The House Oversight and Reform Committee is set to release version 14.0 of its FITARA Scorecard on July 28, according to a notice published by the committee’s Government Operations Subcommittee, which will hold a hearing on the same day beginning at 9:00 a.m. to discuss the scorecard’s finding with three Federal agency CIOs as witnesses.
The FITARA (Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act) Scorecard is issued twice a year by House Oversight and grades the 24 largest Federal agencies for their progress on range of IT modernization categories. The committee refreshes the grading categories over time once most agencies have attained a particular goal, and then presents them with new categories for improvement.
As always, the easiest way to make sense of the House Oversight and Reform Committee’s multicolored scorecard is to view the results on MeriTalk’s FITARA Dashboard.
Category Changes in the Air
The Government Operations Subcommittee hinted at possible category changes today when it announced the July 28 hearing date.
“Since January, the Subcommittee has engaged stakeholders to explore potential updates to the methodologies behind the Scorecard with the goal of better aligning metrics with best IT practices,” the subcommittee said today.
“Further, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) changed the types of IT data that it collects and reports, prompting the need to rethink how the Subcommittee tracks agency progress,” the panel said.
The hearing, the subcommittee previewed today, will cover several areas that could form the basis for grading adjustments and changes, including:
- The Scorecard’s success in ensuring federal CIOs are an essential component of agency C-suite conversations;
- The future of the Federal Data Center Optimization Initiative and potential movement into cloud computing;
- The future of federal agencies’ cybersecurity posture; and
- Recommendations from the Chief Information Officers Council’s Scorecard.
“The Scorecard is also a way for Congress to hold federal agencies accountable for implementing basic and fundamental IT practices that improve the operation of the federal government,” the subcommittee reminded.
CIO Witness List
Testifying at the hearing will be a trio of large-agency CIOs, including John Sherman of the Defense Department; David Shive of the General Services Administration; and Vaughn Noga of the Environmental Protection Agency.
They will be joined at the witness table by Carol Harris, Director of Information Technology and Cybersecurity at the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The watchdog agency has a seat at the table when FITARA grades are assessed by members of the House Oversight and Reform Committee.
FITARA 13.0 Scoring Trend
Scores trended modestly higher for the 24 CFO Act Federal agencies whose IT progress is measured by FITARA Scorecard 13.0 released in January.
Seven agencies earned higher overall scores, four saw their grades decline, and 13 remained steady with gradings from the previous scorecard issued in July 2021.
No agency received a failing overall grade – 22 of them got marks in the “B” and “C” range.
Only two agencies – the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) – won the top grade of “A” for their performance.
Helping to shape the scoring trends were higher marks for some agencies for their work on shrinking data center footprints under the Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI), and lower grades for agencies that are not proceeding quickly enough on transitioning their communications contracts to the General Services Administration’s Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) contract.
