Jane Edwards
Some industry experts say the Section 809 panel’s recommendation to exempt the Pentagon from the Clinger-Cohen Act highlights the need to fix the budgeting approach to provide agencies the ability to facilitate the information technology acquisition process, Federal News Network reported Friday.
Mark Forman, vice president and global head of public sector at Unisys, said the Section 809 report suggests that agencies have now shifted to buying IT as-a-service, instead of treating or procuring IT as a capital asset.
“What has shifted over time for IT is that we now need to focus more on how we are managing and leveraging information, and how do we get more value out of information,†Forman said.
“We don’t need to focus so much on what technology we are buying or what version of technology we are buying.â€
Dave Wennergren, a managing director at Deloitte, talked about the impact of paper-based compliance requirements in the Clinger-Cohen Act on the acquisition process and chief information officers.
“The specifics the 809 Panel is driving toward was about the Clinger-Cohen compliance checklist was not the key enabler and it didn’t speed up acquisition at all,†Wennergren said.
“It’s important to detach the thing the 809 Panel wants to get rid of, which is [a] paper-based compliance checklist that, frankly, [has] driven some CIOs to become compliance people rather than business change people,†he added.
Dan Chenok, an executive director at the IBM Center for the Business of Government, discussed how implementation causes delays in DoD’s IT procurement process.
“An approach that would work within the department to almost do a work breakdown structure of those processes and a simplification exercise to see what you need to do to acquire technology could probably lead to significant improvement in the time it takes to acquire emerging technology and bring it into the mission space without sacrificing program integrity or introducing a lot of risk,†he said.
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