E-gov initiatives released

E-Government Task Force

The Office of Management and Budget today released the list of crossagency e-government initiatives aimed at transforming the federal government by basing services on specific customer segments (see list below).

An interagency e-government task force, under the leadership of Mark Forman, OMB's associate director for information technology and e-government, chose the 23 initiatives because they have the potential to improve service at multiple agencies and to significantly impact one of the customer-centric segments outlined in the president's management agenda. (OMB listed only 22 initiatives when it originally published the list. But that list, widely reported, did not include the public-key infrastructure project, which is intended to secure electronic transactions.)

Those segments are government to citizen, government to business, government to government, and internal effectiveness and efficiency.

OMB and the President's Management Council also named "managing partners" for each of the initiative's portfolio teams. The other agencies on the team will have to work closely with that lead agency, Forman said this morning at a breakfast hosted by Federal Sources Inc.

OMB also will be hiring four portfolio managers who will work with steering groups to oversee the initiatives in each of the four categories, Forman said. The steering groups will be made up of officials from the Chief Information Officers, Chief Financial Officers, Procurement Executives and Human Resources Management councils.

The initiatives will be completed in the next 18 to 24 months. The first task for the teams will be to build a business case for their initiative by mid-November and a final one by mid-December, each of which will serve as the outline to measured success, Forman said.

The business cases must include details in seven areas: how the initiative links to the agencies' mission(s); what benefits it will bring to users; the critical factors for success; the necessary back-end process and systems; a cost-benefit analysis; where the financing will come from; and a management and organization plan.

A full report on the initiatives, explaining each one in detail, is in its final phase and should be released by the end of the month, Forman said.

The initiatives include the following plus one cross-cutting effort called E-Authentication, for which the managing partner is the General Services Administration.