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U.S.: The Administration’s IT Management Reform Agenda - Progress at the Department of Commerce |
| Source: |
cio.gov |
| Source Date: |
Monday, June 04, 2012 |
| Focus: |
ICT for MDGs
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| Country: |
United States |
| Created: |
Jun 05, 2012 |
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With the upcoming anniversary of the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB's) IT management reform agenda, I thought I would take an opportunity to provide an update on progress made at the Department of Commerce (DOC).
Migrations to the cloud within DOC are taking place across different scales of implementation. On the smaller end, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is using software-as-a-service to implement the bureau's Project Management Program. This effort will provide a centralized project and portfolio management system that meets the project management planning, execution, control, and reporting needs of NTIA project managers, investment managers, functional managers, and the NTIA Chief Information Office (CIO). This will enhance the capabilities not only of program management staff, but will provide support to enterprise architecture, capital planning, and governance functions within NTIA.
Elsewhere within DOC, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has moved to the cloud for enterprise email, calendar, and collaboration services. This service is providing cost effective, reliable enterprise email, calendar and collaboration with full mobile device email and calendar synchronization, a cloud-based collaboration application suite, as well as mobile device management. The unified messaging infrastructure has expanded services, replaced multiple independently managed in-house email and calendaring solutions within NOAA, and consolidated the contracting associated with these services.
Finally, in a public-facing implementation, the Census Bureau is using cloud computing technology to front the Census Bureau's 2010 Census website, provide a more cost-effective and reliable delivery of its web content and services to its employees and the public. The Census Bureau turned to public cloud technologies to extend the capabilities of its Web infrastructure. This will enable the successful, reliable delivery of all content associated with the Bureau's 2010 Decennial Census website, including video, no matter how large the audience, while providing the additional benefit of protection against distributed denial of service attacks.
The Department has also effectively integrated the TechStat process - a technical review aimed at troubleshooting high risk investments - into our IT investment review process and the oversight and risk management functions provided by the Department's Office of the CIO. Since the publication of OMB's IT management reform agenda, DOC has held several TechStat reviews, focusing on the Department's highest risk investments. Commerce was among the first agency to conduct a bureau-level TechStat review back in June of 2011, and is currently planning a second one. Following the example implemented by the Department of Energy, this bureau TechStat will be focused not on a high-risk project but to advance the process of portfolio rationalization across multiple IT investments within the bureau.
One can think of various elements of OMB's IT management reform agenda - data center consolidation, moving to the cloud, consolidation of commodity IT purchasing, and shared services - as all being different facets of the broader concept of portfolio management. Commerce will soon be issuing an IT Portfolio Management Policy aimed at strengthening IT management authorities within the Department in order to enable more effective management of the portfolio (in reality, the portfolio of portfolios) that constitute DOC's $2.3 billion in annual IT spending. The policy will reshape how IT is managed from an enterprise architecture perspective, how spending is approved and how oversight of major IT investments is conducted, and will enable greater consolidation of commodity IT purchasing, contracting, infrastructure, and services through an increased use of shared service models within and across bureaus.
As always, it is important to note that IT does not exist for its own sake, but rather to enable the essential missions and programs provided by government Departments and agencies. With the current fiscal outlook for government IT spending and recent guidance from OMB to cut IT spending in future years, these efforts will enable DOC to identify opportunities for efficiencies, enhancing services, and improving the quality of customer service. The DOC IT community is aggressively pursuing a number of such opportunities, realizing that every dollar squeezed out of inefficiencies will help preserve our key programs and enable the Department to deliver on our priorities.
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