Government Executive - Authors - Wes Andrues

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

Wes Andrues — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: Ten years ago, Congress passed the Information Technology Management Reform Act, later renamed for its co-sponsors, Rep. William Clinger, R-Pa., and Sen. William Cohen, R-Maine. In this four-part series, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Wes Andrues, an IT policy consultant and CIO Certificate holder from the National Defense University, looks at the changes in federal technology procurement since the law was passed. Part Four: 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.

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The Clinger-Cohen Act, 10 Years Later: Becoming Enterprise Architects

Wes Andrues — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: Ten years ago, Congress passed the Information Technology Management Reform Act, later renamed for its co-sponsors, Rep. William Clinger, R-Pa., and Sen. William Cohen, R-Maine. In this four-part series, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Wes Andrues, an IT policy consultant and CIO Certificate holder from the National Defense University, looks at the changes in federal technology procurement since the law was passed. Part Three: Becoming Enterprise Architects

In 2002, while the Office of Management and Budget was still struggling to get its arms around compliance with the Clinger-Cohen Act, Congress got into the act again. The Electronic Government Act required OMB to implement yet more results-oriented controls, measuring how information technology would "improve the performance and reduce costs of federal government administration." Like the CCA, the new e-gov effort was launched with high hopes. A key element of the Bush administration's President's Management Agenda, the idea behind e-gov was to "make better use of information technology investments to eliminate billions of dollars of wasteful federal spending," OMB announced.

The e-gov effort, though not driven directly by the CCA, led to an effort to establish a framework for governmentwide technology improvement known as the Federal Enterprise Architecture. It provides a shell of sorts, corralling each agency's IT planning methodology into an analytical framework of five separate reference models. It is a lens through which OMB and the Government Accountability Office can establish context and assign ratings to the overall health and maturity of an agency's IT enterprise planning efforts. In other words, it is at least a rudimentary means of capturing performance factors on which to base an evaluation of efficiency.

While shy on detail, the Federal Enterprise Architecture is nonetheless a laudable beginning in the great experiment of aligning IT with agency missions and gaining perspective on the question of efficiency. Much remains to be done in making it the consummate instrument of measure, crystallizing its inputs and refining its overall utility. For now, although OMB assigns scores to agencies' enterprise architecture efforts, they merely reflect the degree of compliance with overall makeup and design requirements.

This speaks to the universal truth that while OMB may be the appointed arbiter of the enterprise architecture process, wielding the blunt budgetary stick over compliance requirements, it is the CIO who is ultimately responsible for the architecture's impact and how it is positioned to meet the agency's definition of efficiency.

Regardless of how blunt the overall instrument, the OMB does use today's enterprise architecture inputs to undertake some budget control activity. For example, the ratings of agency efforts are used to create a management watch list, which has resulted in several hundred IT programs being placed in a special monitoring category. Should a watched program fail to improve, OMB may recommend budget cuts to force improvements or propose killing the program altogether.

In 2004, the Federal Aviation Administration experienced just this scenario when its Wide Area Augmentation System was added to the watch list. Facing the real possibility of budget cuts, the FAA upgraded its metrics for the program, and the following year it was not included on the list.

The Federal Enterprise Architecture structure and its attendant processes reflect an effort by the government's IT collective to capture the functionality of big IT programs. Yet structure alone does not precipitate change, especially when it is a structure that is not largely understood or easily applied. Not long ago, the Government Accountability Office noted that since enterprise architecture efforts are lashed to individual agency performance measures, they are not a "one-size-fits-all proposition." In many cases, the process of developing such architectures suffers from a lack of understanding, especially at the executive level, and often there is insufficient staff on hand to translate the complex mechanics of the process into action.

One agency that has proven especially adept at formulating appropriate enterprise architecture inputs is the Department of Interior, who recently won OMB's "Best in Class" award. This means that the department has demonstrated a clear linkage between its information resources and the five reference models of the overall Federal Enterprise Architecture.

DOI's efforts demonstrate that capturing and aligning agency information resources is indeed achievable, and implementing that effort government wide is one of OMB's top priorities. It is being spurred by a chorus of voices still decrying the state of today's IT spending.

In a 2003 memo, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., said, "federal agencies should be deriving better results from the $60 billion spent annually on information technology. Much of that money is wasted on IT systems that are redundant or obsolete." Moreover, Lieberman wrote, "The lion's share of the $60 billion spent on IT is spent on service contracts, and there is ample evidence to suggest that oversight of these contracts has been deficient."

The simple truth is that in implementing IT, the government is forced to rely on myriad service contracts. And the idea of issuing performance-based contracts for such services is still a relative novelty in the federal IT world.

One agency where the concept has taken root is the Transportation Security Administration. The brand-new TSA, not tethered to legacy systems or tired capital planning procedures, made its billion-dollar IT Managed Services contract an exclusively performance-based package. Under the contract, Unisys agreed to implement an infrastructure that spans more than 600 sites, both on and off airport premises.

Next week: The Age of Results

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The Clinger-Cohen Act, 10 Years Later: Measuring Efficiency

Wes Andrues — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: Ten years ago, Congress passed the Information Technology Management Reform Act, later renamed for its co-sponsors, Rep. William Clinger, R-Pa., and Sen. William Cohen, R-Maine. In this four-part series, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Wes Andrues, an IT policy consultant and CIO Certificate holder from the National Defense University, looks at the changes in federal technology procurement since the law was passed. Part Two: Measuring Efficiency

It's clear that congressional expectations for cost savings from the Clinger-Cohen Act have not come to pass. So what about the other half of the "sense of Congress" message included in the legislation-that agencies also achieve a 5 percent increase in efficiency. Is the federal government doing measurably better at actually applying IT investments?

The agency most logically aligned to provide an answer to that question is the Office of Management and Budget, which assumed the mantle of information technology management once the CCA was signed. Under Section 5101 of the law, OMB shoulders the responsibility to "oversee the use of information resources to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of governmental operations."

Despite that designation, however, neither OMB nor anyone else can categorically declare whether or not the goal of Congress has been met. Efficiency in IT procurement does not easily lend itself to measurement. To arrive at a specific figure, one would have to mine enough data to fill an ore cart, tracking every expenditure from every chief information officer within the Beltway and beyond, taking inventory of what was bought, whom it benefited and how. That, after all, is the fundamental thrust of the legislation-taking the IT community away from cumbersome and myopic acquisition and wringing an actual return on investments.

Yet proving such a return is notoriously difficult and requires, among other things, a snapshot against which to compare. That lack of a comparative mooring point may be the most crippling factor in trying to prove whether the 5 percent challenge has been met.

Rewind the tape to when CCA was first passed, during the age of what Sen. William Cohen, R-Maine, aptly called "computer chaos." The IT world was long on horror stories and short on real benchmarking data. As the February 1997 minutes of the meeting of the First Practices Forum (as opposed to "best practices," which were yet to emerge) of the newly formed CIO Council Committee indicate, "few agencies have existing capital investment processes, and generally those are for investments other than information technology."

The CCA, either by design or simple omission, mandated no particular construct for capturing initial measurement data. The IT "problem" was passed to OMB as a rather formless entity, a state of being which was to be addressed through the rather nebulous goal of being 5 percent better each year.

To its credit, OMB wasted no time in sizing up the breadth of this complex governance test, issuing a data call of sorts to all 28 newly appointed CIOs to provide "a statement listing the major information systems investments for which new or continued funding is requested."

Guiding resource decisions was, of course, the primary focus of the data call, but if the intent was to capture the state of IT across the federal space, OMB's early efforts fell short. One of the problems was its reluctance to impose a particular model for documenting the relationships between business processes and information technology. By endorsing a medley of models, OMB may have perpetuated some of the complexities associated with drafting the appropriate data collection instrument, and may have therefore missed an opportunity to set conditions and to couch the effort appropriately. Of course, this may have been OMB's precise intent, to leave the intricate architectural details to the information officers now officially at the helm.

Next week: Becoming Enterprise Architects

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The Clinger-Cohen Act, 10 Years Later: The Five Percent Solution

Wes Andrues — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: Ten years ago, Congress passed the Information Technology Management Reform Act, later renamed for its co-sponsors, Rep. William Clinger, R-Pa., and Sen. William Cohen, R-Maine. The Clinger-Cohen Act fundamentally changed federal procurement of information technology, requiring that IT purchases be handled as capital investments and that chief information officers be appointed to lead the process of planning, acquiring and managing technology. In this four-part series running over a month's time, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Wes Andrues, an IT policy consultant and CIO Certificate holder from the National Defense University, looks at the changes in the technology acquisition landscape in the years since the law was passed.

Part One: The Five Percent Solution

With the arrival of the Clinger-Cohen Act's 10th anniversary, it's worth pausing and asking: Are we better off? A decade on, has this legislation achieved its aims?

It may come as no surprise that there is no clear "yes" or "no" answer. The landscape of federal information technology is not a clearly defined plain of reference points that can be empirically studied in pure isolation. The CCA is just one of at least half a dozen major pieces of legislation with implications for IT. It shares space with a host of laws and memoranda and executive orders, all of which tend to make it difficult to issue tidy proclamations about where we are in terms of how well the government buys and uses information resources.

That said, there is a passage tucked within the CCA that provides some tangible scope to the legislation -- a tiny little nuance of a mathematical formula upon which to gauge the grand question of progress. "It is the sense of Congress," the passage reads, "that, during the next five-year period beginning with 1996, executive agencies should achieve each year at least a 5 percent decrease in the cost (in constant fiscal year 1996 dollars) that is incurred by the agency for operating and maintaining information technology, and each year a 5 percent increase in the efficiency of the agency operations, by reason of improvements in information resources management by the agency."

It's fitting that Congress only indicated its "sense" that this goal be achieved, because it defies objective measurement. Apparently, legislators simply wanted to impart their overall expectation that somewhere, somehow, the government should reap some tangible benefit as a result of the law. Nevertheless, the question persists: Have agencies achieved the CCA's pair of 5 percent directives-if not within five years, then in the 10 years since the law was passed?

Perhaps the easiest and most obvious means to address this is to look first at the anticipated reduction in costs. The steady rise in the aggregate IT budget line would certainly seem to mock Congress' intent. When the CCA was passed, the federal IT budget was $28 billion. It now stands at more than $64 billion, despite the fact that the price of a government PC has fallen more than 50 percent in the past decade. So while Congress envisioned a 5 percent spending decrease, the cost of IT is actually rising at an average of 9 percent a year.

To be sure, a host of both anticipated and unforeseen factors has contributed to the spending increases, including Y2K, homeland security efforts, military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and the heady requirements posed by major cybersecurity initiatives. Given the major changes in the world in the past decade, rising budgets can be forgiven, if not expected. What's more significant is how the money is being spent. A great deal of the expertise associated with the implementation of new and upgraded systems lies not in government but in industry, which has resulted in significant increases in outsourcing. According to a report by market research firm INPUT in Reston, Va.,, the outsourcing market is one of the most dynamic sectors of federal IT, expected to reach over $17 billion by 2010.

This growing outsourcing market could, in theory, be tempered by cost-cutting measures such as offshoring, but lawmakers are largely opposed to government operations being sent overseas. So, not only is federal IT governance expensive in and of itself, but exigencies have arisen that demand the commitment of more dollars, and the government cannot numb the bite by subscribing to the same cost-cutting measures available to industry.

Next week: Measuring Efficiency

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The Clinger-Cohen Act: 10 Years Later

Wes Andrues — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 00:00:00 -0400

In this four-part series running over a month's time, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Wes Andrues, an IT policy consultant and CIO Certificate holder from the National Defense University, looks at the changes in the technology acquisition landscape in the years since the law was passed.

Part One: The Five Percent Solution (7/11/06)
Part Two: Measuring Efficiency (7/18/06)
Part Three: Becoming Enterprise Architects (7/25/06)
Part Four: The Age of Results (8/1/06)

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