Federal CIO Tony Scott and other federal leaders are touting the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) as an opportunity to advance federal IT management reform in a way that was envisioned, but never fully realized, by the 1996 Clinger-Cohen Act. And rightly so. Under the implementing guidance issued in June by the Office of Management and Budget, FITARA gives agency CIOs greater authority and involvement in their agencies' procurement, workforce, and budget matters while driving a tighter, more integrated CIO partnership with other senior leaders, including CFOs and chief procurement officers.
At a June hearing of House lawmakers, Scott said FITARA will "position CIOs so that they can reasonably be held accountable for how effectively their agencies use modern digital approaches to achieve the objectives of effective and efficient programs and operations."
Despite this optimism, seasoned government observers may be skeptical about FITARA's prospects, given the failure of Clinger-Cohen almost 20 years ago to achieve similar goals. But what they may be overlooking are two key factors existing today, which didn't exist then, that dramatically improve FITARA's chances for success.
One is top-level priority and leadership from the White House to realize the ambitions of FITARA. In the mid-1990s, there was no Federal CIO position or anyone, for that matter, in a comparable high-level position who had the White House's backing – as Scott has today – to provide sustained governmentwide leadership and pressure to deliver on the promise of Clinger-Cohen.
Another factor that makes success more likely for FITARA is the existence today of powerful automated commercial tools that can provide CIOs and their staffs with unprecedented visibility into and intelligence about their IT domains. Having complete visibility into all hardware and software assets within an enterprise – combined with in-depth intelligence about those assets – will be critical to CIOs and other leaders as they:
- Consolidate existing and future contracts for commodity IT;
- Prioritize modernization funds;
- Consolidate and eliminate duplicative IT resources;
- Identify and remove cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the form of unauthorized IT assets – known as "shadow IT" or "hidden IT" – that are not approved or that have exceeded their end-of-support or end-of-life dates;
- Enable and enhance Information Security Continuous Monitoring (ISCM) activities to ensure that all IT assets are subject to an automated inventory, configuration, or vulnerability management capability;
- Centralize and optimize the purchase and management of software licenses;
- Reduce lifecycle costs and improve asset management practices for commodity IT;
- Support and leverage governmentwide Category Management and Federal Strategic Sourcing initiatives for commodity IT;
- Enforce and optimize enterprise IT configuration and approved/not approved regimes;
- Optimize data center consolidations, cloud migrations and shared service adoptions under the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI), Cloud First and the Federal IT Shared Services Strategy initiatives;
- Harmonize the cacophony of IT product value chains, procurement systems, product numbers, licensing models, and product descriptions that typically exists across a federal enterprise, which is needed for improved procurement decisions and audit preparedness.
Clinger-Cohen was never fully successful in part because agencies lacked the visibility into their IT assets required to effectively support these kinds of decisions. The tools simply didn't exist to provide in-depth IT asset data on an enterprise scale. And this made it virtually impossible for agency CIOs and their staffs to assemble the intelligence needed to carry out Clinger-Cohen in the way Congress had envisioned.
Today, these solutions do exist and will be essential to FITARA's success. IT asset discovery tools in the marketplace today, for example, can find and classify all IP-enabled hardware and software on a network, including those not normally detected by agent-based discovery tools. This includes servers, Linux and Unix-based devices, and even IP-enabled non-IT devices like medical devices, and manufacturing equipment. Such tools can help federal IT staffs spot devices brought into their agencies' networks through "shadow IT" and employees' personal mobile devices.
Other tools in use today can normalize that raw data, whether it is derived from IT asset discovery solutions, configuration management tools, or procurement systems, by reconciling inconsistencies and variations in nomenclature. Finally, tools are available to enrich IT asset data with in-depth market intelligence and product information to provide clean, accurate, updated, consistent and complete data for various IT initiatives.
These capabilities are already in use at many civilian and defense departments, providing federal CIOs and their staffs a holistic overview of what hardware and software assets they own, when the assets were purchased, how they are used and by whom, and when they are approaching their end-of-support and end-of-life dates, for example. Federal IT staffs are using this data to support license consolidation and optimization, vendor contract negotiations, data center transformation, service management, IT asset management, enterprise architecture planning, audits, and more.
These solutions have often been viewed by CIOs as "nice-to-have" capabilities. But in the FITARA era, having comprehensive, in-depth intelligence about the enterprise's IT assets is foundational to driving successful outcomes with respect to cybersecurity, IT asset management, commodity IT procurement, software license management, FDCCI, Cloud First and more. In short, these are now "must-have" capabilities that empower today's federal CIOs and their staffs to deliver greater efficiencies in their IT activities and, ultimately, deliver on the vision of FITARA in a way that was not possible 20 years ago when Clinger Cohen was passed.
Clark Campbell is vice president for public sector at BDNA of Mountain View, Calif., a provider of enterprise IT data solutions serving federal clients from its office in Washington, D.C. He can be reached at ccampbell@bdna.com.
