Forman and Steinhoff: Cloud computing shows the way

Changing federal financial management systems away from strict accounting tools to dynamic repositories of spending data will require cloud computing, say two former government officials.

In the cloud, as opposed to the typical client-server systems of today, systems and data can coalesce to offer integrated real-time views of federal spending, said Mark Forman, former head of the office of e-government and information technology at the Office of Management and Budget.

FierceGovernmentIT spoke with Forman and Jeff Steinhoff, former Government Accountability Office managing director for financial management and assurance and assistant comptroller general for accounting and information management, at length on March 26. Both now work at KPMG, Forman as a partner, Steinhoff as executive director of the firm's government institute.

 A full transcript of the conversation is here.

Among the highlights of the conversation: OMB and the Treasury Department will soon open a new Office of Financial Innovation and Transformation. Announcement of the new office, at the Federal Systems Integration Office annual conference held on March 23, came about a week after OMB said it will close down FSIO.

According to a presentation (.pdf) at the conference by Nancy Fleetwood, Treasury deputy assistant secretary for accounting policy, the office will work to reduce the cost of generally expensive federal financial management projects and roll out cloud computing.

Forman told FierceGovernmentIT that cloud computing is a means for transformation.

"When you go to the cloud, you're buying the transaction processing as a service, so there's much more standardization," he said.

"That data is going into a standardized database, so you don't even have to do data warehousing with the complexity of what you used to do, because of the standardization of the data," he added.

Federal financial systems have been developed mostly to create year-end financial statements but they're being asked to provide comprehensive spending data, said Steinhoff. It was never the intent of the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 for agencies just to focus on auditable statements, he added.

"That was just one mechanism to get folks to focus on some of the blocking and tackling. The three most powerful provisions in that act were the call for the system management of performance, the development of cost information, and the integration of systems. Meaning, financial, budget and program systems," Steinhoff said.

For more:
- check out the full transcript of FierceGovernmentIT's question and answer with Mark Forman and Jeff Steinhoff
- see a presentation (.pdf) by Nancy Fleetwood, Treasury deputy assistant secretary for accounting policy, on the new Office of Financial Innovation and Transformation
- read OMB controller Danny Werfel's March 16 letter (.pdf) closing down FSIO

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