The Clinger-Cohen Act, 10 Years Later: The Age of Results

The Clinger-Cohen Act issued a twin challenge to agencies: achieve 5 percent reductions in both the cost of operating and maintaining information technology systems and in their efficiency. In the end, could any emissary of the government's IT confederation go up to Capitol Hill and say the goal had been met?

Likely they would begin by declaring that the CCA had led to a sea change in IT procurement - how computers are now approached as business enablers rather than pallets to be offloaded at a dock. But as to the more direct question - have we saved any money - the answer, as we have seen, is decidedly not. Yet several caveats come into play. In spite of sizable price drops in the semiconductor industry and the availability of lower-wage labor, too many contingencies have arisen to hold IT accountable to a blanket reduction in spending. Moreover, the legislation itself ironically has asked more of IT, not less, which works against any expectation of savings.

Trailing the money issue is its companion question: Have we increased efficiency? No single voice can make that claim. While chief information officers are making good faith efforts to comply with the spirit and intent of every mandate foisted upon them, the case for efficiency from a macro perspective is not convincing. Rough rulebooks have been written and boundaries established, yet too many disparate efforts are taking place on the field of play. Much internal alignment still needs to be done in order to show how today's investments are effecting results-oriented outcomes. In short, the players, referees and spectators alike cannot get excited about the game until they know what a touchdown looks like.

What complicates the game is that not every end zone is the same, nor can it be. Efficiency, as a testable metric, will always be open to some interpretation. For example, there have been significant advances in the utility of government Web sites, as evidenced by recent scores in the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Some government sites are fetching higher scores than major online retail sites such as Amazon.com, which says a good deal about the government's ability to connect with its constituency and to capitalize on the growing demand for online services.

As encouraging as customer satisfaction ratings may be, however, they still fall short of proving efficiency in the empirical sense. Likewise, architectural frameworks and scores in the Office of Management and Budget's Program Assessment Rating Tool can give us a general idea of what agencies are doing to enhance performance. But there is little tangible direct evidence to make the case for efficiency.

In the end, the Clinger-Cohen Act is about the age-old aphorism of good resource management: Is what we're buying the right thing for the right reason, and how do we know?

Regardless of how difficult it is to measure progress toward answering that question, House Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis, R-Va., stands behind the law and all it represents. "Since the passage of Clinger-Cohen," he says, "the government has begun to take a holistic approach toward information technology, [using] it to solve business problems and achieve improvements in performance. We've got a long way to go, but the behemoth that is the federal government is well on its way into the 21st century."

The CCA and the laws and regulations that have succeeded it are all part of an elemental push to impose boundaries, demand organizational outcomes and establish a basis of accountability. Imposing structure, however, is only part of what it will take to make Clinger-Cohen the agent of change it was designed to be. What is needed most are good news stories, and the storytellers must be federal CIOs. They must cultivate an environment where results can be proven, exalted and exposed. They must create conditions to achieve definitive improvements through technology.

Congress has set the tone, OMB has written the rules, and it is now the mandate of every CIO to make the next 10 years of the Clinger-Cohen Act the age of results.