Here we go again. Someone is trying to increase the federal chief information officer’s authorities. This time it’s the Office of Management and Budget who, according to Federal CIO Greg Barbaccia, wants to “make sure you have ultimate decision-making authority over all your agency’s IT acquisitions.” This will be accomplished by making sure that all agency contracts, which will be provided by agency CIOs, have “appropriate clauses.”
This isn’t the first time that someone has tried to increase the authorities — and by inference, the accountability — of CIOs. Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane and review some of these efforts.
The first real attempt was Clinger-Cohen in 1996, which officially established the CIO as a direct report to the agency head and identified CIO responsibilities. OMB followed Clinger-Cohen with implementation guidance. Six years later, the E-Government Act of 2002 was designed to help CIOs exercise their authorities by creating the federal CIO role and assigned new cybersecurity responsibilities. In 2014, Congress tried again to increase the authority of the agency CIO with the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA), reiterating many of the same responsibilities as Clinger-Cohen. To ensure the success of FITARA, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s Subcommittee on Government Operations, led by the late Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), created a scorecard to track FITARA progress and held hearings to hold agency CIOs accountable for results.
Over the last 20 years, there have also been at least half a dozen OMB memos, two OMB circulars and several executive orders designed to increase CIO authority or accountability. Despite all these efforts, agency CIO authority has remained elusive. Agency-level CIOs still have little control over IT strategy and execution within their organizations, a fact that is well known and the source of this latest effort to empower CIOs.
While I appreciate the intent, there’s no evidence that Federal CIO Barbaccia’s attempt to strengthen CIO authorities will be more effective than past efforts. Directives, scorecards, metrics and paper authorities have not moved the needle. This is no different.
I was the CIO at two different CFO Act agencies for a total of seven years. Everyone who worked in IT at those agencies was professional, well intentioned and focused on delivering on their mission objectives. They also controlled their own budgets and were accountable to their leadership, which converged with my chain of command at the agency head or deputy agency head. This is not a productive escalation point. My only option was to achieve results through influence. My team and I did, in fact, achieve notable results through influence.
We saved the taxpayers many millions of dollars and delivered important services. At the Environmental Protection Agency, my team rescued a program that had spent a lot of time and money building the wrong product. We talked to end users, implemented agile practices and delivered the right application in record time.
At the Energy Department, we implemented low-code/no-code platforms, improved service delivery to the point that others in DOE were voluntarily turning services over to my team, delivered agencywide contracts that saved hundreds of millions of dollars and provisioned an early AI sandbox.
We had many more wins at both EPA and DOE and I’m proud of what we accomplished. But we also left money and results on the table because influence and political capital have their limits.
During my tenure, I watched in frustration as multiple teams wasted millions of dollars attempting to build workflow management applications from scratch when software-as-a-service (SaaS) products that met their needs were readily available. I watched as teams throughout my organization built duplicative functions because everyone wanted to control their own services. I watched us procure multiple SaaS products for the same need because teams chose to run different procurements with different requirements when their needs could have been met with one. There were not enough hours in a day to influence all these activities, and in many cases, teams were convinced that they had the only possible answer and had convinced their leadership of that as well.
So, if CIOs can’t exercise their authorities after years of laws, memos, circulars and executive orders, what will help CIOs take charge? Money talks. CIOs need direct control over the agency’s entire IT budget.
Past efforts have, at best, given CIOs the authority to say “no” — often with unacceptable political consequences — but little authority to say “yes.” The agency CIO has not been able to set strategic direction for the entire agency and ensure that the organization moves in that direction through budget control. Budget authority is the single most important thing that CIOs need to improve their effectiveness. There is clear evidence that budget control is effective in the success of many small agency CIOs who control the entire IT budget and punch above their weight delivering results.
The logical outcome from budget control would be centralizing all IT resources into the CIO’s direct reporting line. This would be even more effective than simple budget control. However, reorganizations are disruptive and would take more time than transferring budget control to CIOs.
If each agency had a deputy secretary for management who operated as the agency chief operating officer, that would increase the CIO’s internal influence and build collaboration among CIOs, chief financial officers, chief human capital officers and other operational leaders. Elevating the federal CIO to be a peer to the OMB deputy directors for management and budget would increase the federal CIO’s influence, allowing them to better support agency CIOs.
But if Congress can only do one thing to support agency CIOs, give them full authority for agency IT budgets. Show CIOs the money and then they can truly be held accountable for outcomes.
Ann Dunkin served as the chief information officer at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department. She currently is a distinguished professor of the Practice and distinguished external fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology, an independent director of the Global Interconnection Group and the CEO of Dunkin Global Advisors.
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