The Small Agency CIO Council published the Federal Small Agency CIO and IT Executive Handbook in partnership with GSA’s IT Modernization division. As co-chairs of the Small Agency CIO Council and having managed IT organizations within the context of small agencies, we recognized the importance of creating guidance specifically to...
In February 2023, the Federal Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council hosted a “Fraud Detection & Prevention Symposium”. The day-long event featured over 20 executives, technologists, and changemakers from 10+ agencies, academia, and the private sector participating in the one-day event to discuss fraud issues as mentioned below that are impacting...
Earlier today, we announced that $100 million of the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) will be designated to help streamline and improve public-facing digital services and technology systems to deliver a better customer experience to the American people. All Federal agencies and High-Impact Service Providers (HISPs), which serve the largest percentage...
Every day, the public experiences well-designed interactions when using consumer products and services. They’re easy and intuitive. The public rightfully wants, expects, and deserves the same experience when interacting with the Government – and it’s possible. Technology underpins our ability to get there. Data enables an enterprise view, provides better...
On December 13, 2021, the President signed an Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government. This EO is about ensuring the Federal Government serves its customers better by putting people at the center of everything we do. With this announcement by the...
The USDA Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) Specialty Crops Program helps buyers and sellers of all sizes in the U.S. produce industry to market their perishable products in the most efficient manner. The program offers a wide array of services that span from helping market the quality of products to ensuring...
This week marks the three-year anniversary of the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF). The TMF is an innovative funding vehicle that gives Federal agencies additional ways to deliver services to the American public more quickly, better secure sensitive systems and data, and use taxpayer dollars more efficiently. When I received the...
Technology Business Management (TBM) aligns cost to IT services to improve delivery and efficiency, meaning this framework can be leveraged successfully amongst Executive Leadership across agencies. TBM will ultimately empower agency CIOs to better understand and communicate the business and mission value of IT spending to senior executives, mission support...
The CIO Council’s Innovation Committee recently published a white paper titled Networks of the Future highlighting the new and emerging technologies that will disrupt the networking space. The white paper provides insight into how the next generation of networking technologies will impact Federal agencies and citizen services. Computer networks are...
The President has made it clear that America’s security and public accountability of government officials are foundational pillars for this Administration. One year ago, the President issued Executive Order 13800 (EO 13800) on Strengthening the Cybersecurity of Federal Networks and Critical Infrastructure, emphasizing the importance of reducing cybersecurity risks to...
This Administration has placed a significant emphasis on improving the way that the Federal Government serves American Citizens and recognizes that IT Modernization is a key component to provide Americans the services they deserve. The President directed the creation of a report on the modernization of Federal IT in EO...
This blog post was originally posted on the White House blog on December 13, 2017. Read the Full Report Here Today we delivered the final Federal IT Modernization Report (in response to EO 13800). The report is a key piece in this Administration’s efforts to modernize Federal IT. The actions...
This is the tenth in a series describing how the Social Security Administration is working towards a more modern IT infrastructure. In the last few posts I’ve been bragging about some successes. To close out my term I’ll try to say something more provocative and discuss how the economics of...
This is the nineth in a series describing how the Social Security Administration is working towards a more modern IT infrastructure. In several of the previous blogs on IT Modernization, I mentioned the SSA’s DCPS2 product program, which aims to modernize a very old legacy green-screen application. In this post,...
This is the eighth in a series describing how the Social Security Administration is working towards a more modern IT infrastructure. Over the last two years the Social Security Administration (SSA) has worked toward a point where the ideas presented in this series could be implemented. On December 16, we...
This is the seventh in a series describing how the Social Security Administration is working towards a more modern IT infrastructure. We have spent some time talking about how to modernize legacy applications, but no time describing what a modern application looks like. In this post we will outline the...
This is the sixth in a series describing how the Social Security Administration is working towards a more modern IT infrastructure. This post is sort of about IT Modernization, but mostly about a part of Agile software development; and Agile is critical to IT modernization. Here we will consider the...
This blog entry was originally published on October 31st, 2016 on the GSA blog. Some of my friends have asked what could possibly have gotten me to leave the life I love in the Bay Area and take a government job in DC. My answer is straightforward: I believe the...
This is the fifth in a series describing how the Social Security Administration is working towards a more modern IT infrastructure. In the next three posts we will consider the problem of modernizing old legacy software. In this post we will start a discussion about why modernizing software is important...
This is the fourth in a series describing how the Social Security Administration is working towards a more modern IT infrastructure. In this post we will consider how to develop a modern data architecture to underpin the modernization of your code base. Systems developed before the year 2000 were often...
This is the third in a series describing how the Social Security Administration is working towards a more modern IT infrastructure. This post will start to tease out the different technologies that we might modernize. In the previous two posts of this series, we considered how the advance of technology...
This is the second in a series describing how the Social Security Administration is working towards a more modern IT infrastructure. Most of you who are reading this series will expect to see an approach that forces a migration to modernization. You are likely expecting an expensive march to transform...
This post is the first in a series of entries from Social Security Administration CIO Rob Klopp that will consider issues associated with modernizing the US Federal IT infrastructure. First… here is a little about me. I came to the Social Security Administration (SSA) in January of 2015 as the...
Strengthening the cybersecurity of Federal networks, systems, and data is one of the most important challenges we face as a Nation. Every day, public and private sector leaders – my team included – are directing significant resources to address this ever-growing problem. Yet as cyber threats increase in severity, so...
Today, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is proposing for the first time in fifteen years revisions to the Federal Government’s governing document establishing policies for the management of Federal information resources: Circular A-130, Managing Information as a Strategic Resource. More specifically, Circular A-130 provides general policy...