New IT Strategy To Be Released The Office of Management and Budget plans to present its strategy for overhauling federal IT acquisition and management later this month. “I’ll offer recommendations on reforming federal IT, ranging from project management to procurement to budgeting and personnel reforms—and I hope to discuss with the private sector…how best we can transform federal IT,” acting OMB director Jeffrey Zients wrote on his blog. Zients, the government’s chief performance officer, is scheduled to speak Nov. 19 to the Northern Virginia Technology Council. OMB has already canceled several large IT projects and demanded improvement plans for others that are over budget and behind schedule. It froze spending on financial systems upgrades, saying they are especially prone to failure. Industry weighed in on IT overhaul in a report from the TechAmerica Foundation. A panel of 31 industry executives and academics said, "Most of the policies, procedures and practices that are used on major IT acquisitions date back to the 1990s, 1980s or even earlier. Such an infrastructure is poorly suited to supporting the interactive, incremental and collaborative processes of agile/incremental development." The panel said the government needs a professional development program for IT managers, improved risk management by independent reviewers and more communication between federal IT program managers and industry. “[T]he key challenge facing the Federal IT community—contractors as well as Government agencies—is not so much knowing what needs to change as it is identifying how to make those changes happen,” the report said. Zients said the OMB administration aims “to close the ‘technology gap’ between the private and public sectors to cut waste and boost performance.” He said the government spends $79 billion annually on IT, and “these dollars are invested in technologies that can generate further cost-savings and better, more convenient services for the American public.