OMB reports drop in number of high-risk IT projects

The Office of Management and Budget reported on Thursday that it had significantly reduced the number of federal information technology projects deemed high risk because of their complexity and cost. In addition, the number of IT projects identified as having management weaknesses also dropped, OMB reported.

Comment on this article in The Forum.In the second quarter of fiscal 2008, OMB identified 489 IT projects as high risk, down about 19 percent from the 601 the agency had flagged in the first quarter. OMB places IT projects on the high-risk list, because they are costly, have a large impact on operations governmentwide, or have management concerns, for example. Agencies evaluate and report on performance of high-risk projects to OMB every quarter.

OMB officials attributed the drop in the number of high-risk projects largely to agencies' progress in meeting the requirements of the initiatives for e-government and the lines of business, which were developed by the Bush administration in 2001 under the President's Management Agenda.

OMB developed the initiatives to consolidate common business operations across government, and the initiatives were automatically added to the high-risk list. All agencies completed migration of regulatory systems to the federal document management system used for the E-Rulemaking Line of Business, for example, and all agencies except for the Veteran Affairs and State departments have migrated to one of four payroll providers, allowing the agencies to turn off legacy payroll systems, as required by the Payroll Line of Business.

"As agencies have finished implementation and shut down and decommissioned systems, those projects have been removed from the list…because there is no more money being spent [rolling out] that initiative," said Timothy Young, deputy administrator of e-government and information technology for OMB. "It's a positive story, because they have not only made a commitment, but they've followed through on that commitment."

OMB also reported that agencies have improved management practices on other IT projects. When reviewing business cases for projects, OMB places cases that reflect one or more planning weaknesses on its management watch list. Agencies are supposed to follow up on its recommendations to correct the weaknesses.

In an update to the first-quarter numbers reported in the fiscal 2009 IT budget request in February, OMB reported that 473 projects, with a total value of $15 billion, were placed on the management watch list and will carryover to fiscal 2009. That number is a decrease of nearly 12 percent from the 535 projects on the list in the first quarter of 2008.

"[Agencies need to have] some activity to compensate for risk, and when they do, they come off the list," said Karen Evans, OMB's administrator of e-government and information technology. "[They're] looking at overall problems, and reducing down investment by investment the weaknesses they've identified."

The Commerce Department has 61 projects remaining on the management watch list, and 13 on the high-risk list. Projects on the high-risk list include a Census Bureau contract to develop handheld computers for data collection, which Congress has cut back its planned use of the contract considerably.