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By Vincent Capasso
Good, bad, or ugly - what do you think the changes in IT at the federal level under the leadership of Vivek Kundra over the course of the last three years? This question in survey format was put to IT pros like yourselves recently and the results are a bit of a shocker.
Vivek Kundra is no longer the Federal CIO but his legacy lives on mostly because of the scope of the systems changes he instituted while in charge of the administration of the Federal IT budget.
The recent survey of federal IT professionals praised the former federal CIO for making a significant impact during his tenure at the Office of Management and Budget. In addition he received good grades his vision in advancing the government IT community. This is mostly likely directly attributable to his data center consolidation plans as well as his idea to realize substantial cost savings by embracing cloud computing at all levels of the federal government.
The federal IT sector overall is better as a result of his leadership, said 71 percent of the respondents.
71% of respondents gave Kundra credit for making a significant impact and 75 % said his vision was his greatest strength. ( Again cloud computing and data center consolidation).
A mere 18% of the surveyed IT pros pointed to his dedication to the job as his greatest strength.
Overall they gave him a grade of B for his leadership and raised questions about OMB’s implementation timing, funding, and conflicting mandates for improving federal IT.
Among Kundra's top challenges, 59 % said he did not get sufficient funding to fulfill mandates. 44% of respondents said he faced conflicting mandates and 41% said he faced unrealistic goals or mandates.
Only 29 % said they were actually following Kundra’s Cloud First policy, a keystone of his federal IT innovation program. Sometimes the difficulties of implementation are very complex at the federal level.
When asked what Steven VanRoekel, the new federal CIO, should focus on:
60% said reducing the number of mandates.
53 % suggested a reassessment of goals and timelines to make success more attainable.
46 % called on VanRoekel to listen to feedback and counsel from IT operators.
The survey was conducted in person with IT professionals with many different backgrounds in computing. The survey was named “Over to You, Mr. VanRoekel . A Federal IT Referendum on Change Study.”
The participants numbered 174 federal IT and systems integrators. It was conducted at the MeriTalk Innovation Nation conference in August.
Published by myITview.com
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