White House announces plan for review of all government IT projects

The White House plans "relentless oversight" of the entire federal information technology portfolio, which will include a bottom-up review of all projects, Vivek Kundra, federal chief information officer, said at a news briefing on Wednesday.

The Obama administration plans to crack down on IT projects that do not work and to focus on the execution of those that are performing as designed, Kundra said. He provided few specifics about the review but said the federal government will no longer "put good money after bad" in pursuing troubled projects such as the Defense Integrated Military Human Resources System, which the department canceled earlier in February after investing 12 years and $1 billion.

A Veterans Affairs Department program to track progress and improve management of IT projects is an example of how the administration plans to monitor the federal IT portfolio, Kundra said. VA Chief Information Officer Roger Baker launched the Program Management Accountability System in June 2009, which required program managers in charge of problematic IT projects to deliver systems and applications incrementally, rather than all at once, and to stick to a strict schedule of finishing portions of the project or face being replaced.

Kundra also said the Office of Management and Budget's IT Dashboard provides valuable insight into the federal technology portfolio and OMB will rely on it for oversight.

VA already hadplaced 45 IT projects under PMAS oversight, and the department announced on Tuesday that all IT projects would be managed using the accountability system.

Baker told reporters that VA has between 250 and 282 ongoing IT projects, and as a result of the PMAS review, Veterans Affairs has canceled 12, which he views as money added to his budget.

Although VA's $3.3 billion IT budget request for fiscal 2011 is the same as fiscal 2010, Baker said PMAS "gave us a budget increase by [allowing] us to do better with the dollars we have." Canceling the 12 IT projects resulted in savings of $54 million this year, he said.

Richard Griffin, VA's deputy inspector general, told lawmakers at a House Veterans' Affairs Committee hearing on Tuesday that the department faces difficult problems in financial management because it lacks an integrated system, which is still under development at a projected cost of $608 million.

The Government Accountability Office reported in December 2009 that VA must solve major development problems with the portion of its Financial and Logistics Integrated Technology Enterprise program intended to manage physical assets and inventories. Baker said the logistics program faces "substantial issues," and he has slowed development of the system until "the asset management piece can be successfully demonstrated."

Griffin also expressed concern about VA's ability to manage its HealtheVet program designed to modernize the department's health care IT systems, which has a planned budget of $346 million in fiscal 2010.

The bulk of the programs VA canceled in its first PMAS review are from HealtheVet initiatives, including:

--An eight-year project to develop a patient scheduling system that cost $167 million.

--Pharmacy software designed to reduce occurrences of adverse drug interactions and to provide less expensive formularies.

--A system to store chemistry and hematology lab results in a new health data repository.

--Using barcodes to track blood products.

--A program to transmit medical imagery among VA medical facilities for remote interpretation.

--A radiology standardization project.

--A redesign of the enrollment system used to compile veteran military service and demographic information for VA health care facilities.

--A server that determines which patient files clinicians can access.