Contractors should refuse tech projects with undefined goals, OMB official says

Federal agencies must become better information technology clients, and if they don't, private sector contractors should refuse to take their money, the Office of Management and Budget's management chief told a group of IT managers and industry officials Wednesday.

"If we haven't defined [an IT program] to the ultimate degree, then you need to just stop taking our money," Clay Johnson, OMB's deputy director for management, said during a conference in Washington on Internet-enabled government services. "We need to be really smart about how we spend out IT dollars."

Both government project managers and private contractors are responsible for failing to define goals for federal technology projects, Johnson said.

He cited the FBI's failure to upgrade its digital case-management system as an example of a program that was not well defined. The Virtual Case File system, contracted to Science Applications International Corp. for more than $170 million, was intended to help FBI agents improve the management of case records, but the project was scuttled after several setbacks.

"Too often we'll invest in systems … and we haven't clearly defined what we want this system to do," Johnson said. "That kind of discipline didn't exist with Virtual Case File."

Technology spending is one of the select areas that has seen budget increases under the Bush administration, most recently to the tune of more than 7.1 percent, raising the government's total IT budget to $65.2 billion.

Johnson said there is $25 billion to $30 billion of government work that could be done by the private sector, and decisions must be made on who can most efficiently do that work.