Feds Draw Lessons From Private Sector IT

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Federal IT leaders need to leverage best practices not only from other agencies, but they also need to take some cues from the private sector, federal CIO Vivek Kundra said during a keynote panel Thursday with the CIOs of Sunoco, FedEx, and United Stationers at the InformationWeek Government IT Leadership Forum.

"We need to move away from the victim mentality that we've seen in government, where we always say why we can't do these things," Kundra said, pointing to big pushes the administration has made in areas like cloud computing and improving customer service as examples of government accomplishment despite bureaucratic and fiscal challenges.

Kundra said the government needs to become a much more agile enterprise and invest in cost-saving and productivity-increasing technologies like cloud, mobile, and business intelligence. Those technologies continue to make waves, and the government needs to figure out how it can better use them to communicate with and serve the American public.

It's not that the private sector has all the answers--in fact, far from it, said Rob Carter, CIO of FedEx. "Take heart that everyone out there is fighting the same battle," he said. However, with a wide productivity gap between the public and private sector, there are plenty of lessons the government could learn.

For example, United Stationers CIO Dave Bent said in response to remarks by Kundra about the persistent existence of multi-year mega-projects in government, "I had a boss that once told me, if any project is longer than the lifetime of a small mammal, we probably shouldn't start it. Constancy in purpose is really important, but you need to ask, how do we create these things in small steps."

In a meeting at the White House the day before the forum, Kundra and several other federal government CIOs met with a half dozen private sector CIOs in an effort to hash out solutions to some of their common challenges. They tried to identify the next wave of big IT trends that the government and private enterprise will need to confront, from cloud computing to client virtualization to application stores.

President Obama last week issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to draw up customer service plans that take the best practices from the private sector and apply them to "deliver services better, faster, and at a lower cost," adding an extra impetus behind Kundra's comments.

Customer service has never been the strong suit of the federal government, but Sunoco CIO Peter Whatnell had some advice for federal CIOs grappling with an open government directive and Obama's new customer service executive order. "You need to understand, what is your mission, what are your customers looking for, and then think about how you can align your IT to address that," he said.

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Kundra noted in reply that the customer service effort looks to more closely align the nuts and bolts of IT with the government's larger mission. "The last decade in federal IT, we've continued work on infrastructure, on integrating legacy systems, but where we haven't focused a lot is the interface between the American people and how they're getting services from the federal agencies," he said. "Now, we're asking a simple question: Given the experience many of us have on OpenTable or Facebook, what are the bets those companies made and how can the government shift its mind-set?"

Big, cross-government efforts like data center consolidation should not just be about cost savings and energy efficiency, he said. They also need to be about freeing up money to spend on higher value efforts to better connect with the public.

However, customer service doesn't just mean the external customer. "For the future CIO, there's much more of a role to ensure our internal clients do the right thing with the stuff we give them," Sunoco's Whatnell said. "If you help them do the right thing, you help drive the mission forward."

In an interview after the keynote, Kundra noted that the General Services Administration would by May 10 release a $2.5 billion request for proposals for a cross-agency cloud email and collaboration contract that will cast a wide net in an attempt to attract agencies from across federal, state, and local government as potential users and leverage their combined purchasing power.

"The government has a unique opportunity when it pools its purchasing power to drive the marketplace," Kundra said.

The contract will account for wide variations in customer demand by offering both private cloud and public cloud options, and will even have an option that meets the security needs of agencies doing business in a classified secret environment. The contract will be one of the first that will go through the FedRAMP shared security accreditation process, Kundra said.

The email contract won't just aim for federal customers, either, as most GSA contracts do. Instead, GSA has worked closely with state CIOs, including Utah CIO Stephen Fletcher, in crafting the request for proposals. The contract will include a provision that allows states and localities to buy in.