Federal CIO sees upside to doing more with less

When information technology officials invoke the budget-cutters' mantra of "doing more with less," they've typically focused on the "less" part of the equation, federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel said Friday.

For the federal IT community, that has included commitments to close about 1,200 federal data centers during the next three years and shelving major IT projects that have ambled on too long without delivering results.

The CIO's office, however, has been trying to focus on how savings from closing data centers, improving IT management and moving programs to cheaper cloud computing can be shifted to new initiatives that deliver more and better government services, VanRoekel said during a breakfast presentation sponsored by the Bethesda chapter of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, a government and industry group.

President Obama's 2013 fiscal budget request includes a dip of about 1 percent for federal IT spending, to $78.9 billion. IT spending has been basically flat since the start of the Obama administration, after rising about 7 percent annually during the previous decade.

Despite that flat funding, the government has made significant strides, VanRoekel argued Friday. "I would contend that in the last three years we have innovated more than in the prior 10," he said.

Among the new initiatives VanRoekel touted were a roadmap to leverage mobile spending and applications governmentwide -- due out in March -- and a plan to update the government information trove Data.gov to be more searchable and accessible.

The Homeland Security Department's IT shop cut existing investments so it could squirrel away money for new initiatives, CIO Richard Spires said during a panel discussion following VanRoekel's speech.

"Working through my own CIO council in DHS . . . we agreed we would take a 10 percent cut across-the-board in our IT infrastructure," he said. "And this was somewhat of a challenge for us to say, 'Look, we've got to figure out a way to really streamline our infrastructure through the shared first initiative that [VanRoekel] mentioned, to plow out those additional funds, because we're pretty much flat-lined at DHS. We need to plow that into more business and mission-oriented investments. And we've done that."

Most parts of the Homeland Security budget were cut in the president's budget request -- except for cybersecurity funding, which was doubled.

Other IT officials said they had taken a less structured approach to cost-cutting, but shared the overall goal of squeezing savings from existing projects so that they could invest in new initiatives.

"We're embarking on this enterprise strategy that is intended to create a more homogenous infrastructure for the entire department," said Robert Carey, deputy CIO at the Defense Department.

Defense saw the largest cut in the president's proposed fiscal 2013 budget, which Carey said was due to several modernization efforts coming to fruition, including plans to cut about 200 data centers by the end of 2012.

"It's a big enterprise architecture approach to get to that operating end state that supports the warfighter while at the same time is more efficient to operate and costs less," Carey said. "So we have not directed any 'you'll take an X percent reduction,' because that ends up being salami slices through programs, [which] you don't want to do."