CIO Council Launches Best Practices Website

A how-to guide for federal IT managers hit the web Wednesday with case studies on major IT transitions at the departments of State, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs.

The new website is a best practices guide for IT system acquisition, reform and maintenance, which was promised in federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra's 25-point IT reform plan published in December.

The site was produced by the CIO Council's best practices committee. The council described it as a soft launch with more case studies to come.

The case studies, which average about six pages, outline a problem with an existing IT system and detail how it was modified in recent months to be more efficient, responsive, or cheaper.

The USDA case study, for example, describes transitioning the agency's 21 separate email systems, all housed on federal servers, into a single, integrated system that's housed in privately-owned cloud computing space.