Federal CIO Wants New Policy for Refreshing Aging Federal IT Systems

Recently, the White House issued tough new guidance limiting new contracts for laptops and desktops to a handful of government-wide acquisition vehicles, seeking to tame a proliferation of one-off commodity IT purchases and leverage the federal government’s buying power. It’s the first in a new series of moves federal Chief Information Officer Tony Scott says his office is cooking up to rethink the way the government buys and manages IT.

"What we're trying to do at the end of the day is bring the federal government into modern practice in terms of procurement,” he said. Scott’s office is now preparing to release a major rewrite of government IT policy, the so-called Office of Management Budget Circular A-130, which could spell even more far-reaching changes. A “core, fundamental problem” in the federal government is the way agencies plan for and budget major IT projects, Scott said. “This world where annually we decide what we're going to spend money on is not conducive to building a secure infrastructure,” he said. “It's not conducive to building the kind of infrastructure that the country needs. And the 1-year, 2-year, no-year money kind of thing just doesn't work well for building a solid IT foundation.”