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The buck stops with Vivek Kundra.
The Federal CIO recently began conducting meetings with agency CIOs and other department officials to assess the status of IT projects. Kundra’s TechStat meetings are aimed at determining which projects are on course, which ones may need to be revised and those which are ultimately deemed for the scrap heap – either because they’re running over-budget, behind schedule or are otherwise out of scope.
Kundra’s TechStat barometer is based on a crime-fighting performance measurement system used by New York City and other municipalities called CompStat. According to Federal Computer Week and other publications, Kundra has already met with officials from the Environmental Protection Agency about an IT project that’s $30 million over budget and a year behind schedule. Following the meeting, Kundra sent EPA officials a detailed letter on what he expects the agency to do to get the project back on course.
Kundra is currently holding three or four TechStat meetings per week and is planning on adding more.
This kind of financial discipline is long overdue in Washington. Based on his track record, it seems that Kundra has the chops to enact stricter financial governance. For instance, when Kundra was CTO for the District of Columbia, his zeal for utilizing cloud computing led DC to spend less than $500,000 for a Google Apps Enterprise license which is $3.5 million less than what it had planned to spend on a portal project, according to CNET.
Last June, just one month after being named Federal CIO by President Obama, Kundra introduced an IT dashboard which tracks over $76 billion in IT spending. The dashboard is aimed at providing greater transparency into federal IT spending and can be accessed by the public, department officials and agency CIOs.
Earlier this month, Mel Duvall wrote about how The Obama Administration plans to keep a lid on IT spending by taking advantage of cloud computing and data center consolidation.
It’s refreshing to see the federal government apply the types of IT financial controls that have been popularized by private sector CIOs. Time will tell whether Kundra’s financial management savvy has a lasting impact on how IT operations are run inside federal agencies.
President Obama has received a lot of criticism for how he has handled the economy and healthcare reform during his short tenure. He beat the drumbeat of change when he was running for the nation's highest office. He appears to have delivered on at least part of that promise in the form of Vivek Kundra.
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