Federal IT remains problematic at almost every level, from acquisition and modernization to securing our information infrastructure. According to federal CIOs, the greatest challenge to effective management of IT is not technical or even financial. It’s bureaucratic. Nearly all of them cite processes for hiring, recruiting and retaining IT personnel as the biggest problem they face.
This is a finding from a survey of 24 major agency CIOs by the Government Accountability Office. Not surprisingly, availability of personnel was the second biggest problem. Inadequate financial resources ranked third.
The position of chief information officer was established for 24 executive branch agencies in 1996 under the Clinger-Cohen Act, which also gave the Office of Management and Budget oversight of IT spending, modernizing federal IT and improving cybersecurity. A GAO report released this month found that more than 20 years after the positions were mandated, none of the agencies have created policies to fully address the role of CIO. Significantly, no agency had established a policy for managing its IT workforce.
An old story
The IT workforce challenge has been recognized for years and the federal government has established programs to encourage STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education and to encourage graduates to consider government work. Despite these efforts, there is still an overall shortage of skilled workers, and the government is not competitive in recruiting and retaining those that are available. The private sector can generally offer more money, provide a clearer and more attractive career path and has a simpler hiring process.
Nine CIOs told the GAO that slow and inefficient hiring processes make it difficult to hire staff with the needed skills and experience. One CIO said he had lost many strong candidates because of the unreasonable length of the process. Agencies also cannot offer adequate salaries, and several agencies that have authority to pay higher salaries increase the competition faced by the rest.
A shortage in the IT workforce might not be the greatest problem for six CIOs, who reported that they did not have sufficient budgets to fully staff their offices anyway.
Not only are agencies finding it difficult to fill the IT ranks, it’s hard to get generals, as well, and GAO cited a lack of consistent leadership as a major contributor to the lack of effective IT management. Although IT executives say it takes from three to five years for a CIO to be effective, the median tenure for agency CIOs from 2012 to 2017 was less than two years.
No fix in sight
The GAO is recommending that OMB update and expand its guidance on CIO responsibilities and authority and that agencies put the required policies for managing IT in place. This is fine, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t address the serious underlying problem of having a trained workforce acquiring, operating, managing and securing our information infrastructure. And no fixes for that problem seem likely any time soon.
With a Congress that cut taxes for the rich and expanded the national deficit spending more on bombs, bullets and boots, I am not holding my breath until they provide the money to make government IT positions competitive with the private sector.
Fortunately, pay isn’t the only, or the most important, issue for young workers, whom studies indicate value mission as much as money. But the bureaucratic hurdles the hoops involved in landing a government job are enough to dampen the ardor of even the most idealistic millennial. Getting the folks who set the rules for these kinds of things to change the way they do business is as tough as getting money out of Congress, so I don’t expect to see government streamlining hiring policies to be competitive with the private sector.
Until we have an administration and legislators in place who take the problems our country is facing seriously—not just IT, but all of the problems—we can expect to see the same problems coming up over and over again. Just as they have for the last 40 years.