OMB To Review, Revamp 26 High-Risk IT Projects Improve it or lose it is the message from the Office of Management and Budget to federal IT program managers. OMB identified 26 projects it considers high-risk and high-priority, and ordered agencies to come up with improvement plans. “The programs we’ve identified are mission critical,” federal chief information officer Vivek Kundra said in an Aug. 23 conference call with reporters. “We believe their objective remains as important as ever. As such, we want to speed up, and simplify the execution of these programs. This isn’t about killing projects, it’s about making them work better and faster.” Kundra has threatened to cut off funding for projects that are far over budget and behind schedule. He said the improvement plans will help determine funding levels for fiscal 2012. “Part of what we need to do is, we need to end a culture in which we continue to throw good money after bad money,” he said. Among the projects are some long-running clunkers: the Interior Department’s $7.6 billion infrastructure upgrade (Interior currently cannot send emails departmentwide); the FBI’s Sentinel case management system, which has been temporarily halted after its cost ballooned; and the Office of Personnel Management’s overhaul of the system for handling federal employee retirement benefits, which has been a work in progress for 23 years. Taken together, the 26 projects have an estimated life cycle cost of $30 billion. (The full list is at http://it.usaspending.gov/?q=content/highpriority-projects.) Kundra described the review as one step in a drive to change the way agencies buy and manage IT, to close what he calls “the technology gap” between the government and private sector. OMB officials have said one change may be an increasing use of strategic sourcing methods, such as blanket purchase agreements, to acquire IT products and services.