CIOs will easily meet first accountability initiative goals

Many federal agencies are far along in meeting the initial technology goals the White House laid out this month in its accountable government initiative, which means the next step should be ensuring the government receives a good return on information technology investments, a long-time chief information officer said on Thursday.

The Office of Management and Budget asked CIOs this month to measure their progress in meeting two goals as part of the initiative: transitioning to the government's new telecommunications contract Networx and consolidating data centers. Federal agencies already were merging data centers and moving to the contract before the Obama administration's Sept. 14 memo that listed the efforts as keys to improving efficiency and IT performance, said Steve Cooper, CIO at the Air Traffic Organization, which is part of the Federal Aviation Administration. He also was the Homeland Security Department's first CIO, serving from 2002 to 2005.

Cooper, who appeared on a panel Government Executive organized, said CIOs should also answer another question: Are we getting the business value of every dollar invested in IT? He suggested agencies could measure their progress with more formal portfolio management processes and by holding agency CIOs accountable for executing IT projects efficiently.

President Obama issued a memorandum to federal senior executives, including CIOs, on Sept. 14 emphasizing the importance of government reform efforts. "As the most senior managers in the federal government, you know how essential the work you and your colleagues do is to the nation," he wrote. "You also are aware what happens when your best efforts are thwarted by outdated technologies and outmoded ways of doing business."

The president's message was followed by a memo from federal Chief Performance Officer Jeffrey Zients, who outlined a series of goals for improving IT performance, including closing the technology gap between the government and the private sector, cutting underperforming IT projects, and publicly tracking progress on a new website, Performance.gov. Agencies' progress in consolidating data centers and in transitioning to Networx will be the first metrics published on Performance.gov.

Justice Department CIO Vance Hitch, who also appeared on the panel, said Justice's data center consolidation efforts will ease the conversion to Networx, but the enormity of the task means progress will be slow.

"It's not just a flip of the switch," he said. "[The transition] represents thousands of circuits and thousands of connections across the country. We went through the process and awarded a contract under Networx, but just rolling that out and implementing it is going to take the contractor awhile to do, even under the best of circumstances."

Congress has criticized agencies' delay in adopting Networx.

Hitch also said agencies likely will not realize the benefits of merging centers until they complete other standardization and virtualization work. "A lot of work is necessary in order to make data center consolidation a good business move," he said. "We need to do it in a rational way, and it's going to take time."

Cooper said FAA has no plans to buy a Networx contract for its telecommunications needs. The agency's current network is tightly guarded and for reasons of safety and national security, it cannot be connected to the Internet or other networks. "The FAA has a very, very different approach to the network environment," he said. "Every circuit, everything related to it is absolutely controlled by the FAA for obvious reasons. We can't afford to have anything affect that network."