CIO Council gets new priorities

HERSHEY, Pa.--The Office of Management and Budget has radically overhauled the CIO Council by abolishing committees, changingmembers' assignments and setting new priorities.Following months of what council cochairman James Flyzik called "a lotof brainstorming" with Mark Forman, OMB associate director for IT andelectronic government, the council’s standing committees have beenreduced to three: work force, best practices and architecture. Gone are the security and electronic government subcommittees.Flyzik, the acting assistant secretary for administration and CIO ofthe Treasury Department, outlined the changes during a press briefingat the Industry Advisory Council's Executive Leadership Conference here yesterday. The council will now have four portfolio teams, each corresponding to a segment of the president's so-called citizen-centric government initiative. Each team will oversee specific improvement projects Forman has identified in the four areas. OMB has not yet identified the projects, which will each be headed by a manager and a managing partner, Flyzik said.The managers might be CIOs, chief financial officers, program managersor other senior officials.