Government IT Leadership Redefined 2

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.

Security Disconnect

In terms of technology challenges, our survey found that there's some disconnect between open government goals and the IT challenges that federal IT leaders say are most daunting. For example, 53% of respondents say security is the top test they face. However, there's innate tension between transparency and data security.

As many private-sector organizations have found, data security can be a major roadblock to even lightweight IT system deployments that promote participation and collaboration. There are legal, privacy, and policy issues that can get in the way of a more open government. Add in the need to ensure data safety, and things get complicated. From a technology perspective, every new initiative, no matter how popular, must pass muster from a data assurance standpoint.

Management Challenges

When it comes to management issues, 41% of respondents say hiring and retaining technical talent is their top challenge (see chart, below). Thing is, the government has no one to blame for this but itself.

Twenty-five years of policies promoting outsourcing have resulted in an exodus of IT knowledge to the private sector. The Bureau of Labor Statistics and other sources estimate that the number of private contractors is four times the number of federal employees. After a few years in government, federal workers often parlay their skills and knowledge into significant salary bumps in the private sector.

With so much outsourcing going on, agencies find they lack much of the intellectual property required to run their own IT organizations. Federal IT leaders must find ways to get back much of this intellectual property.

Changing this structure is hard. Agencies have little incentive to do the hard work of developing in-house talent. It's quicker and easier to outsource and operate as contract management shops. But this model delivers short-term savings while sacrificing institutional knowledge. And savings aren't assured--nearly 30% of survey respondents say that delivering projects on time and on budget is a challenge.

Cutting off all outsourcing isn't the way to go, either. But agency leadership must heed the lessons of the past decade and realize that as the government becomes more transparent, heavy use of IT contractors will become more visible. Substantial policy reform will likely place more control back in the hands of government, but the issue of finding and retaining talent won't go away. It will become even more problematic as demand for critical technologies like virtualization and cloud computing increases in both the public and private sectors.

Better Buying

Another management challenge government IT leaders face is procurement reform. Many in the public sector use cost-plus contracting, where the government pays the costs incurred by the contractor plus a modest fee--say, 5% to 8%--for profit. Cost-plus contracting was seen as a way to cut through artificially high rates under the time-and-materials system and provide transparency to the contracting office. But there's a catch: Contractors aren't on the hook to deliver anything. They can add people and stretch timelines, with no incentive to complete the work.

Contractors aren't the only ones at fault. Government program offices often fail to adequately define requirements and manage programs. They're frequently stretched too thin and lack technical depth in key IT areas--often as a result of excessive outsourcing.

Only 36% of survey respondents say they think the federal government will rely less on contract personnel for IT projects in the future; 53% say it won't. Therefore, IT leaders must do a more thorough job of defining what they want from projects and then managing contractors to those results. By using earned value management, project and portfolio management, and similar tools, project managers can do a better of job tracking the success of projects and identifying problems before they impact deliverables.

Instead of cost-plus contracts, IT leaders should move toward firm-fixed-price ones. This approach puts more of the risk and burden on the contractor to deliver what was promised. If timelines slip as a result of inefficiencies or mismatched skill sets, the contractor must correct the issue. For its part, the government must ensure that bureaucratic dithering and inefficiencies don't cause delays. If they do, the agency will pay a price when the contractor demands compensation for changes in work scope.

As with outsourcing, as government becomes more transparent, contract issues will become more apparent. CIOs should implement reforms now to avoid future embarrassment. These moves also reflect good governance and will free up funds for other technology programs.

Processing The Future

Another challenge IT leaders face is having the right IT processes to execute initiatives, run the operational environment, and report on the success of the organization. Here, many agencies are turning to established industry frameworks or using hybrid approaches to process methodologies.

In our survey, there was no clear favorite framework, although ITIL, at 37%, had a slight edge over Six Sigma (35%), CMMI (28%), and ISO 9001 (27%). Emerging standards like ISO 20K and COBIT finished toward the bottom. More interesting, however, was that 28% of respondents say none of the process methodologies in our survey is relevant to their organizations.

Frankly, that's disturbing given the huge amounts of cash agencies are spending.

Let's be clear: The government IT environment has never been more dynamic, and quality initiatives and good practices for running IT units are critical to success. In large organizations, the ability to clearly define, optimize, and eventually automate IT processes--particularly complex ones--can substantially cut ongoing expenses, reduce mean time to repair and outages resulting from human errors, help meet compliance requirements, and aid in tracking discrete tool costs.

Instead of using point products to automate processes between systems, automation will likely find its way into core technologies--vendors just need to hurry up and get there. The more manual the process, the more difficult it will be to implement and ensure accuracy. This is especially true in large organizations. Any successful process improvement initiative must include a directive to automate as much as possible. If a process can't be automated, CIOs should look for ways to at least automate enforcement and compliance to ensure that the right checks and balances exist in their organizations.

Michael Biddick is president and CTO at Fusion PPT, a consulting and IT services company. Write to him at [email protected].