Perfect Pitch

With the IT Infrastructure Optimization Initiative, OMB strives to fine-tune a systems approach for needs that cross agency boundaries.

Paul Wohlleben

Paul Wohlleben, a former federal CIO, consults in the federal sector. E-mail him at paul.wohlleben@gmail.com, or visit his blog at www.businessofinfotech.blogspot.com.

Adriving objective of the Office of E-Government and Information Technology has been to save money and improve operations by moving agencies to shared solutions for cross-agency needs.

The Office of Management and Budget first addressed this objective with its Quicksilver projects, which attempted to use the best existing government capabilities to provide shared services. OMB then introduced its Line of Business initiatives, further maturing and focusing the process of moving agencies to shared services. The LOBs remain the current focus for this campaign.

In the president’s fiscal 2008 budget proposal, OMB formally introduced its latest LOB, the IT Infrastructure Optimization Initiative. IOI aims to help agencies tackle some of the foundational systems complexities in expanding shared services.

Mother of All LOBs

The scope of the government’s IT infrastructure is extensive. In fiscal 2006, total infrastructure costs were $20 billion — almost a third of the federal IT budget. OMB estimates that through common implementations, as much as $29 billion in savings can be achieved over 10 years. That’s a staggering potential savings, with a tremendous return on investment. And yet, these estimates assume just more than a 15 percent annual savings. That savings, given consolidation opportunities, common solution adoption potential and the continued innovation and improvements in the capabilities of technology, seems conservative.

The vision for the IOI LOB is an optimized and cost-effective governmentwide IT infrastructure that supports agencies’ core missions and customer-centric services. Achieving this vision demands that the government do four major things:

Make functions across agencies and programs interoperable.
Enable collaboration within and across agencies.
Reduce the total cost of commodity IT infrastructure components.
Govern IT investment to achieve mission and governmentwide goals.

How IOI Will Work

Centers of excellence and shared-services providers in the specific functional areas implement most of the other LOB initiatives. For example, under the Financial Management LOB, agencies are selecting an OMB-certified center of excellence to implement, host and/or run their financial operations.

For the IOI LOB, however, agencies will be driven to improve IT infrastructure cost and performance by taking actions that will move the respective agencies toward industry-average service levels and cost-effectiveness measures. An interagency working group led by the IOI Program Management Office will establish these measures. Rather than select providers from an approved list of centers, agencies will develop plans of action laying out how they will achieve infrastructure improvements within five years.

The task will begin with development of a detailed performance baseline. The IOI PMO will gather baseline data for the next two years and establish what it calls a top-performers target zone and scale and industry range. Agencies will use this baseline to measure progress.

Once the baseline is complete, government leaders will have a tool to guide them in seeking additional investments or pursuing cost and quality improvements through change initiatives such as service aggregation within the current agency, service aggregation with top performers or outsourcing to managed service providers.

The Challenges Ahead

The IOI LOB holds the promise of significant cost savings and improved services. It’s a great concept, but big questions remain, such as:

Will Congress support IOI?
Can OMB overcome resistance from agencies?
Will the A-76 process be a debilitating factor?
Can agencies effectively implement changes required by IOI?

IOI will become a significant issue for CIOs over the next few years. If the outstanding questions can be answered, the infrastructure LOB has the potential to herald one of the broadest IT transformations in government to date.

The Upshot for Agencies

For the Information Technology Optimization Initiative, agencies’ IT shops will have to develop plans for moving toward metrics defining desired levels.

To develop these plans, each agency will need to answer these questions:

What do we have now?

It is normally an eye-opening experience for an agency to conduct an inventory of every device in its infrastructure, all operating systems, software, servers, printers, wireless devices and so on. One bonus: Tools are available to quickly complete a detailed discovery process and to manage the infrastructure over time.
In the current state, what do we need?

In this step, the agency will remove nonstandard hardware and software from the infrastructure. It will also have to assess how varying levels of security and infrastructure affect overall costs of service and, in some cases, may have to justify that something is truly critical to mission performance.
What is our baseline?

The agency will need to use its best available information sources to craft a baseline of current performance and cost effectiveness for the current-state infrastructure. The baseline must aggregate functions and capabilities so that they align with three IT infrastructure areas: end-user systems and services, data center systems and telecommunications systems and services.
What are our service-level and cost-effectiveness gaps?

To determine these gaps, the agency will compare the metrics established by the Office of Management and Budget as the goals in the three infrastructure areas to its best estimates for performance and cost of current state.
What are the options for closing performance and cost gaps?

To determine this, the agency will need to examine two broad sets of alternatives for each IT infrastructure area. First, it should examine a combination of business process solutions and best practices for the components of each area to determine how to best deliver services. Second, it should examine alternative providers for these services — itself, other government organizations and industry organizations. From this analysis, the agency will develop approaches to closing performance and cost gaps.
How will we manage the process?

It is not enough to develop a plan. The agency must also devise an organizational strategy and capability to implement its plan and successfully manage the IT infrastructure over time.