The White House yesterday issued a 25-point action plan that establishes ownership responsibilities and deadlines for each in the coming months as a means to keep federal information technology (IT) projects on track and within budget so that the improved functionality promised by these efforts can be realized every few quarters rather than every few years as is currently the case.
“Many projects use “grand design” approaches that aim to deliver functionality every few years, rather than breaking projects into more manageable chunks and demanding new functionality every few quarters,” the introduction to the new plan says in outlining the problems facing federal IT efforts. “In addition, the Federal Government too often relies on large, custom, proprietary systems when “light technologies” or shared services exist.”
The 25 Point Implementation Plan To Reform Federal Information Technology Management was issued by Vivek Kundra, chief information officer (CIO) for the United States.
The plan notes that since the 1990s the government has been adopting best practices for IT management that are consistently obstructed. The purpose of the plan is to help “clear these obstacles” so that the government can use IT to be more efficient and effective, it says.
The action items include things such as:
- Completing detailed implementation plans to consolidate at least 800 federal data centers by 2015. The consolidation effort was called for earlier this year and the new reform plan wants the White House Office of Management and Budget and federal agencies to have the implementation plans in place within the next six months;
- Also within six months the Federal CIO is supposed to publish a cloud computing strategy to “accelerate the safe and secure adoption of cloud computing across the government.” To jump start this effort, the plan requires each agency CIO to identify and create plans for three “must move” services to cloud solutions and retire the existing legacy systems. It also requires that one or more of these “must move” efforts be fully migrated within a year;
- And another action item is aimed at improving collaboration between agencies and industry before a Request for Proposals (RFP) is issued by creating efficient and inexpensive means for interaction between the two groups. For example, the Implementation Plan pointed to the recent use by the government of an online “wiki” tool to quickly examine solutions for an upcoming federal IT effort that allowed large and small companies to discuss the best solutions and also “allowed participants to tag and vote on the best ideas, providing the agency with a list of top priorities and key themes that made the feedback both more comprehensive and more actionable than what could have been obtained through traditional methods.” Plans for a pre-RFP interactive platform are due within six months.