Fitting In

hree of the Commerce Department's 11 bureaus were jolted this summer when their plans for new or expanded computer systems in fiscal 1999 disappeared from their budget submissions. "We zeroed out the IT proposals of three bureaus where they hadn't done the basic job required in terms of IT planning," explains Alan P. Balutis, the department's deputy chief information officer. "We wanted them to recognize that good IT planning isn't just a good idea," he adds dryly, declining to identify the miscreant bureaus.

Such Draconian measures have been rare during the first year of the Clinger-Cohen Act, the 1996 law that required federal agencies to employ chief information officers and take other steps to improve management of information technology. Most agencies' CIOs do not have the clout enjoyed by Balutis and Commerce CIO Raymond G. Kammer. Balutis also is the department's director of budget, management and information, and his boss, Kammer, also is chief financial officer and assistant secretary for administration.

The Commerce setup seems at odds with a Clinger-Cohen provision calling for the CIO to "have information resources management duties as that official's primary duty." But at many agencies, it would be tough to justify adding yet another senior manager during a period of downsizing and retrenchment. And the budget authority exercised by the Commerce CIO evidently comes in handy.

In other agencies, the CIOs are relying on contemporary management techniques to get their jobs done. Terms like stakeholders, consensus-building, empowerment and return on investment dot their conversations. This language marries well with the CIO notion, which was borrowed from the corporate environment. But some observers regard these corporate trappings as window dressing that obscures CIOs' lack of true authority.

"Just because you're a CIO doesn't make you a businesslike CIO," says Paul C. Light, a public policy expert and former federal official who now directs the Public Policy Program of the Pew Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia. Light decries what he calls "the new tradition of using private-sector labels to gussy up public-sector functions." But at the same time, he says, "it does make sense to do anything we can to strengthen the management sides of these departments."

The importance of management and administration is too often overlooked in Washington, Light says. If a new title helps CIOs gain stature in their organizations, he's for it. But in the end, he says, the issue is not the title but whether CIOs affect the course of events within their departments.

The Old Way

Certainly the CIOs' predecessors, who were designated in the old Brooks Act as senior officials in charge of information resources management (IRM) at each major agency, had difficulty getting a grip on the problems. In most cases they were assistant secretaries for administration or in similar jobs where information resources management, as it was then known, was just one of their responsibilities. At Commerce, as at some other agencies, practically nothing seems to have changed except one of Kammer's titles.

But Balutis says there's no reason to change Commerce's management scheme. He and many others say the White House should let agencies decide for themselves how best to get the job done. "The true test ought to be: Does it work?" Balutis maintains. At Commerce, he says, more attention is being paid to IT-partly because of the new law and partly because Secretary William M. Daley recognizes the inherent importance of IT in the department's work. "We're largely an information department," Balutis says, citing functions such as economic and trade statistics, weather forecasting, the census, and patents and trademarks. In fact, IT accounts for at least one-quarter of the department's $3.8 billion in annual spending.

For agencies where the CIO has no finance responsibilities, "lack of budgetary control is a problem," says Neil J. Stillman, deputy assistant secretary for IRM at the Health and Human Services Department. As at Commerce, the HHS CIO is the assistant secretary for management and budget, John Joseph Callahan. Stillman, who is deputy CIO, says Callahan's double duty "is working great at HHS." Stillman doubts whether a CIO without financial clout can force bureaus to cooperate on a common departmental systems architecture-one of the Clinger-Cohen mandates-or carry out the other major duties laid out in the law.

To G. Edward DeSeve, acting deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, such doubts fail to take into account the way things get done in contemporary organizations. DeSeve stepped in as OMB management chief upon the departure of John Koskinen, who had championed the CIO concept and chaired the governmentwide CIO Council. DeSeve was chief financial officer at the Housing and Urban Development Department when the Chief Financial Officer Act was passed in 1991 and made a name as a leader of the CFO Council. It's been a long time since anyone asked him whether the CFO concept will survive, DeSeve says, and he predicts the CIO concept will enjoy the same confidence.

CIOs' effectiveness will depend on their ability to build coalitions within their agencies and across government, DeSeve and others say. The interagency Information Technology Resources Board issued a report this year that includes a description of "the CIO in leading organizations." Although it mentions management authority, the report talks more about guiding, championing, and sharing than it does about decision-making.

They're Not Nerds

One notable omission in that list is technology. There's a tendency to think of CIOs as the agencies' top computer weenies, but in fact few of them have degrees in engineering or computer science. James J. Flyzik, Treasury Department CIO, holds two degrees in business administration and has spent his career managing federal information systems and networks. Donald Rappaport, the new Education Department CIO and CFO, is a retired Price Waterhouse executive and financial management expert. Lt. Gen. Otto J. Guenther, who just retired as Army CIO, was a career officer with substantial experience in acquisition.

DeSeve says the key skills for CIOs are an understanding of organizational dynamics and ability to work cooperatively and collaboratively. As for technical skills, he says project management is much more important than in-depth knowledge of hardware or software. But the CIO must understand how to fit the technology to the applications. "These issues are strategic decision-making issues" that don't require knowledge of computer nuts and bolts, says Anne Thompson Reed, Agriculture Department CIO, whose background is in financial management, not systems. But, she adds, "you do have to have [technical] people whom you have confidence in."

If they're not nerds and they don't control technology budgets, what do CIOs do? The biggest thing on their plates is the requirement to develop information architectures, or systems frameworks, for their agencies. Agencywide architectures are required by the Clinger-Cohen law and OMB directives, and the General Accounting Office has been weighing in on their behalf as well. GAO recently criticized the Education Department for failing to develop one. "Without a systems architecture and the ability to easily integrate its systems, the department continues to acquire independent systems to support specific student financial aid programs-programs that cannot easily share information," GAO auditors wrote. "Accordingly, the cost of developing and maintaining these stand-alone systems continues to mount." That's a criticism that could apply to many other federal agencies.

A June memo to agencies from OMB Director Franklin D. Raines says an architecture "provides the technology vision to guide resource decisions that reduce costs and improve mission performance." In other words, the architecture spells out how the agency's systems will work together in support of strategic objectives. There's no cookbook to tell CIOs how to create such a model and implement it, but Raines' memo and other official sources are providing some guidance. The OMB memo cites four departments-Agriculture, Defense, Energy and Treasury-as having published architectures that other agencies can use as models.

Agencies have been struggling for years to get their information systems and their IT spending under control, and it's not certain CIOs will succeed where so many others have failed. But the CIO approach is benefiting from a unified approach to oversight. Congress and OMB seem to be singing from the same songbook, and they're in harmony with a raft of other management initiatives, including the vice president's reinvention drive and the push for capital planning and performance measurement throughout government.

OMB itself has been paying more attention to IT. Although OMB long has had some responsibility for IT oversight, it had ceded much of that work to GSA. Under the old Brooks Act, replaced by Clinger-Cohen, agencies' IT acquisitions were the focus of GSA oversight for at least a decade, and little attention was paid to what the systems were doing, or failing to do. That's all changing with the new emphasis on results and return on investment. The Clinger-Cohen law divested GSA of most of its governmentwide IT oversight duties and put OMB in charge again.

Thin Line

Now, DeSeve says, OMB's program analysts review program performance and return on investment with the agencies twice yearly. Those reviews include CIO performance. OMB also is reviewing CIO candidates and has withheld approval in some cases. For example, when the Interior Department named its deputy assistant secretary for finance to be the CIO as well, OMB told Interior to hire a separate CIO.

OMB is walking a thin line between telling agencies what to do and encouraging them to find the arrangement that will work best for them. One thing the administration and GAO have emphasized, though, is a structure of executive review boards and integrated project teams, which include IT professionals and program managers, along with acquisition specialists and representatives of other organizations that will be affected by a new system or process. The teams are assembled to plan and execute a system upgrade or other IT project.

The executive review board, composed of assistant secretaries and other senior executives, makes strategic decisions and reviews the IT projects as a portfolio of investments, from a perspective that extends all across the agency. The executive review board is a means through which CIOs can carry out the Clinger-Cohen provision requiring them to advise the head of the agency "and other senior management personnel" on IT.

Navy CIO Marvin J. Langston has established the Navy CIO Board of Representatives, with members from about three dozen Navy commands and management organizations. It meets only quarterly, relying between meetings on electronic mail and computer conferencing to review issues and make decisions. "We're trying to get as much stakeholder involvement as possible," Langston says, as he inventories the existing systems and networks and moves toward a Navy IT architecture and standards.

Langston is accomplishing this work through the integrated project team approach. Without participation from other Navy units, his CIO staff of about 40 would be stretched thin.

Langston and GSA CIO Joe M. Thompson both get high marks from observers inside and outside government. Langston seems to be demonstrating that the CIO dogma actually can produce results-although it's too early to be sure how the Navy IT strategy will play out. Thompson is praised for delivering systems that delight his customers, a benchmark espoused by management guru Tom Peters and others.

"Much of our business can be facilitated by a great infrastructure," says Thompson, who has seen that all GSA employees have direct Internet access. "It didn't just connect the people but provided a competitive advantage for us," he adds. GSA has lost the federal monopolies it once enjoyed in providing other agencies with office space, cars, furniture, computers and office supplies. Now it's competing with private suppliers and needs more responsive systems. For example, he says, the Public Buildings Service recently modernized its 25-year-old computer system that provided information slowly. The new, interactive system even gives some vendors direct access to information they need to do business with the government.

Most Admired

CIO watchers reserve their greatest admiration for Agriculture's Reed, one of the few CIOs who reports directly to the secretary of her department. She is the only one with direct authority over the department's IT spending-more than $1 billion per year. The USDA CIO supervises the department's data centers and provides computer support to its local offices nationwide, work requiring more than 1,800 employees.

Asked how she acquired such an unusual amount of line authority, Reed points to an IT spending moratorium that Deputy Secretary Richard E. Rominger imposed a year ago. "That created a real sense of urgency," she said, and it will remain in place for now. USDA units can get waivers to acquire new hardware, software or networks, but they must demonstrate that their plans make sense and fit in with the department's emerging architecture. In addition, Reed personally has approved every network upgrade or addition, looking for ways to share resources and use excess capacity already in place. Now that the executive IT investment review board chaired by Rominger is in place and a capital planning process has been established, IT budgeting and spending can begin to return to normal, she says.

Reed joined USDA after a series of ambitious departmental information integration initiatives had failed and as auditors uncovered poor management in areas such as telephone systems. That created awareness, within the department and on Capitol Hill, of the need for new IT leadership. Sen. Richard G. Lugar, the Indiana Republican who chairs the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, has introduced a bill to strengthen the Agriculture CIO's power and curb what the bill calls "decentralized, uncoordinated and wasteful purchases" of IT in which USDA has squandered "hundreds of millions" of dollars.

Reed has new challenges on her plate now as Agriculture reorganizes and streamlines. The department is merging the administrative functions of three bureaus that have offices in nearly every U.S. county. "IT is changing the way the whole world operates," Reed says, making it possible to link previously isolated systems and offices. Getting those links in place is more than a technical challenge, though, according to Reed and her colleagues. When asked about the hurdles ahead, they often mention "stovepipe" systems and divisions that operate in isolation from the rest of the organization. "The management portions of the bill are the hardest to implement and are still problematic," says one Senate staffer who has monitored Clinger-Cohen implementation.

As Year 2 of the Clinger-Cohen era gets under way, there is a sense that the honeymoon is ending for many CIOs. "We embarked on an experiment, and now it's time to start evaluating the results," says the Senate staffer, who offers muted praise for CIOs' performance to date. On the House side, hearings are planned for this winter to review Clinger-Cohen implementation. House Government Reform and Oversight subcommittee staffers say they'll look at whether CIOs are exercising influence over IT planning throughout decentralized departments.

It may be too soon to know whether CIOs can cure a substantial portion of the government's IT problems. "The hardest thing to change is behavior and culture," says Philip Kiviat, an executive with Sterling Software Inc.'s federal unit who tracks CIO activities for the Industry Advisory Council, an IT vendor organization. A year is too little time to tell whether the CIOs are succeeding, Kiviat says, adding, "I think the level of expectation for the whole CIO process was too high." He concurs in the widespread opinion that, on the whole, they're not doing badly.

"The concept of the CIO has raised awareness," says HHS's Stillman. "But in most departments, there's probably no difference" from a year ago. "The CIO may have a seat at the table," he adds, "But it's a short seat."