“I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you,” supposedly is one of the three Great Lies. (Don’t ask about the other two.) But the purpose of government is to help its citizens, and to fulfill their missions agencies need more help from their IT vendors.
That is the big takeaway from a survey conducted by Lockheed Martin and the Government Business Council. Although federal employees are generally satisfied with the services being provided by their agencies’ IT departments, there still is a long way to go in aligning those services with agency mission and improving productivity. Areas where federal IT consistently falls short include:
• Compatibility and interoperability. Too many of the services being offered do not work with systems across an agency or with those of other agencies.
• Collaboration. IT can help employees work, but too often it does not help them work together. Improved productivity is touted as one of the benefits of IT, but often it fails to deliver in this area and there is a lack of metrics for informing improvements.
• Mission delivery. IT acquisitions are focused on economy, but many IT contractors lack an understanding of their customers’ missions and it is difficult to identify innovations to address mission challenges.
What is needed to address these issues is a more robust partnership between agencies and their vendors focusing on outcome rather than procurement, says Scott Gray, VP of IT and security solutions for Lockheed Martin Information Systems and Global Solutions.
In the traditional model for federal procurement, the agency specifies a particular product or service then selects the acceptable offering at the lowest cost. Both agencies and vendors have gotten good at this, and IT functionality has improved rapidly while costs have fallen. But the end result frequently has been too little compatibility, collaboration and operational improvement in service delivery. Agencies need to focus more on identifying challenges and defining desired outcomes, and then work with the private sector to produce the proper results.
This is not a new idea. “It is being done today,” Gray said. He cited the departments of Justice and Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration and NASA among those at the forefront. They are not going outside the Federal Acquisition Regulations to do this, but are using contract language to encourage innovation and providing incentives such as sharing the savings in overall cost of ownership. This flexibility can help agencies seize opportunities of the moment and realize more of the advantages that IT should provide.
Despite these examples, the recent survey suggests much room for improvement. Gray is an optimist. “The glass is significantly more than half full,” he said, “but there is still work to be done.” Much of that work is in change management and overcoming organizational resistance.
This is a job for the CIO, who must be a coalition builder within the organization, Gray said. “The CIO has to be in the center of everything,” including the budget process, congressional relations, working with the user base, service delivery, and IT teams. Understanding agency mission and the needs of the workers as well as the IT infrastructure, and managing Congress while managing data centers is not an easy job, but that is what is needed.
Furthering this evolution will require the cooperation of vendors and contractors who understand and embrace this concept and who are willing to innovate, share risks and help their customers succeed.