Earlier this year, the Office of Management and Budget released guidance for the implementation of the federal IT Acquisition Reform Act. FITARA is the IT reform package signed into law in December 2014.
Over the past few months, I have met with numerous federal agency CIOs and various executives in federal procurement to better understand their perspectives on FITARA and its implementation.
The overwhelming focus of FITARA implementation has been on agency CIO/CTOs, and the perceived additional authority they would be granted. This relatively narrow focus limits the understanding of the potential value of FITARA. I have instead been struck by the fundamental possibilities presented by the parts of FITARA that deal with better IT training and guidance. In a nutshell, Congress enacted FITARA to improve the performance of major IT investments by lowering the risk associated with them. There is no more patience for massive IT projects running way over schedule and budget and, in the end, delivering little to no value.
This fact is clear in the specific language used in FITARA to introduce the subject of training: The purpose of this section is to ensure timely progress by federal agencies toward developing, strengthening, and deploying information technology acquisition cadres consisting of personnel with highly specialized skills in information technology acquisition, including program and project managers.
FITARA focuses on a number of measures to make federal IT more efficient, such as increasing the authority and accountability of federal agency level CIOs, improving the governance over such investments, driving additional IT efficiencies, and the expansion of training and the use of what are called “IT cadres.”
The CIOs that I met with raised some common themes to describe the problems with IT acquisitions. One of these is the notion that the Federal Acquisition Regulation needs an overhaul.
The acquisition executives I met with strongly disagree. They assert that flexibilities already exist within the FAR that would allow any IT acquisition to be tailored to the characteristics of modern approaches such as agile development and cloud computing.
The other very common belief is that training is required on both the CIO and acquisition sides. Based on my experience as the CIO of the US Patent & Trademark Office and as the executive director of one of the federal shared services centers that operated one of the largest assisted acquisition organizations, I am confident that the issue is far bigger than training alone.
The FAR is flexible enough to be utilized effectively in the cloud, mobile, agile era of IT. The lack of clarity across the numerous acquisition offices that span the federal government regarding how to tailor the FAR for these types of IT acquisitions is the real issue.
Two fundamental things need to happen.
First, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy at the Office of Management and Budget needs to coordinate with federal agencies and the General Services Administration to develop clear and concise standard guidance to define precisely how acquisition professionals should utilize the FAR for such IT acquisitions.
Second, every contracting officer, IT program manager, and contracting officers’ representative involved in major IT acquisitions should be required to attend training regarding the effective use of this standard guidance.
What is needed is a holistic approach to human capital management of the IT acquisition workforce using a best-practice called competencies. That would be a considerable shift in the approach to strategic acquisition workforce management. A competency is the measurable or observable knowledge, skills, abilities, and behaviors that, when utilized together to perform a job-related task or activity, lead to successful results.
Once the IT acquisition competencies have been established for each critical role, they need to become the underpinning of all HR processes. In part, hiring decisions need to be made based on an assessment of any potential candidate’s demonstrated use of the desired competencies to achieve successful results. Job descriptions also need to be updated.
In tighter budget times, training often gets tossed to the side. FITARA provides a great and rare opportunity. Though, if federal agencies only focus on CIO authorities and the governance model, improvements will only be incremental.
Business models exist within government that support the competency-based training called for in the legislation. If the federal IT and acquisition communities utilize them, then FITARA can dramatically change the current status quo for the better.
Bill Rowan is vice president of cloud and virtualization at VMware Public Sector.
