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IT Reform at United States Department of Agriculture
Posted by Chris Smith
As we pass the 6 month mark of the 25 Point Federal IT Reform Plan I wanted to take this opportunity to update you on our progress to date and provide a glimpse into future activities. The 25 Point Plan is a thoughtful, well crafted and pragmatic framework for strengthening key fundamental IT management practices that will help ensure improved time to market, improved cost management and improved performance and service delivery of business technologies to our customers. USDA has made strong and steady progress on all fronts relative to the plan. Embracing the “Cloud First” tenet, and as a part of our Enterprise Data Center Consolidation efforts, I am pleased to announce that USDA has now migrated more than 46,000 employees into the Cloud to deliver a robust set of enterprise messaging and collaboration capabilities.
Building on this momentum we will complete the migration of all 120,000 staff over the next few months. We have developed a clear and compelling vision of how cloud technologies can be leveraged to deliver a competitive advantage resulting in agile development of business technologies at lower cost. Cloud technologies will more rapidly deliver functionality and improve operations and more efficiently and effectively deliver customer facing services.
In addition to our messaging and collaboration efforts we have implemented the first fully cloud-based instance of a geospatial portal. This shared services platform offering is designed to rapidly scale for diverse spatial visualization and analysis business needs. USDA recently initiated a progressively different operational approach to delivering Geographic Information Systems (GIS) decision support. During the New Madrid earthquake mock exercise in May 2011, we implemented an entirely cloud-based platform for shared GIS services, which consolidated diverse internal agency and external spatial data assets in a single, virtual operating picture.
Embracing an aggressive cloud first strategy is an evolution of our streamlining and consolidation efforts and our Enterprise Data Center (EDC) consolidation efforts. USDA is actively shutting down data centers in over a dozen locations, including Washington, DC. In addition to improving the efficiency in which we manage our infrastructure footprint, we are greatly increasing our physical security posture. We have shut down 4 data centers to date and plan on shutting 10 more by the end of 2011.
We held our first TechStat on March 24, 2011 and are working to refine the process and institutionalize it as a part of our overarching portfolio management framework. The results from the first TechStat include: improved governance, greater executive oversight and stronger alignment of the investment with our enterprise architecture.
I am extremely proud of our efforts to date and the commitment of USDA employees to ensuring American taxpayer dollars go further while improving business technology and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery to the Citizen. My agency has been very active in sharing best practices across the Federal IT community. Our case study describing the challenges and lessons learned from our current move to a cloud based email is available on the Best Practices platform. In addition to USDA’s efforts, I have been playing a key role in the newly restructured CIO Council. As Co-Chair of the Best Practices Committee, I am working directly with all agency TechStat leads in order to work through common challenges and elevate best practices. The work we have completed so far has been pivotal in establishing momentum toward achieving our shared goals for reforming Federal IT management, but it will take a continued focus to implement the remaining initiatives and to leave a lasting impact for our Nation.
Chris Smith is the Chief Information Officer of the United States Department of Agriculture.
