OMB: E-Gov cooperation starts right here

When it comes to cooperation with other organizations, the Office of Management and Budget recognizes that it must walk the walk as well as talk the talk.Tad Anderson, OMB’s associate administrator for e-government and IT, yesterday said his office must communicate better with Congress about the benefits of the IT reform agenda.“We can do a better job in the coming months of communicating with Congress in terms of what our strategy is for e-government and what the Federal Enterprise Architecture is and its value,” Anderson said during a keynote address at the E-Gov Web Enabled and Enterprise Architecture conference in Washington. OMB officials have said the reluctance of Congress to authorize money for the E-Government Fund is the result of the agency’s inability to explain the importance of the resources to lawmakers. Anderson said he plans to meet with congressional authorizing, oversight and appropriations members and their staffs to bolster the administration’s e-government message.“We communicate with agencies, [Reps.] Tom Davis (R-Va.) and Adam Putnam’s (R-Fla.) staffs well,” Anderson said. “But we need to do a better job with appropriators and authorizers.”Anderson said for e-government transformation to continue, federal agencies must cooperate more with each other, with state and local governments and with the private sector.As an example of cooperation, Anderson noted that a $30 million enterprise contract for content management software at the Treasury Department was signed by seven or eight officials from different agencies within the department .He said the E-Rulemaking and Geospatial One-Stop Quicksilver projects are examples of interagency and state and local cooperation, and added that share-in-savings contracting will help further public-private partnerships.“Every day at OMB, we are seeing the results of agency cooperation to create a government more focused on the citizen,” Anderson said. “These successes highlight the type of cooperation that is necessary to achieve the kind of breakthrough performance we all want to achieve.”