Members of the Obama administration, including the president himself, have talked about the urgent need for reforming the federal IT apparatus. Those initiatives have included online tools to track IT spending and initiatives to bring cloud-based technologies into the federal government.
But change has been slow, as appropriations and procurement cycles continue to lag behind the agility of the private sector. Now, the White House is presenting a detailed plan for closing the gap, including a “cloud-first” policy that will require agencies to prioritize lightweight, shared and distributed technologies ahead of traditional deployments.
OMB Deputy Director Jeffrey Zients made a sweeping set of announcements Friday morning in northern Virginia, vowing to professionalize program management and cut the federal government’s data-center footprint by 40 percent. Datamation has the story.
McLEAN, Va. — In perhaps its most dramatic move yet toward reshaping the federal IT apparatus, the Obama administration on Friday announced a multipronged strategy to improve efficiencies and eliminate waste from the government’s sprawling technology operations, including a mandate for all agencies to embrace cloud computing.
Speaking here at an event hosted by the Northern Virginia Technology Council, Jeffrey Zients, the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), described a “cloud-first” policy that Obama plans to incorporate in the fiscal 2012 budget, directing IT managers across the federal government to look to lightweight, distributed IP-based systems ahead of building their own technologies in-house.