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The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act scorecard and the governmentwide average is a “D.” Lawmakers and OMB expect agency scores to improve across the four metrics.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will soon release the first round of grades on implementation of the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act. One of the things the committee will grade agencies on is their IT spending. Richard McKinney, chief information officer at the Transportation Department, told In Depth with Francis Rose that determining what counts as IT spending and what doesn't isn't as easy as it looks any more.
DoT CIO Richard McKinney said he's not buying any new hardware and will not approve IT spending plans unless they get the program off of legacy infrastructure.
The Office of Management and Budget wants to create a cyber playbook, and a digital services teams focused on IT security. Tony Scott, the federal CIO, said industry also must play a bigger role by automatically enabling two-factor authentication and using more secure chips.
Acting Agriculture CIO Joyce Hunter is taking aim at consolidating 15 assorted networks the agency uses. At Transportation, CIO Richard McKinney is creating shared services for commodity IT to get the bureau CIOs out of the IT services business.
Tony Scott, the new federal chief information officer, said in his first public speech his priorities are to ensure existing administration technology efforts are successful. But Scott offered some insights into tweaks and focus areas.
A new survey from the Chief Information Officers and Chief Human Capital Officers councils shows most agencies are finding the pool of job candidates to choose from is too shallow. Darren Ash and Richard McKinney, the co-chairmen of the CIO Council's Workforce Committee, said 75 percent of agency IT managers and human resource executives responding to the survey said they couldn't recruit the necessary talent to do mission critical work.
A new initiative from the Chief Information Officer's Council seeks to solve IT acquisition challenges by bringing together small groups of mid-level feds. The groups will try to take a different approach to these long-standing problems.
Four chief information officers list the qualities they'd like their IT managers to have, drawing upon both their experiences and imaginations.
Richard McKinney, the Transportation Department chief information officer, said he reduced contractor-federal employee IT workforce ratio to 1-to-1 from 5-to-1. He said better training and governance will help the agency centralize certain computer network services.
News and buzz in the acquisition and IT communities that you may have missed this week.