Failure to produce results puts IT projects on the chopping block

Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra called the moves "tough decisions." James Kegley

Obama administration officials have cut funding for the modernization of some information technology programs as a result of a governmentwide accountability system launched earlier this year, according to federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra.

"We've made some tough decisions across the board," Kundra said during an interview with Nextgov . In February, the Veterans Affairs Department announced it had terminated 12 IT projects using its own performance assessment tool -- the Program Management Accountability System -- and by preparing data for the IT Dashboard , an Office of Management and Budget Web site that tracks federal IT investments. VA initially suspended the projects and 33 other troubled systems in July, pending further review.

Now, the White House is following VA's lead with the TechStat evaluation program, which began in January. The initiative brings OMB officials and agency leaders together for in-person meetings to review IT Dashboard results and feedback from citizens. After a TechStat session, OMB takes action on underperforming projects by canceling, halting or overhauling them.

OMB officials have suspended system enhancements and turned around initiatives, Kundra said. By summertime, the White House also will unveil a refurbished IT Dashboard that delves deeper into the 7,000 federal IT investments listed on the current site. Kundra said the next iteration will offer better analytics and information feeds from agencies. Both features will reflect suggestions from citizens, lawmakers, federal auditors and chief information officers.

TechStat and the IT Dashboard already have helped redirect a major initiative at the Small Business Administration, Kundra said.

SBA was "going down a course that was costly" in administering identification cards for its employees as part of a homeland security policy dubbed HSPD-12, Kundra said. SBA had the added challenge of accommodating a workforce spread out across 68 district offices. Following an OMB TechStat meeting with SBA's chief operating officer and chief information officer, the agency opted to issue cards the General Services Administration developed rather than start from scratch with an in-house product. GSA's system was more cost-efficient because it already was available nationwide, SBA officials said.

"The SBA HSPD-12 program was on schedule and within budget; however, after reviewing the ongoing costs to completion and conducting an alternative analysis using the GSA solution, we determined we could significantly lower the cost per card issued and accelerate the implementation," SBA spokesman Michael Stamler said. "We believe we can accelerate the schedule by about 25-30 percent, saving us approximately $1.5 million."

But not all problematic projects will have a quick and easy solution, Kundra said.

VA's Learning Management System , an e-government initiative, was among the 45 IT projects the department suspended for mismanagement last summer. Nine months later, the project -- a system that delivers online instruction to VA employees -- is the only one that has yet to resume or be cut. No restart meeting has been scheduled as of yet. The agency is still paying the contractor, but only for operations and maintenance of the existing platform and not for development.

Nearly 300,000 staff, interns and health care contractors at Veterans Affairs rely on the system for on-the-job training. In 2009, personnel completed 3.9 million courses online, VA officials said on Friday. Veterans Affairs and the Office of Personnel Management, which is administering the contract on behalf of VA, would not disclose the cost of the entire contract, including operations and development since the initial award.

Kundra said a planned upgrade and any new releases remain on hold. "We're not putting capital at risk," he said. "Part of what we want to do in the government is to not just terminate projects . . . [but] make sure we turn them around so they deliver on their business cases."

VA Chief Information Officer Roger Baker and Kundra are proceeding with a review of the project.

"What we want to do is make sure that any action we take is grounded in evidence," Kundra said. "We've got a platform that delivers Web-based courses to thousands of people a year. You have to make sure you've thought through what is the impact on the agency's mission," if the upgrade is canceled or overhauled.

Baker addressed the e-training project during a March Webinar hosted by Government Executive . "That's the one system that we have not made a final stop or restart decision on," he said. "I'm a big-time supporter of distance learning and Internet-based learning. And so from that standpoint, we need something at least as good as LMS. If there are better systems out there or better approaches to it, I think we owe it to everybody inside VA to explore those, [and] potentially go [down] those paths as well."