The Partnership for Public Service has said IT should be managed as an enterprise resource as part of a wider strategy to reduce government overlap and take a more unified, enterprise approach to government as a whole.
In a report prepared with Booze Allen Hamilton, “Building the Enterprise: Nine Strategies for a More Integrated, Effective Government,” PPS said agencies are now widely deploying cloud-based applications for a wide range of uses ranging from email to supply-chain management but that the potential remains for a far more efficient enterprise, or unified, approach to IT.
PPS noted that services being moved to the cloud still reflect a traditional stove-piped model whereby agencies seek individual solutions to fill individual needs. “This situation represents a perfect opportunity to achieve real efficiencies by taking an interagency, enterprise approach to common IT services,” according to the report.
There’s a lot of money at stake. PPS noted that the government spends roughly $80 billion a year on IT – $55 billion of that on operating and maintaining existing systems and said there is considerable opportunity to reduce duplication and find savings.
The White House has been pushing a shared-first, and in many cases cloud-first, strategy for some time, and it has tasked agency CIOs with leading IT portfolio reviews – “PortfolioStats” – to find ways to consolidate or eliminate IT systems and projects.
The White House plan for shared services is a positive, but should be more aggressively pursued, PPS said, so that the “focus on enhancing IT capability should be expanded into a portfolio approach to all IT resources across the federal enterprise, not just within agencies.”
PPS called on the White House CIO and the CIO Council to empower cross-agency efforts by carrying out an wider reaching enterprise IT strategy, one that bundles IT shared services into portfolios such as a single email portfolio with designated leaders.
