Inside the Briefcase
Clouds, Consolidation, Culture: Making Federal IT Less ‘Horrible’
April 25, 2011 1 CommentIn a new interview with Politico, the dirt-inside-the-beltway site, federal CIO Vivek Kundra didn’t hold back on his thoughts about the world’s largest IT consumer:
“Federal IT is horrible,” he reportedly said. “That’s why we’ve made it a priority to aggressively crack down on wasteful IT spending and turn around poorly performing projects.”
Kundra says when he took his position in 2009, he was surprised how much government technology management lagged, even though it spends $80 billion a year on the stuff. Even now, he says, he and other government workers can’t use their own personal devices for getting work done.
Kundra says he is aggressively pursuing cloud services for government agencies, as well as pushing a data center consolidation effort. The Politico article reports that the General Services Administration uses Google Apps to power email and other software tools, the Department of Agriculture uses Microsoft’s products, and efforts are no underway to move email systems to the cloud.
Kundra also employed an IT dashboard to track IT spending, and says he has been able to wring $3 billion in savings simply by being able to get an enterprise view of where money is being spent. (Thanks to John Dodge for surfacing this interview.)
But, as anyone who’s come into far smaller organizations and attempted to tighten up technology spending knows, turning an oceanliner around is far easier said than done. In an article in Federal Computer Week, Mark Cohn and Peter Gallagher (CTO and partner at Unisys Federal Systems) reiterate Kundra’s call for clouds and consolidation, but points out that to get there, the government needs to adopt a “culture of reuse.” This is essential in such a huge, complex organization with deeply embedded legacy processes, systems and silos.
“Agency CIOs face a seemingly insurmountable funding obstacle. In the face of shrinking budgets and essential O&M to-do lists, how can agencies align critical applications with the cloud-first agenda? Thousands of customized applications, built over decades, contain the business logic required to execute critical government functions in a complex digital fabric that is rarely cloud-ready…. To benefit from cloud computing, we must embrace a culture of reuse for all types of applications. Otherwise, the cost and complexity of maintaining disparate systems will eventually overwhelm our ability to respond to users’ expectations.”
The story is old, how to keep the tail from wagging the dog. To do this we do not need more and more Cloud Computing products and services and a myriad of government owned contract vehicles. We need an Office to lead in establishing a means for agencies to easily arrive at a decision and then to execute a procurement of the services or products desired by that agencie’s business line owners. To achieve this an “above standards” set of contract vehicles that emphasize alignment and integration between the three main “as a Service” levels of the Cloud Computing architecture need to be put in place and governed so that the agency’s CIO’s may then govern for their agency Business line owners which of those products and services those business lines may procure. Emphasis should be made to developing a the SaaS Business Process Management as a Service. If that is a achieved then the business lines need not spend money on support organizations that “maintain” the business, but may then “grow” and eventually “transform” their business lines to meet the needs of their customers. To achieve an agile means to procure cloud computing services will mean that the Office charged with the governance must embrace what are referred to as Acquisition 2.0 policy and methodology.