Much of the movement on the latest President’s Management Agenda scorecard took place in the e-gov initiative, where the Departments of Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, and Education received upgrades in status ratings, and where the Small Business Administration was downgraded to red for both status and progress.
Accompanying the release of the scorecard was a memo from OMB’s administrator for e-gov and IT, Karen Evans, pushing the lines of business initiatives in the area of e-gov where the administration hopes to eek out savings and migrate to common government-wide solutions and big contracts.
“Upon migration to common, government-wide solutions, agencies will shut down redundant systems which will not only save money but also free-up resources for agencies to better focus on achieving their missions,” the fiscal 2007 budget says.
In the previous scorecard issued in March, OMB downgraded the e-gov scores for nine agencies, something OMB attributed to under-funding.
However, despite slightly better scores this quarter, nine agencies were rated red and 12 yellow for e-gov in the traffic-light style scorecard. Financial performance continues to have the most red-ratings at 16.
LoB initiatives in the area of e-gov that Evans cited in her memo include switching the Department of Labor’s benefits website, GovBenefits.gov, from a hand-coded architecture to a flexible, portal-based architecture, as well as the creation of a Department of Homeland Security umbrella program called SAFECOM meant to help local, tribal, state, and federal public safety agencies improve response times with interoperable wireless communications.
Evans also cited progress with the financial management LoB, which launched migration-planning guidance for comment in May, and noted that in June 2006, OMB released the second version of the consolidated reference model, including an updated version of the federal enterprise architecture reference model.
