Obama Administration Unveils Plan to “Fix IT” The Office of Management and Budget has announced a six-month blitz to restructure federal IT acquisition and management. OMB deputy director Jeffrey Zients said the goal is to make federal IT programs “more agile, more adaptable to new technologies, more accountable and more focused on results.” He spoke to the Northern Virginia Technology Council on Nov. 19. “Fixing IT is central to everything we are trying to do,” he said. “IT is our top priority.” Zients outlined a five-pronged approach: ·Aligning the Budget and Acquisition Process with the Technology Cycle. The Obama administration will ask Congress for more budget flexibility to reprogram funds. The goal is to increase oversight and speed up acquisitions. “Three years is forever in technology,” Zients said. ·Strengthening Program Management. The government will create a formal career track for professional program managers. Zients said most agencies fill those jobs “on an ad hoc basis” and suffer from high turnover and lack of expertise. ·Streamlining Governance and Increase Accountability. Zients said oversight is currently spread among multiple layers, resulting in reduced accountability and slow decision making. He said senior agency executives will take a more active role. ·Increasing Engagement with industry. “We’ll be launching a myth busters campaign to promote greater engagement with industry and remove barriers to communication that are hurting our productivity,” he wrote in a blog post. ·Adopt Light Technologies and Shared Solutions. Zients said that means “a cloud-first policy… whenever a secure, reliable, cost-effective cloud option exists.” Secure governmentwide cloud computing platforms will be created to ensure security. As part of the shared solutions initiative, the 2,000-plus federal data centers will be consolidated, reducing the number by at least 40%. Zients said “agile, modular approaches” are needed to break down IT projects into “manageable chunks” that can be completed within months rather than years. As an example of the new strategy, Zients said the review of federal financial management projects, announced last summer, has produced savings of $1.6 billion while cutting delivery times in half. Two of the 20 projects were canceled and others were overhauled. OMB will present details on how the plan will be carried out at a public meeting on Dec. 9 in Washington. The changes are to be implemented within six months. “IT has been at the center of the private sector’s productivity gains, but for too long federal IT projects have run over budget, behind schedule, or failed to deliver what on their promise,” Zients said in the post on OMB’s blog. He declared that the new approach will “fundamentally change how the federal government purchases and uses IT.”