FEDTECH: What about your second project?
Roat: Working at multiple agencies throughout my career, I needed to support a process called CPIC, capital planning and investment control. And I never really got value out of it. As a CIO, I was reporting data to the Office of Management and Budget on my major investments, and I never knew what OMB did with the data, if anything, other than put it up on ITDashboard.gov. I realized while I was CIO at SBA that a quarter to a third of my IT spending was not reported to OMB because of the CPIC focus only on major investments and not the whole IT investment portfolio.
A few years ago, the federal government started leveraging the Technology Business Management taxonomy. While I was at the Small Business Administration, using that taxonomy and building models, I had four years of data, and I was able to see my spending shift over time as I modernized — moved out of data centers, moved into the cloud, adjustments like that. I really used that data. I could see trends over time with the data and was at the point where I was starting to do benchmarks and adjust the models to be able to do predictions based on the models and trending, and that was of significant value to me. The CFO was a partner with me on this journey, and he gained significant insights as well as we shifted from capital to operational expenses.
Taking on my role at OMB and working with the CIO Council, we took on what I affectionately called “blowing up CPIC.” I wanted to understand why we collected what we did. The council took on a project that lasted about four months to understand the use cases for an improved approach to overall IT portfolio management. What came out of that was an actual action plan that looked at the full lifecycle of an agency’s IT portfolio, identifying useful KPIs, and how data could be used for benchmarking.
We eliminated about 100 or so data fields that we were collecting from the agencies, and we began standardizing data collection using the taxonomy. Standardized data elements meant OMB was collecting the same data consistently. That allows us to start capturing the entire IT portfolio, not just major investments. The work we did in calendar year 2021 really set the stage for the long term to get us to standardized capabilities and a taxonomy to look holistically at the entire IT portfolio. In two to three years, the data will be richer and has the potential to inform strategic budget development for better IT spending planning and forecasting.
FEDTECH: What’s the biggest change you’ve noticed over time in the way the government uses and deploys technology?
Roat: I like that agencies are running pilots — taking six weeks or even eight or 12 weeks to develop capabilities for the mission, and including the end users in the solution. You want to do a modernization project? You want to try a new tool and a new capability? Run a pilot in a series of sprints. If it doesn’t work, fine, move on without spending millions of dollars. You didn’t see that as much 10 years ago. Additionally, the government is doing so much more to leverage its data, use the cloud for scalability, and leverage capabilities such as machine learning and AI.
DISCOVER: How HPC solutions are helping agencies handle big-data jobs.