IT reform effort expected to meet most deadlines

The Obama administration is reporting significant advances in implementing its 25-point IT reform plan released last December, but changes that require congressional consent appear to be lagging.

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra said during a White House forum April 27 that seven of the reform plan’s action items have already been delivered and five more are on track to be completed by early June.

However, two of the plan’s main goals – working with Congress to create IT budget models that align with modular development and working with Congress to consolidate commodity IT spending under agency CIOs – are behind schedule, according to the six-month IT reform report card Kundra presented at the event.

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Kundra also announced that 137 data centers will close by the end of 2011. And, he noted the administration’s cloud first policy has resulted in 15 agencies identifying approximately 950,000 mailboxes and over 100 e-mail systems that will move to the cloud.

Also speaking at the forum were agency CIOs and deputy secretaries, including Homeland Security Department CIO Richard Spires who spoke about the Federal CIO Council’s newly launched best practices information-sharing platform.

As for the next steps of the reform plan, Kundra said he is focused on execution and rolling out the TechStat model at the bureau level. So far, there have been over 80 agency TechStat sessions.

He added that as part of the budget process, there will be a “fundamental change” made to the IT Dashboard where “you have much more granular detail” on how contracts are awarded and the health of IT projects.