Page 7 - GCN, May 2017

ADVANCED
Agencies may be making more progress than it seems, but there is still much to be done.
Take FITARA to the Next Level
IT Playb k
SPONSORED REPORT
Federal departments and agencies should be well on their way toward satisfying the requirements of the
Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA), game-changing legislation that will change the way government manages IT. FITARA is clearly ambitious, but it is also exactly what government needs.
Done right, FITARA will
help agencies acquire IT within weeks instead of years, foster innovation, and save money across the board. Among other goals,
it requires agencies align IT resources with agency missions;
establish government-wide IT management controls; create
a common baseline; and give agency CIOs more authority for IT development, integration, delivery and operations.
So far, though, no agency has achieved an “A” grade in four key areas: Data Center Consolidation, IT Portfolio Review Savings, Incremental Development and Risk Assessment Transparency. Also,
no agency has yet achieved the Common Baseline, a framework that delineates the specific authorities of CIOs, among other things. So there is clearly still work to be done.
One reason agencies may be having trouble making the grade
is continued reliance on legacy systems. A report from Meritalk found agencies spend 73 cents of each IT dollar on legacy systems.
A study from Grant Thornton found agencies continue to wrestle with siloed and inaccessible data across the enterprise and different domains. These are systemic issues. The same Meritalk report found less than half were sure they could meet the requirements of FITARA by 2021.
As dire as these statistics may sound, it might not be that bad. One factor is the way FITARA is scored. Many believe the scoring method isn’t accurate because it
is based on budget formulation documents instead of IT execution documents. David Wray, CTO
for Federal Alliances at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), believes agencies are actually doing better than scores would indicate.
In fact, many agencies seem to be making progress toward satisfy- ing FITARA requirements. For example, the Grant Thornton study revealed every agency interviewed said they were using Agile devel- opment methodologies and CIOs are moving more quickly toward DevOps. Both of those factors are critical to the Incremental Develop- ment requirement. That same study also revealed spending on develop- ment modernization and enhance- ment has increased over each of the past several years while spending
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