The federal government still lacks the skill sets necessary to effectively implement information technology (IT) programs with minimal amount of waste, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) senior IT executive.
“(It’s) the biggest problem I see across the government,” DHS Chief Information Officer Richard Spires said recently at the Center for National Policy think tank in Washington. “It’s critically important to have a program management office overseeing particularly large IT programs that’s got the right skills.”
Spires said DHS is bolstering training and mentoring capabilities and is working on career paths for skills like systems engineering, configuration management, test and evaluation and development, among others, so it can build a cadre of people over time who really know how to do these well.
“I’m a big believer you need some really talented individuals on the government side that can support oversight on these programs,” Spires said. As DHS CIO, Spires is responsible for the agency’s $5.6 billion investment in IT. “You really need a solid program management office.”
Though he said DHS doesn’t have a vast pool of IT talent to select from, Spires said the agency is setting up “Centers of Excellence” to capitalize on its existing expertise and develop best practices.
“We don’t have tremendous expertise throughout the organization, but we have pockets of expertise,” Spires said. “How do we leverage out of that smaller number this idea of them having a community of practice, then working together to drive tools and templates.”
Spires advocated active governance for “very large” IT programs with real oversight. Spires cited the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS) Transformation program, an effort to move the division’s Electronic Immigration System (ELIS) from a paper-based application and adjudication process to an electronic one to automate the process of immigrant processing. Spires said he sits on an executive steering committee, chaired by CIS Director Alejandro Mayorkas, that meets every other week with key decisions made in that body. USCIS is a division of DHS.
Spires said it is not proper oversight for an agency turning around releases, or a phase of development, at a rate of every three or four months, as he said DHS does, to have a governance committee meeting only once a quarter. Spires said a governance committee needs to align with the tempo of how the program is operating.
“That’s what I mean by acts of governance and real oversight of these programs,” Spires said.
Effectively implementing IT programs has been a challenge for other federal agencies. The Air Force last year canceled its Expeditionary Combat Support System (ECSS) after spending $1 billion and failing to produce any military capability. ECSS was an effort to globally view, standardize and manage logistics resources to help close process gaps and use enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to more efficiently manage logistics-like end items, materiel and people. The Air Force’s Defense Enterprise Accounting and Management System (DEAMS) program is also 7.5 years behind schedule while its original lifecycle cost estimate has more than quintupled to over $2 billion.
Spires also touched on sequestration’s potential effect on DHS IT, saying DHS is moving to consolidate data centers and optimize IT infrastructure. Part of this is moving to cloud services, Spires said, adding DHS currently has 11 cloud enterprise services in production. Sequestration, the $1.2 trillion decade-long budget reduction, began March 1.
“Sequestration, of course, makes that much more difficult, but that’s our strategy,” Spires said.