OMB targets 26 IT projects for critical assessment

August 25, 2010 — 9:20am ET | By Molly Bernhart Walker

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The Office of Management and Budget released a list August 23 of 26 "high-priority" IT projects across federal agencies that are at-risk for termination or serious modification if significant changes are not made to turn the projects around. Many of the targeted projects are either over-budget or running behind schedule, OMB says.

The list of projects was formulated after 16 days of meetings between Federal Chief Information Office Vivek Kundra and agency CIOs, Kundra said while speaking to reporters the day OMB released the list. Fifteen departments are affected by the project crackdown. The projects are an average of five years old and range from a low life-cycle cost of $64 million to a high life-cycle cost of $7.5 billion.

"The focus here is to make sure that these projects are turned around and if these projects can't be turned around, if they don't add value, we will take the appropriate actions. They may be discontinued," said Kundra.

Kundra announced that one project at the Office of Personnel Management has already being "essentially halted."

"It slowed down in terms of spending as we go out there and make sure that it's properly scoped through fiscal year 2012," Kundra said. It is unclear from Kundra's remarks whether or not other projects have been temporarily suspended as further assessment is conducted.

Matthew Perry, the OPM CIO, said during the press call that the project has been underway for 23 years and is at a life-cycle cost of $136 million. He said the agency is putting together it's implementation plan and will be taking action to improve the project because it is important for federal employees that the project continues.

As for the private entities supporting some of these projects, "companies also need more information about how and why these projects were selected--they can only help correct problems they understand," said Phil Bond, president and CEO of TechAmerica, a technology industry group. "There certainly are concerns in many quarters about what data went into the development of this list, how that data was analyzed and how it was presented."

During the press call on at-risk programs, Kundra explained that the decisions on which programs to target were based partially on the IT dashboard--a tool that several groups, including Government Accountability Office have criticized for its accuracy.

"I've talked about it and we've said multiple times that there are challenges in terms of the data sometimes that's presented on the IT dashboard. And agencies over the last one year have been working very, very hard to fundamentally reengineer their back-end processes to make sure that the data on the IT dashboard is accurate as possible," said Kundra.

"The IT dashboard is an evolutionary process. And we're going to iterate and improve data quality over time," he added.

Kundra said the decisions were also based on conversations in meetings held from August 2 to August 18 with 27 CIO-council agencies. Meeting attendees included agency CIOs, program managers, others working on specific projects. The data discussed in the meetings included past GAO reports and IG reports, in addition to Dashboard data.

"These projects were not selected just based on the IT dashboard. That was one of the data points," he said.

"What we want to make sure is that we're being surgical in our approach to make sure that these projects deliver faster and that this project actually creates value for the American people as we focus on execution," he added.

For more:
- see the list of 26 at-risk IT projects
- listen to the press call and read the transcript
- see the TechAmerica statement