VanRoekel, a Microsoft alumnus who currently serves as the country's second
U.S. CIO, is leading a government IT apparatus at a time of seismic
transformation, helping oversee the development and implementation of a barrage
of White House IT directives covering everything from cloud computing to
mobility, cybersecurity to open data.
And agency CIOs aren't receiving those mandates with a corresponding uptick
in their budgets, though VanRoekel notes that federal IT spending, in aggregate,
has held steady as duplicative or outdated programs are cut and new funding
flows to emerging priorities such as cybersecurity.
In all seriousness, VanRoekel explains, the CIO is pivotal to maintaining the
IT "headquarters," responsible for the procurement of commodity IT like PCs and
email (he notes that many agencies still operate multiple, distinct email
systems), and the oversight of the building blocks of the operation, such as
usage policies, security and enterprise architecture.
"What headquarters needs to do is this next layer, which is a
service-oriented infrastructure," VanRoekel says.
In that spirit, staff-level workers would be encouraged to bring their ideas
for developing, say, a new mobile app that could deliver a clear benefit for the
citizens who are viewed as the customers of the agency.
"The central IT shop should say, 'Fantastic. Here is a development
environment as a service, Here's a test environment as a service. Here's a
deployment environment as a service,'" VanRoekel says.
"When you develop in that way it snaps to enterprise architecture, it snaps
to your cybersecurity guidelines, it snaps to your open data and your API
strategies, and you can build in a level of flexibility and optionality to give
the bureaus and offices the ability to deliver their mission in the best way
they know possible," he adds.
But VanRoekel describes a workplace culture in the federal government that
might best be described as risk-averse. He recalls that his team at Microsoft
handed out a monthly risk reward to employees "who stuck their neck out and
tried something," even though the majority of those awards were given in
recognition of endeavors that failed.
"But we wanted to incentivize risk, to tell people it's OK to take risks,"
VanRoekel says. "The way you manage this if you're a C-level executive or
managing an organization is lower the risk surface -- make the failure not so
painful that you can get out of it."
At the federal government, VanRoekel argues, agency CIOs (and, more
importantly, mission objectives and citizens) would be better served by
employees who approach the IT projects they design and scope with a more
ambitious vision.
"We've got a lot of project managers in government who can hit the short
deliverable, who can do the 90-day, let's get something done and let's focus on
that from an objective standpoint," he says. "We don't have a lot of [project]
managers who can hit the five-years-out thing, and hit it with a level of
precision that's going to be on time, on budget or under budget."
Source: http://www.cio.com/article/733526/U.S._CIO_Shares_Vision_for_Federal_Agency_IT_Operations?page=1&taxonomyId=3133