There’s far to go on the path to fixing federal IT. As House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz recently told an audience of federal employees: “I hear the horror stories throughout your organization. The federal government is spending close to $100 billion a year on IT and in many ways it doesn’t work. I mean, I hear these stories about how some agencies just got Windows 95. … There’s one group that told us they just got off of a DOS operating system.”
Another pain point: The traditional “waterfall” approach to IT acquisition, in which large-scale projects are designed, developed and implemented in their entirety — and all too often end up significantly off the mark from their budget, schedule and performance targets. Recall the failed 2013 launch of Healthcare.gov, which cost hundreds of millions.
The sorry state of federal cybersecurity is another sore point, as is the government’s slow progress to modernize many processes that are still done manually.
There is an agenda in place to address these problems. Current administration efforts to encourage widespread use of shared services, agile IT development, cloud services, Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) tools, smarter services delivery, evidence-based IT portfolio reviews (known as PortfolioStat) and other best practices are promising and deserve wide support.
The question is whether they are robust enough. Probably not. Progress remains slow. But the government, we are often reminded, is a slow-moving ocean liner that turns wide and slowly. Mostly that’s the result of organizational and cultural resistance to change. But that, in itself, must change as well, and that’s a harder challenge — but not an impossible one, as we are seeing with the Veterans Affairs Department, the Defense Health Agency and the General Services Administration, all of which are undergoing major organizational and cultural renovations.
The president’s 2016 budget proposals make big investments in key IT initiatives, such as cybersecurity and the scaling up of U.S. Digital Services, among other things, to expand on what’s been started. These programs deserve congressional support.
But what’s needed even more are clean-slate reviews at all agencies to determine what’s working and what isn’t when it comes to modernization, mission effectiveness, improved customer focus and service delivery.
Steve Watkins
Editor
Editorial: Modernization means more than IT
