Keeping Score

New federal IT budget ties funds to performance and information sharing

In an era when declining funds are causing many government and corporate IT programs to be axed or scaled back, the Bush administration's recent proposal to increase federal IT spending by 15 percent in the 2003 fiscal year (FY) is good news for hopeful IT contractors.

However, agencies and legislators are still sorting out priorities for spending the more than $52 billion allocated for U.S. e-government projects and billions more in homeland IT security efforts. Even after the budget gets approved for the FY starting Oct. 1, 2002, agencies and their contractors will have to meet strict new performance standards and information-sharing goals in order to get the green light for continued funding.

The U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) identified security, information sharing, and facilitating economic growth as top priorities for spending federal IT funds in 2003. OMB also issued a significant policy shift for IT spending, detailing in the budget how OMB will measure the success of agency IT efforts using scorecard standards.

In addition, OMB scrutinized how effective current IT management practices have been at individual agencies and set goals that each agency's e-government projects must meet in 2002. While the OMB gave good grades to agencies such as the National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, and Nuclear Regulatory Commission, others didn't fare so well, including the Veterans Administration and the Energy, Interior, and State departments.

Not surprisingly, nearly half of the $52 billion is going to defense agencies and departments, while OMB recommended increasing FY 2003 IT security spending from $2.7 billion to $4.2 billion. A separate $37 billion allocation for the U.S. Office of Homeland Security reserves an additional $722 million, or about 2 percent, to deploy IT for information sharing efforts at different agencies.

One objective for homeland security IT spending is to establish an Information Integration Office in the Department of Commerce to eliminate information "stovepipes" and implement an interagency information architecture. Another goal is to extend information sharing among federal, state, and local agencies and the private sector using portals and other technology.

For example, in recent testimony before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Technology and Procurement Policy, Siebel Systems Inc. CEO Thomas Siebel discussed how existing information-sharing technology might have prevented the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks. Siebel explained how multiple U.S. and local agencies, including the FBI, CIA, the State and Treasury departments, two state police departments, and the Federal Aviation Administration had separate pieces of information about terrorist ringleader Mohammed Atta and coconspirators.

If all of the agencies had centralized access to all of this information, they could have analyzed data about Atta's meetings with Iraqi intelligence and Osama Bin Laden operatives, large sums of money wired to Atta, and incidents involving an airplane and a flight school and possibly predicted the attacks and alerted other agencies, Siebel said. Information-sharing efforts would also need to connect federal, state, and local agency IT systems with private sector IT, such as airlines, hotels, and rental car companies, and work across multiple channels, including phone and email messages and field agent reports, according to Siebel.

The ambitious scope of federal plans to upgrade the U.S. IT infrastructure could create barriers to successful implementation, according to Meta Group Inc., which said government efforts to fix IT problems by throwing money at them will not be effective without better planning and a complete overhaul of existing IT policies and information architecture, preferably by a blue-ribbon panel of top government and private-sector IT experts.

— Claudia Willen

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