The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee commended the federal chief information officer for progress made on several IT acquisition efficiencies, but the senators remained critical of the Department of Defense, which accounts for 50 percent of federal IT spending.
The main point of contention at the Thursday hearing was DoD’s contributions to the Federal IT Dashboard. Launched in 2009 out of the White House, the publicly available dashboard shows status updates for 750 major IT investments across 27 agencies. The dashboard categorizes IT investments from highest risk (red) to lowest risk (green). As of the hearing, DoD did not report any of its 118 major investments as red.
Ranking Member Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said he was surprised to hear more positives than negatives at the hearing, but called DoD’s IT assessment “ridiculous.”
“We do see some agencies moving in the right direction with more accurate reporting and doing something about it,” said David Powner, director of IT management issues at the Government Accountability Office.
Yet Powner acknowledged that the number of government-wide “at-risk” IT investments was low, and DoD’s lack of reporting was driving total numbers down. The dashboard currently shows 200 at-risk projects (40 red, 160 yellow).
DoD did not have any representatives at the hearing, but in a previous hearing the department committed to updating the dashboard every six months. Its goal of monthly updates had become unrealistic, and they had fallen behind schedule. Additionally, DoD said it would put any new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems as red on the dashboard and manage them appropriately. The department has had significant challenges with ERP software, which runs business applications. Reports estimated that the Air Force lost up to $1 billion on its Expeditionary Combat Support System (ECSS) to replace legacy logistics applications in 2012.
While he recognized the dashboard as progress on transparency, Coburn suggested that self-reporting is to blame for its inability to capture the true state of affairs.
“Self-reporting is not the best mechanism to track this stuff,” agreed federal CIO Steven VanRoekel.
VanRoekel said he added some features to the dashboard to get a better sense of an agency’s status. He can now see if an agency is moving its goal line, even if it stays the same color.
“You can see someone is bright green, but they’re moving the goal line a lot, so you know that something is wrong,” he said.
The Office of Management and Budget also started an annual PortfolioStat process in 2012 that provides guidance for agencies to report how they are managing their IT projects. The first years of PortfolioStat were aimed at eliminating duplication, VanRoekel said. This year’s guidance, which was released this Wednesday, asks agencies to identify their core systems. Remaining systems should be eliminated or moved to the cloud.
In addition to the dashboard, the panelists testified on data center consolidation. The government began with 10,000 data centers and has closed 750 to date, Powner said. He expects closures to produce $10.5 billion in savings by fiscal year 2018.
The data center initiative began when GAO discovered the government had disturbingly low server utilization rates at 10-15 percent. The industry standard for server utilization is approximately 60 percent, he said. Additionally, the government was spending three-quarters of its $80 billion IT budget on legacy systems and operations with only a quarter going to development of new and efficient systems. Data center closures and cloud adoption to reduce hardware have helped flat line the IT budget, Van Roekel said.
To spur further savings beyond data centers, Powner suggested cutting new programs that do not produce results within six months to a year. During his time in the private sector, he said he routinely produced IT deliverables in 90 days.
“If they’re not delivering anything, don’t fund it,” he said.