Federal IT spending – new approach needed

i-Lighted Content A new approach is needed to managing federal IT spending

Just saw this new article, and while I agree that Federal IT spending needs to be analyzed and reprioritized it needs to be done so in some news way.  I would encourage Mr. Kundra to:

1.  Look at the operations and maintenance side of IT, too many budgets look at cutting new items when it fact it is O&M that is where the spend is.

2.  Put some hard stakes in the ground about consolidation.  where agencies have redundant IT investments they should be forced to reuse.

3.  Make performance a real part of the analysis.  what measures are the invesments using? are they real? Many investments have circular performance metrics don’t really tell you anything about how well the investment has been used/deployed.

4.  IT within programs must also be on the table.  Just because a large program is considered mission based it may have 100’s of millions of dollars in IT investment, many of these programs may never get into the IT review process.

More to come…