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Update on IT Reform at the Department of Education
A year has passed since the official kickoff of the 25-point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management. A significant amount of work and progress has been made across government, and, indeed, it feels like we have accomplished so much at the Department of Education (the Department). A few highlights include our leadership role in growing capabilities and communities around the data.gov platform, continued consolidation of data centers, migration of real business applications to shared services, significant reduction of .GOV domains and use of a standard value measurement methodology to help prioritize how we invest scarce IT dollars.
The challenges associated with eliminating nearly half of the .gov domains registered to the Department are less technical than they are programmatic and managerial. For example, many of the decommissioned domain names were originally established as part of a grant program and hosted by a provider of the grantee's choosing. New challenges involve modifying processes and practices so grantees must follow the Department's IT acquisition process when acquiring web hosting services on behalf of the Department. Additionally, we must have a mature and effective way to choose the shared service hosting provider while ensuring all customer requirements are satisfied at the best cost to the Department and citizens. By addressing these new challenges, we are able to increase operational efficiency and return value to the Department and citizens in the form of cost savings, and technical and management sustainability.
We have made real contributions toward sharing services across agency boundaries. Our Open Government work was recognized as a best practice for its use of open source components. The Department of Housing and Urban Development decided to share our infrastructure and technical capability to post data and information. We have improved this service and will soon activate the capability for analysts to self-publish grant data using our shared hosting platform. As part of this effort, we are planning the future of data.ed.gov and education.data.gov to increase the utility of education-related information and current technology by citizens.
I recently approved a value measurement methodology (VMM) to be used in our investment management processes. Over the years, we have had standard processes for selecting, controlling and evaluating our IT portfolio. With assistance and support from the Deputy Secretary and the Chairman of the Investment Review Board, we have sharpened the focus on value and raised the bar for IT investments. We used TechStat to get the investments healthy through right-sizing, improved planning and ensuring proper engagement by applying integrated project teams (IPTs). Now we will use the VMM to eliminate low value investments from the portfolio. Simply put, value is articulated as specific support for mission and strategic objectives and savings or cost avoidance. This will be a year when otherwise healthy, well-performing investments are at risk of being eliminated because they cannot clearly demonstrate acceptable business value.
Finally, as one of our efforts is to strengthen program management, we have fully engaged an IPT to deliver one of our most critical projects. Our contracts and purchasing support system is fully integrated with our financial system, meaning that purchases are immediately recorded in our general ledger without the need for batch processing runs and shutdown periods for balancing the books. I chartered an IPT to address all aspects of the project, including considering shared first, cloud and commodity solutions while ensuring that all integration and interface requirements are adequately addressed.
These are just a few examples of what has happened at the Department during the year since the kickoff of IT reform. Yes, it's a lot of work and it's different work, but in the end … well, there really is no "end," we are delivering better value to citizens every day.
Dr. Danny Harris is the Chief Information Officer at the Department of Education.
