10th Federal IT Scorecard Released

I’m on holiday, so just a short post.

On 3 August, the House Oversight and Reform Committee’s Government Operations Subcommittee held its most recent biannual hearing on how United States government agencies are faring in meeting the metrics as laid out in a few key statutes on information technology (IT) development, security, transparency, and other related areas. However, the subcommittee, for reasons that are not immediately clear, did not release the actual scorecard (aka the FITARA Scorecard), and so I’m posting a version of it released by a trade publication.

As for the substance, you can compare to the last scorecard released in December 2019 and see that things mostly remain the same. I think the incentive structure for federal agencies (and probably companies providing these products and services to the federal government) will need to change further before greater gains are made with with the more than $90 billion spent annually in Washington on IT. A big part of the problem is that agencies are still not following the requirements of the “Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act” (FITARA) (P.L. 113-291) regarding the authority of Chief Information Officers (CIO) to manage and acquire IT. These officials should be deciding these matters, and it is not happening in agencies, likely because more CIO authority means less authority elsewhere over significant funding and programs. Hence, good old institutional resistance and warring over turf is part of the problem. There are others, as have been chewed over, and were discussed at the hearing.

Anyway, I just wanted to make the FITARA Scorecard available for those interested but unable to find it.

And, I’ll be back to posting regularly next week.

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Image by Michael Schwarzenberger from Pixabay