Agencies share secrets for boosting e-gov grades
Transportation Department and Small Business Administration jump from lowest ranking to highest in just a few months.
Federal agencies graded on the Bush administration's quarterly management score card continue to have mixed results in the area of expanding electronic government. But progress on the final fiscal 2006 score card could represent a turning point for several agencies.
Four moved into the green category in e-government: the Environmental Protection Agency, Small Business Administration, and State and Transportation departments. The turnarounds at Transportation and SBA were particularly noteworthy because the agencies jumped up two levels, from red to the top mark of green.
According to one former government official familiar with the score card process, agencies that move from the bottom to highest rung in one quarter must lay out specific action items and concentrate their efforts on resolving those issues.
"The proof is in the pudding," the official said on the condition of anonymity. "They spent their time and money on what [the Office of Management and Budget] wanted them to do."
Dan Mintz, recently appointed Transportation chief information officer, said the department's success can be attributed to a focus on how the initiatives could be helpful. They were not treated as just another OMB requirement, he said.
"If you define it in terms of value to the department, people buy into it more," he said.
According to Mintz, one of Transportation's biggest challenges was addressing its cybersecurity processes. The work done in the six months he has been there will be reflected in its Federal Information Security Management Act audit.
Charles McClam, SBA deputy chief information officer, said the agency achieved green by addressing issues with its IT security assessments, and with its e-government initiatives -- namely the Business Gateway Web portal to centralize regulatory information of interest to small firms.
"We have gotten our grades upgraded to green status and we're going to be working very hard to make sure that we maintain that green status," McClam said.
The SBA's relaunching of the Business Gateway Web site, Business.gov, was a significant part of achieving the highest ranking on the score card, he said.
Senior executives across government often have score card grades tied to their performance plans, making the marks a high-priority issue for many agency CIOs, McClam said.
But despite the success of SBA and Transportation, nearly a third of all agencies graded for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2006 were unable to do better than the failing mark of red on e-government.
Three agencies -- the Agriculture and Health and Human Services departments and NASA -- fell from yellow to red. Another 10 agencies are at the middle mark of yellow.
The Army Corps of Engineers and Homeland Security Department have never moved out of red in the e-government category, and the Veterans Affairs Department has not moved higher since the fourth quarter of fiscal 2004.
Agencies' grades are based on a set of standards developed by the President's Management Council.
To achieve a green e-government grade, agencies must show that they have an effective enterprise architecture describing the structure of their IT processes and systems. They also need adequate IT security and acceptable business cases for all major system investments. None of the business cases can be on the "management watch list." They must also comply with the lines of business initiatives to consolidate back-end technology systems in areas such as financial management.
Agencies that score red have an inadequate enterprise architecture, unacceptable business cases for more than half of major IT investments, and inadequate compliance with IT security policies and procedures.
In May, several agencies were docked on the e-government section of the score card for failing to communicate the benefits of the multiagency e-government projects to congressional appropriators.
One OMB official speaking on the condition of anonymity said that officials have yet to determine whether agencies were successful in resolving this shortcoming, because Congress has yet to complete the majority of fiscal 2007 spending bills.