficiently, as well as the equipment within those facilities, so we’re truly optimizing these data centers.
Rose: If we’re still talking about metrics for measuring data center consolidation and maximum utilization of servers, we’re not going to make a broad-based transition to the cloud for a long time to come, are we?
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