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IT Reform at the Environmental Protection Agency
Posted by Malcolm D. Jackson
The work accomplished at the EPA on the 25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal IT Management has had a great first six months. It is an exciting time to work in Federal IT, with a tremendous amount of energy and new ideas being implemented across the government. I am happy to say that EPA is at the forefront of this reform effort.
An important aspect of IT Reform is the focus on moving systems to the cloud where possible. We have begun this process by migrating our perimeter security and intrusion detection systems to the cloud. By leveraging a more flexible and efficient system, we have increased performance by a factor of three without incurring any additional costs and while maintaining the same level of service. We will continue to aggressively pursue cloud solutions going forward—we are investigating moving EPA’s 25,000 email users to a cloud platform within 18 months. Our move to the cloud will lock in efficiency gains and cost savings that will last for the lives of these systems.
EPA has really embraced the TechStat process as an integral component of our IT management strategy. We have conducted TechStat sessions for all of our CPIC Major systems and are planning to extend future TechStat sessions to CPIC Minors and other systems. The majority of these sessions have focused on governance and management issues, and we have had a number of positive outcomes. We expect to provide new guidance that will strengthen the oversight and accountability processes and address the opportunities that we’ve identified, improving both the project management and Agency governance of IT investments throughout their lifecycle. As a result of our IT investment review process, senior managers across EPA are now looking more closely and critically at all of their larger IT projects.
Going forward, there are even more opportunities for us to use the 25 Point Plan as a framework for improving IT Management. I am particularly excited about the sharing of Best Practices and successes between agencies. By sharing innovative solutions to the challenges that we face, our collective organizations will be able to implement reform far more quickly than any single agency could alone. I expect this spirit of collaboration to create gains for agencies and their stakeholders.
Malcolm D. Jackson is the Assistant Administrator for Environmental Information and Chief Information Officer at the Environmental Protection Agency.
