When President Obama named the first U.S. chief technology officer in April 2009 he said the position “will promote technological innovation to help achieve our most urgent priorities, from creating jobs and reducing healthcare costs to keeping our nation secure.”
Last October and November, as HealthCare.gov struggled to accommodate visitors and offer its promised user experience, HHS staff and contractors were, among other fixes, “adding server capacity” — suggesting that the U.S. CTO’s goals of technological innovation remain to be seen in health programs.
Not that Aneesh Chopra, the first CTO and now a senior advisor at the Advisory Board Company, and his successor Todd Park, whose company athenahealth has built an entire EHR business in the cloud, weren’t stoked about abandoning old models of IT development and embracing the federal cloud-first initiative.
[See also: President Obama appoints Todd Park nation's CTO] and [Why Todd Park wants to set data free]
Cloud-based IT can help the public sector “increase the productivity by which we use information technology, Chopra said in 2010. Instead of the much-criticized, drawn-out procurement and implementation process, “you can literally start to iterate beta versions, to roll some immediate functionality out and scale it over time,” Chopra said.
It may not be the fault of the U.S. CTO, or even agency leaders and staffers, that so few federal IT projects — less than 10 percent by some estimates — succeed on time, on budget and as envisioned. Federal IT procurement rules, the constraints they impose on agencies and the types of contractors they attract and don’t attract may be largely to blame.
[See also: Park sits before squabbling Congressmen]
The time may be ripe for reform, though. Two bills circulating in Congress could go a long way to empowering agency information technology officers and the U.S. CTO and CIO to design better projects and intervene in ones that are languishing.
One of them is the Reforming Federal Procurement of Information Technology Act, sponsored by Democratic Representatives Anna Eshoo, from California, and Gerry Connolly, from Virginia. The RFP-IT Act would put the U.S. CTO in charge of a new White House office, the U.S. Digital Government Office, and task it with reviewing all “major” IT projects, defined as projects serving the public and having high development or operational costs (such as Healthcare.gov) and excluding technology for internal agency use, like smartphones or computers.
The CTO and the Digital Government Office would help agencies design the projects, develop specifications for contracts, or even take over management entirely.
The Eshoo-Connolly bill, currently in draft form, would also let more small businesses compete for federal IT contracts by lifting the threshold for streamlined contracting from $150,000 to $500,000, and would let the CTO tap Presidential Innovation fellows to work on agency IT projects.
“Despite incremental improvements in federal IT management over the years, the bottom line is that large-scale federal IT program failures continue to waste taxpayers’ dollars, while jeopardizing our nation’s ability to carry out fundamental constitutional responsibilities,” Connolly, who worked for the Stanford Research Institute and Science Applications International Organization before entering Congress, said in a media release.
Another bill, the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act, co-sponsored by Connolly and California Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, would try to empower agency CIOs while also holding them more accountable — and spur more cloud-based IT.
FITARA would require the President to appoint CIOs in 16 of the largest federal agencies (excluding the Defense Department), require CIOs to report directly to the head of their agency, and require the U.S. CIO (a position created more than a decade ago and currently held by Steven VanRoekel) to develop a Federal Data Center Optimization Initiative “to optimize the usage and efficiency of federal data centers.”
Among other goals, Issa wrote last year, the bill would “encourage a broader transition to cloud solutions,” and “make it easier for agencies to embrace the use of open source software.”
This type of “major reform will not be easy,” Issa said, “but streamlining our obsolete approach to federal IT is essential.”
