Management, not technology, is the problem, OMB says

Officials at the White House Office of Management and Budget are stumping on behalf of the President's Management Agenda, which aims to improve government efficiency and boost agencies in areas such as e-government and computer security.

Bill McVay, a senior policy analyst with OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, on Tuesday stressed to those attending an information technology planning conference that management, not technology, needs to change to comply with e-government initiatives.

"The rate of change in information technology requires us to have a strong governance process," McVay said. "While the government will not become a dot-com," he said, it will employ technologies necessary to become a "click-and-mortar" presence that provides services both online and by traditional means.

McVay said OMB currently has a working group studying the "best practices" of e-government projects that laid the foundation for current e-government budget requests to determine what resources will be needed for fiscal 2004 projects. Information on what agencies' fiscal 2004 requests should encompass will be emerging within the next month, he said.

Agencies will receive no funding for technology projects that do not have solid business justification or that are ineffective and inefficient, he added.

McVay also said the Defense Department and other agencies will post their IT projects and funding information on the OMB Web site in March. Bush's proposed fiscal 2003 budget includes $52 billion in IT and e-government funds. Major IT projects for 2003 would account for about $11 billion of that, McVay said, while OMB's "watch list" includes $10 billion worth of projects that McVay said agencies still must justify to receive IT investments.

David McClure, director of IT management issues for the General Accounting Office, said agencies should make risk management a higher priority when budgeting for IT projects. "Risk management is the key to the IT area. ... There's simply not been enough attention paid to this," he said.

He said inventories of IT processes completed in preparation for the Y2K computer bug and other critical infrastructure assessments should help agencies determine their weaknesses.

McClure also said one challenge agencies face in complying with new e-government and management laws includes defining the role of their chief information officers (CIOs).

"The CIO in government has got to be a leader in this process, but they can't run the process," McClure said. "I think the role of the CIO here is to ensure the integrity of the process."

Steve Cochran, vice president of the Council for Excellence in Government, said his organization is continuing its White House-supported, 18-month project to orient presidential appointees on the five aspects of Bush's management agenda, particularly e-government. Bush regularly attends the meetings.

"This is being hammered home from the very top," Cochran said.