OMB: It takes money to save money in IT operations

The Office of Management and Budget needs more money to facilitate face-to-face meetings with agency leaders to review faltering information technology projects so they can enforce corrective actions promised during those sessions, the federal chief information officer said on Thursday.

So-called TechStat sessions, which OMB began conducting in January 2010, would be held more frequently if lawmakers funded a proposed $60 million account that they chose not to support at all last year. The government spends about $80 billion annually on IT.

The fiscal 2011 budget request for "integrated, efficient and effective uses of IT" was $50 million. The $60 million pool of money proposed for fiscal 2012 also would support the White House strategy for shutting down 800 energy-intensive data centers and moving more federal computing to Web-based, or cloud, IT operations. The money would remain available until Sept. 2014.

"What's difficult as you look at these TechStat sessions is not the act of just conducting the TechStat sessions -- it's actually the follow-through and the follow-up, which take countless hours and resources to make sure that if Agency A has committed to going live in one month that we come back a month from there and say, 'You said you would go live. What happened?' " federal CIO Vivek Kundra told appropriators at a House subcommittee hearing.

The TechStat approach during the past year has contributed to a cost-savings of about $3 billion in life-cycle IT expenses, according to Kundra and federal auditors. "Our goal is to scale this capability across the federal government, increasing the number of programs that can be reviewed and hastening the speed at which interventions occur," he testified.

As of December 2010, OMB had held 58 sessions that resulted in the cancellation of four projects, including an initiative to automate the processing of flood insurance claims, and the partial defunding of about 10 others.

For instance, the Obama administration halted development spending on a permanent digital repository at the National Archives and Records Administration after a June TechStat meeting. Had that program, called the Electronic Records Archives, continued to follow original blueprints, it would have incurred up to $405 million in cost overruns, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Kundra described the time and money required to take action on TechStat decisions, when asked during Thursday's hearing how the proposed $60 million account would eliminate duplicative IT governmentwide. Lawmakers neither criticized nor praised the request.