Ease Into IT

In a zero-sum universe, people, especially people in bureaus, see the ascension of the CIO’s power as a threat to their own power. This is why CIOs should not just come out with a bunch of edicts; thou shalt do this or do that. I’m not saying do nothing, but I am saying don’t push too far too fast. If you try to drain the ocean you will not be successful and you will unify your opposition. Instead, pick out three to five things that will make a difference. I have already talked about a bunch of these in the previous chapters. Easy fruit to pick include agile development, data centers, platforms, software, workstations, and security. OMB has guidance either published or drafts out there that really try to move on all these. I’m not telling you to score a touchdown in all of these things, rather I am recommending that you pick a few things and try to make an impact with them.

The people at OMB must realize that it isn’t possible to make every single metric perfect. Instead of trying to do that, figure out the three to five you want to move on, that your agency is ready to move on, and make those happen. Let’s say that you hypothetically want to increase cloud adoption or decrease the average PEU in your data centers to 1.4 or less or buy 70 percent of your laptops off a specific enterprise contract. How are you going to realize that goal?

Step 1 is to check in with leadership (the secretary, CFO, SPE, CHCO, etc.) and validate that they are on board with making the change you are suggesting. Nothing could be more catastrophic than to say, “Guys, we’re going to move 60 percent of our processing to the cloud” while the CFO is building a new data center to support an implementation of SAP. So first, check in with the people who need to have your back on this and try to identify any pitfalls. Also, ask them for their help. From a budgeting perspective, how can the CFO help you? From an acquisition perspective, how can the SPE help you? From an annual performance review and training perspective, how can the CHCO help you? Asking for their help is a good way to get them on your side.

Step 2, engage a broad policy-making exercise. This is where you will find that making friends with the CFO can be tremendously helpful. The Performance Improvement Officer (PIO) typically reports to the CFO. Make friends with him or her and enlist his or her help. Some policy-making exercises are built into the cadence of the organization through GPRA-M. Get involved in the strategic planning process of the agency and leverage that to build your IRM strategic Plan and bake these goals into that. But sometimes you may need to develop policy outside of that cadence. You need to know how to build policy-making into the other processes of the agency. Most agencies have some sort of Departmental Memos or other agency guidance that holds weight. You will want to create a panel of people who can hit the finish line with a new one or an update to an existing one. You will need to bring people together for this. Pick some people from those bureaus (especially the bureaus who don’t play ball) and make sure they are participating in the process. Use some of those tricks from management 101 classes, create a SMART objective, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. You lay out the objective and empower them to develop a policy that realizes it.

For all the agencies except the Solitary Agency, if there isn’t some sort of agency internal CIO meeting, you need to create one. There must be a monthly meeting in which you and all of the bureau CIOs get together for 90 minutes to talk about policies, emerging trends, cyber problems, whatever. Step 2 here presents an opportunity to empanel a focused subcommittee on the policy you want.

Step 3, gather feedback. Once you have developed the straw man or starting point policy, publish the draft and let people respond to it. Encourage people to react to it. Hold town halls, allow for anonymous commenting, anything. You want people to expose all the weaknesses so that you can actually improve the guidance before it goes final. On the backside, you also want to be able to say that you had an open and transparent process that provided opportunities for everyone to comment. Once it is final, put out a blog or some mechanism that alerts the department to the existence of this new policy.

Step 4, implement the policy. This is the hard one. In our hypothetical example, we are encouraging the use of cloud capabilities, or data centers below a PEU or buying laptops from a specific contract. How do we actually affect the transition? This is where FITARA comes in handy. For CIOs, FITARA requires three things:

  • Participation in budget formulation for IT,
  • Review of IT acquisitions, and
  • Input into the annual performance review of senior IT personnel.

The good thing is that these levers can be completely effective in changing behavior. Budget formulation is the one that is the most foggy to me. There is only one Departmental CIO and he or she can’t be everywhere at once. Big agencies like HHS have many OpDivs and they are likely to have budget formulation meetings occurring at the same time. The CIO can’t attend all of them. But what the CIO can do is make a preemptive strike. He or she can send a letter to the budget leads and CIOs in each of the OpDivs identifying the qualities in investments that will be prioritized. This prioritization must make those links back to existing Departmental Policy. And the cool thing about this is that he or she isn’t saying “No” to any specific investments, rather he or she is identifying characteristics that practically any investment can choose to adopt.

Read More About
Recent
More Topics
About
Demosthenes
Demosthenes
Demosthenes is a pseudonym for a senior Federal IT official.
Tags