Government IT Leadership Redefined

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The Obama administration is aiming to change the thinking of federal IT leadership. Transparency, citizen participation, and agency collaboration are in; silos, cost overruns, and project stagnation are out. Those are the "open government" marching orders intended to make federal agencies more efficient, accessible, and connected to the people they serve. To get there, government IT leaders must rethink the management approaches they take and the technologies they employ, including the use of Web 2.0 technologies to support government 2.0 initiatives.

InformationWeek Analytics' Technology Leadership in Government Survey of 177 federal technology professionals reveals a wide range of technical and management challenges. Confronting them will require government IT leaders to embrace new ideas and approaches.

When asked to identify the one area federal CIO Vivek Kundra should pay more attention to, for instance, survey respondents' top answer was cross-agency collaboration. Many federal IT leaders recognize that they reinvent the wheel far too often, and when money is tight, that approach isn't sustainable. In addition, security requirements of the Defense Department and the intelligence agencies make collaboration even more difficult. With three-quarters of government contract spending going to Defense, this is a huge concern.

Pockets of collaboration do exist. For example, the TM Forum Defense Interest Group consists of several agencies--including the Defense Information Systems Agency, the Air Force, and the National Security Agency--focused on exploring new areas of standardization and enhancing existing process standards.

Beyond sharing ideas and good practices, however, few shared systems exist across the federal government. The General Services Administration recently launched one such system: the Apps.gov service, which provides a central location where agencies can buy applications, mostly cloud-based ones like Salesforce.com, online from third-party resellers.

Self-service ordering systems can automate many of the manual processes involved with routine functions, like new-employee processing, smartphone and laptop provisioning, and even non-IT requests such as business card ordering. Simple items can be ordered easily, while complex, multicomponent bundles can be packaged together.

These systems can strip out much of the inefficiency in government procurement and drive tremendous cost savings. They give IT leaders the ability to develop service- and operating-level agreements with providers that can be measured and enforced. Demand and costs can be tracked and reported in a fee-for-service, chargeback, or accounting environment.

The move toward standardization will ultimately be the biggest cost reducer for IT organizations, and the ability to centrally procure IT services using an actionable, self-service service catalog is a step in that direction.

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