2011 Budget Invests in IT Workforce

The federal The Chief Information Officers Council plans to conduct a governmentwide IT workforce survey in 2010 to help enable agency managers to identify future workforce needs, according to the budget documents released on Monday.

The fiscal 2011 budget proposal noted a commitment to investing in the IT workforce, particularly as rapid advances in IT continue to drive strong demand for highly-skilled employees to manage IT projects and systems to improve program performance. The Office of Personnel Management has estimated there were about 70,000 IT professionals in the federal workforce as of March 2009, and it projects IT professionals will continue to retire at a rate of more than 2,500 annually for the next seven years. As a result, the CIO Council will conduct a survey to ensure federal managers are adequately addressing current and future IT workforce needs, the budget blueprint states.

The budget proposal also outlines a need for agencies to adopt the latest 21st century technology to attract and retain the best and brightest future employees and enable all federal employees to work at their peak performance. The development of a collaboration platform would enable employees to locate other employees with common challenges, needed skills and ideas and ideas to solve common problems, communicate and share information and generate better solutions to problems more efficiently, the budget states.

As a result, the Obama administration will evaluate alternatives, determine the best solutions and initiate implementation of such a collaboration platform across the federal government, with plans to deploy such a platform in 2011, the budget states.

"Much of the work in the government could be improved with a technology platform that enables effective collaboration across agencies, across distances and across governmental boundaries," the budget states. "The rise in social media and Web 2.0 technologies has proven that no single organization has a monopoly on good ideas."