It was a bit startling last month to hear that federal CIO Vivek Kundra will leave his post in August for a Harvard fellowship. But it's been entertaining and enlightening to hear his outspoken departing advice on federal IT, the essence of which appears to be: Throw away old ideas and start fresh.
Kundra didn't hold back criticism of his current employer. "The model in Washington, especially in the federal government, has been throwing bodies at the problem. It hasn't been about introducing game-changing technology," he told the panel.
Instead of looking at the best technology for a particular goal, Kundra said that something close to an "IT cartel" of contractors wins bids repeatedly. The same managers are shuffled from project to project. And the entire IT procurement process takes too long -- typically two years from the call for bids to implementation. This state of affairs shuts out innovative companies, universities, and people, Kundra said.
He expanded on the waste and inefficiency all this leads to, saying that, on his arrival in Washington, $27 billion worth of IT projects (out of an overall budget of $80 billion) were "hundreds of millions" of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. By calling all parties on the carpet and raking through the facts, Kundra says his team cut $3 billion in waste.
One wonders what happened to the other $24 billion. Kundra cited one DoD project that had to be canned after 12 years and $1 billion was sunk into it. He also cited costs such as $137 million over six years spent on simply piling up reports on cybersecurity that were filed in "metal boxes" in Washington.
But Kundra's most damning statistics surrounded the government's datacenter deployments. Since 1998, he said, the government had expanded its number of datacenters from 432 to 2,000. Average CPU utilization is 27 percent, and average storage utilization is under 40 percent.
Kundra has published a worthy 25-point plan to reform federal IT. And he has begun the process of consolidating and closing government datacenters (800 already have been closed, with 137 more planned for closure by the end of this year). Unless his plan becomes a lost opportunity after he leaves, progress should continue.
Kundra has already started his plan to replace much datacenter infrastructure with cloud services, which he says save money by delivering value "on day one," instead of requiring long periods of time to achieve payback. Various government agencies, he says, have already saved over $42 million just by using cloud services to support email.
IT professionals everywhere can learn from Kundra's assessments, even if their enterprise IT outfits are more efficient than the government's. And a central message seems to be to break out of traditional ways of thinking about procurement, project management, and vendor relations.
Now that Kundra is moving on out of the Washington fray, his words to the wise should resonate even more clearly.
Join the editors and moderators of Internet Evolution to discuss the federal CIO's outgoing advice on Monday, July 25, at 1:00 p.m. ET. Click here then to join the chat. See you
there!
It seems that he was hitting a nerve on a few high level people/lobbyists.
Getting a project off the ground two years after its given a green light is horrible. The government seems to do this with everything, they brute force their way through issues in hopes that it wil eventually work.
Its a shame they're loosing him, he seems to have started turning the government in the right direction.
Antonis, there is absolutely a huge market for "midmarket" or midsized firms (having 100 to 1,000 employees) in the US, as there is worldwide. And note that Internet Evolution has an entire clan devoted to the midmarket.
I apologize if it didn't seem as though I was addressing that segment in my blog.
Indeed, many startups could fit into the midmarket segment. But that said, many enterprise IT buyers are looking for big, big companies when buying technology. The idea seems to be that the longer a firm has been around, the more likely it is to survive as a proven entity. No one wants to think they'll be left holding onto unsupportable technology if a startup goes under.
Hi Mary, catching up with discussion and forthcoming chat, I wonder whether there is something like SMEs (Small Medium Enterprises) in US!! It seems that entrerpisies jump from tiny startups to M&A with Large Enterpsises? Could any SMEs ever compete for procurement or any IT contracts?
There's another side to this, which is that established companies are often considered better bets than startups. Who wants to be left in the lurch if/when a startup folds? Often, financial viability is a key element of the IT vetting process. At the very least, a lot of enterprise buyers want an endorsement by a big partner before hiring a newbie, no matter how innovative the startup may be.
There was a saying 25 years ago that "You were always safe using IBM". Now there are multiple "safe" companies, but it is a relatively small club, and it does not include small innovative companies . Federal jobs are pork. I'm surprised that Kundra lasted as long as he did.
Agreed...but doesnt' this happen in most major city centers? You don't have to stray too far off the Strip in Vegas to see this...or Wander about the side streets of Manhattan! The only difference is that an entire cottage industry has sprung up in support of the federal government and it's programs. And the more affluent workers have migrated to the suburbs and brought their governtment wealth with them. No where else in the country does a change in presidents cause so many people to be out of work like it does in the suburbs of DC. In fact, with the recent changing of the guards from Republicans to Democrats in the whitehouse, military spending was hard hit and dozens of companies that support military technology had massive layoffs or were shuttered completly in our area!
The ThinkerNet does not reflect the views of TechWeb. The ThinkerNet is an informal means of communication to members and visitors of the Internet Evolution site. Individual authors are chosen by Internet Evolution to blog. Neither Internet Evolution nor TechWeb assume responsibility for comments, claims, or opinions made by authors and ThinkerNet bloggers. They are no substitute for your own research and should not be relied upon for trading or any other purpose.
Facebook and Twitter are great for posting cat pictures. But are people really using social media for life-changing communications? Like, if a hurricane comes by and blows down their house?
In a standout presentation at the Jefferies 2013 Global Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in New York this week, the UK government talked about becoming a "very intelligent client."
A consumer business would have to be crazy or desperate to change call-center software in December, the peak of the holiday season. But that was exactly Positec's position.
To help enterprises deploy software faster for mobile, social, big-data, and cloud applications, IBM this week acquired development tools vendor UrbanCode.
Internet Explorer seems like a relic of the 90s, like parachute pants and Friends. But that's just me. I'm a Chrome guy, and before that I used Firefox.
Multi-tenant clouds assure security for clients, but not necessarily for their ideas. Here's one thing you should discuss with your cloud provider before you sign on.
US counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke, who came to prominence with his prescient warnings before the 9/11 attacks, tells Smithsonian Magazine the US was responsible for the Stuxnet supersmart worm that attacked parts of nuclear reactors in Iran – and in the process, has given away one of the world's most sophisticated cyberweapons.
Cisco's rumored sale of Linksys suggests we may have problem with innovation and profit at the edge of our Internet, and that could be critical to the evolution of many Internet-delivered services.
Sean Smith, a US Foreign Service IT manager, gave his life in service of his country and the world. His life and death are a humbling example for all of us who work in IT.
Enterprises are discovering that using social networking within the secure setting of a SaaS provider's network gives them an unusual opportunity to freely collaborate with partners, suppliers, and even competitors.
All the recent hoopla about cloud security overlooks an important point, which is that it's not strictly a cloud problem. The linkage of online services into cooperative chains creates the risk, and only biometrics and federation of providers can save us.
The very low-tech "scrum" project technique introduces "crowd talking" to projects and also sets the entire crowd to problem solving. So far, these new social-media-style meetings appear to have supercharged project execution.
Microsoft's recent decision to bundle its Office software with business partner offerings indicates that cloud software may be in the news, but licensed packages are still in demand for failover.
With 24/7 processing and business continuation paramount, more organizations are considering having three datacenters, where primary and secondary datacenters are in their immediate region and a third is in a remote geography. Why? To avoid repercussions of a major disaster that could hit every IT resource in a specific region.
Jane Williams, technology training manager for Multnomah County, says the ability to share resources is just one of the coming benefits of moving the county's intranet to a Drupal Commons platform hosted in the cloud.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
your weekly update of news, analysis, and
opinion from Internet Evolution - FREE! REGISTER HERE
Wanted! Site Moderators Internet Evolution is looking for a handful of readers to help moderate the message boards on our site – as well as engaging in high-IQ conversation with the industry mavens on our thinkerNet blogosphere. The job comes with various perks, bags of kudos, and GIANT bragging rights. Interested?
To save this item to your list of favorite Internet Evolution content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
Email This
