Another administration, a new federal chief information officer--and another new attempt to have federal agencies treat information technology as a commodity to be shared across agency lines.

The Office of Management and Budget released Dec. 8 a draft "Shared First" strategy calling on agencies to develop a plan to shift at minimum two commodity IT areas "to a shared environment" by Dec. 31, 2012.

An earlier attempt from the last administration to push agencies into collectively buying IT known as "lines of businesses" will undergo assessment by the agencies that manage them, the draft strategy says. That assessment will lead up to release of the final strategy document in April 2012, it adds.

The draft strategy says OMB will place emphasis at first on sharing IT at an intra-departmental or agency level and moving only later to the inter-agency level. Many agencies within larger federal departments have a fair degree of autonomy--a status at times codified into law.

The current state of federal IT, the draft strategy acknowledges, doesn't always lend itself to sharing outside of agency-specific environments since existing systems "are so highly specialized and difficult to integrate with one another that it is often less expensive to acquire a new proprietary system than to share existing systems."

To rectify that, the draft strategy also calls on agencies to embrace another "first," that of "Future First," under which agencies embrace virtualization, eXtensible Markup Language, and other open standards as a default. By adopting Future First, agencies will be "prepared to share data and functionality with one another in the coming years," the draft says.

For more:
- download the draft Shared First strategy (.pdf)

Related Articles:
VanRoekel unveils 'Future First' concept 
Federal officials launch FedRamp 
Federal CIOs face systematic restraints, says GAO