Broader budget authority could help CIOs cut costs

One way to wring more savings from the federal information technology enterprise in a time of flat or declining budgets is to give agency chief information officers broader power to make financial decisions, Veterans Affairs CIO Roger Baker said Monday.

Baker is the only agency CIO with authority, provided by Congress, to unilaterally cancel IT spending projects or to shift funding from one project to another. This allowed him to cancel about $700 million in IT spending during his first year in office and to return about $400,000 of that money to the Treasury Department.

Baker also is about to launch a policy to disallow personal deskside printers departmentwide, which VA estimates could save up to $100 million over several years.

He was speaking in a panel discussion at the American Council for Technology-Industry Advisory Council Executive Leadership Conference in Williamsburg, Va.

Toner cartridges for small, personal printers cost significantly more per page than larger toners for networked computers, Baker said, but the savings are quite small unless you look at the policy change on an agencywide basis -- rather than on a building or division level where such decisions would be delegated if Baker didn't have overall budget authority.

The printer policy, which Baker said he plans to officially unveil soon, was one of several recommendations made by VA's Ruthless Reduction Task Force earlier this month, according to a Federal News Radio report. VA officials have not released the report publicly yet. The reduction task force was charged with finding innovative ways to trim department IT spending.

"VA is a great pilot project," Baker told Nextgov during Monday's conference. "It pretty much proves that consolidation of IT in every federal department would save hundreds of millions of dollars . . . There's nothing really magic about what we've done at VA. We have great CIOs at other agencies and given the same authority and the same backing I have, they'd do exactly the same thing and pull exactly the same type of money out of their IT budgets as I have."