The author says investments in IT spending can yield big gains in productivity. Investing in IT fills the wallet

Never has it been more vital for the federal government to do more with less. Agencies are busy scouring their budgets for waste and their operations for inefficiencies. So what is the role of information technology in making government work better and more efficiently for America’s families?

We have had amazing success in rooting out waste in technology in the past two years. The administration has slashed costs for planned IT projects by $3 billion while delivering functional services at a much faster rate and embarked on a massive initiative to shut down and consolidate excess data centers. We’re also moving to the cloud and improving IT acquisition practices. And our work in cutting waste is not nearly finished.


It has never been more important to cut costs wisely in a way that allows us to invest in our future and provide our citizens what they need most from government during these trying economic times.

So how do we achieve the seemingly disparate goals of reducing costs yet investing to achieve more? The experience in the private sector over the past couple of decades shows that the right investments in IT spending can yield huge gains in productivity and ultimately reductions in costs in many other areas.

If you just look at IT as optional spending, you are missing an important point: IT is a tool by which you can save other costs. Investing in IT can bring you productivity gains and offset other costs. This allows organizations — private and public — to do what we need most in challenging environments, to do more with less.

Just take the reduction of paper-based processes like the move to electronic transactions at the Treasury Department. For decades, the federal government managed its financial transactions through paper processes that are slow and inefficient. By leveraging technology to do vendor billing and payment transactions electronically, Treasury projects the government will save more than $500 million and eliminate 835 million paper-based transactions in the first five years. This is just one example of how investing correctly in IT can lower friction in the way citizens and businesses interact with government — all while saving money.

But the IT challenges facing the government are not just about saving money. We also need to ensure we keep up with a nation that demands more from government online, while protecting ourselves from cybersecurity threats coming from every angle. We need to upgrade an aging IT infrastructure to ensure the government can support federal employees to serve the public best.

This is not the time for government to be penny-wise and pound-foolish and, as the new federal chief information officer, I’m determined the administration work with Congress to invest in technology, but in a new way.

If we just invest in IT but don’t change the way we invest, we will end up where we started — creating closed systems that are outdated by the time we complete them. Under the status quo, it takes years from identifying problems to working with Congress to get funding for IT solutions, to getting funding to begin implementation. By that time, funded projects are too often no longer needed or based on outdated technology.

The old ways of doing things will not work to create a 21st-century government. While we invest, we need to develop principles that not only respect the need for oversight but also prepare us for the future. Instead, as we deploy new systems and solutions, we need to adopt guidelines that are future-proof. We need to use open standards for the way we collect, use and disseminate data and for the way solutions work with each other — and deploy all this on future-ready, modern, mobile-ready and secure platforms.

To do this, though, we need to change the way we purchase information technology, which requires Congress to lower barriers to this type of investing — such as more leniency on sharing technology and solutions across agencies and allowing multiyear budgeting for IT.

We need to work with Congress to make sure we are balancing smart cuts in waste and duplication in IT spending — like adopting commodity IT, consolidating our data centers, sharing services across agencies — with smart investing in new technology and solutions that will ensure success well into the future.

Only by doing this can we deliver the government that the public deserves.

Steven VanRoekel is the federal chief information officer in the White House Office of Management and Budget.

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