From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov Transcript for: The Status of IT Reform in the Federal Government Description: Audio interview by GAO staff with Dave Powner, Director, Information Technology Related GAO Work: GAO-12-461: Information Technology Reform: Progress Made; More Needs to Be Done to Complete Actions and Measure Results Released: May 2012 [Background Music] [ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. It's May 2012. Federal information technology projects often experience cost overruns, schedule slippages, and performance shortfalls. A group led by Dave Powner, a director in GAO's Information Technology team, recently evaluated aspects of OMB's implementation of the 2010 Federal IT Reform Plan. GAO's Jeremy Cluchey sat down with Dave to learn more. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] Can you talk about some of the issues in federal IT that have prompted the creation of the IT Reform Plan? [ Dave Powner: ] Yeah, if you look at the history of IT acquisition overall, there's a long history of many failed modernization programs. Some of those have been on GAO's high-risk lists and many failed attempts looking at modernizing IT from a large-scale acquisition point of view. In addition to some of the failed approaches on acquisition, there's also 55 of the 80 billion that the federal government spends annually on IT goes towards operations and maintenance. So with all that being said, in December of 2010 there was a comprehensive IT Reform Plan that was put in place. There's 25 points associated with this plan, very ambitious where we have 6-, 12-, and 18-month deliverables, and what it does, it basically tackles two large areas. One is operationally, operational efficiencies looking at the data we spend on operations and maintenance, so data centers is one example, and then there's a second component that really focuses on managing large-scale IT acquisitions. It's improving program management, improving our governance, holding CIOs accountable, and those types of things. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] Your team looked at this IT Reform Plan and the extent to which OMB and a few key agencies have made progress on selected action items from the plan. What did you find there? [ Dave Powner: ] Well, what we did is we took 10 of the 25 areas and we chose those 10 areas based on their completion dates. So they were areas associated with the 6- and 12-month deliveries because the 18-month deliveries will be in June this summer. And what we found is that very good progress across the board. In all 10 areas there's been tremendous progress. One area to point out is on improved governance with IT acquisitions. Another area that we looked at where there wasn't as much progress was on data center consolidation. I mean clearly you want to consolidate these data centers and ultimately get to the goal by 2015. The target is closing about 1,000 data centers and having another $3 billion in savings. Well to do that you need to have accurate inventories and very comprehensive plans. What we're continuing to find is the inventories and plans are incomplete. So we saw progress across the board but some areas were more complete than others. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] I understand there was some divergence around how the status of some of these action items is being classified by OMB. Can you talk about this? [ Dave Powner: ] You bet. When you look at the 10 areas we looked at, we thought three were complete and seven were in progress. So there was, again, progress in all 10 areas. OMB just had just the opposite. They had seven complete and three ongoing. So we had four areas where we differed in whether those action items were complete or not. One area that I mentioned previously is the data center consolidation. They thought that was complete. We clearly think there's a lot more work that needs to occur when you look at data center consolidation. Another area is cloud computing. We think there's a lot more work that needs to occur on cloud computing, and interestingly, we made recommendations to the agencies we looked at on their cloud computing gaps in terms of some of their plans to move services to the cloud. And interestingly, all those agencies agreed with our recommendations, which actually showed there was a lot more work to be done in the cloud computing area. So again, we have a difference of opinion, and I think the key here is when we're trying to reform—these are very complicated areas—to move the government forward, you don't want to prematurely declare something being done. You want to make sure, you know, we keep the pressure on these agencies and OMB to truly reform further going forward. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] Finally, for taxpayers who are interested in how the federal government is leveraging IT to perform its responsibilities more efficiently and effectively, what's the bottom line of this report? [ Dave Powner: ] Well the bottom line is we spend a lot of money on operations and maintenance—55 of the 80 billion—so we want to achieve operational efficiencies with the 55 billion. Items like data center consolidation, shared services, and movement to the cloud with certain applications is very key to get those operational efficiencies to ensure that that $55 billion portion of the 80 is wisely spent. That's what we're really trying to do with these large-scale acquisitions. So it's important that we have the appropriate program management and the governance in place so that we truly deliver somewhere within cost and schedule so that taxpayers are getting a good return on their dollar. [Background Music] [ Narrator: ] To learn more, visit gao.gov and be sure to tune in to the next episode of GAO's Watchdog Report for more from the congressional watchdog, the U.S. Government Accountability Office.