"Cloud first" was just the first in a series of first principles to be unleashed on federal information technology, according to Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel, who spoke Oct. 25 at Xerox's PARC headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif.

During his first major public event as federal CIO--held nearly 3,000 miles from the city in which he works--VanRoekel unveiled the construct he said will guide his policy formation going forward: "Future First."

In his prepared remarks (.pdf), VanRoekel said Future First will be "a set of principles like 'XML First,'  'Web Services First,' 'Virtualize First,' and other 'Firsts' that will inform how we develop our government's systems."

In a question and answer period after his speech (embedded video), VanRoekel said the Future First construct is meant to establish a "modular, lightweight ability to engineer within a year and deliver on this promise." Ideas on what Future First should exactly constitute, he said, should be emailed to futurefirst@cio.gov or Tweeted to #FutureFirst.

He also announced a "Shared First" initiative that will seek to have agency components and agencies across government share procurement efforts, technology, expertise and systems.

"It's very likely that many things that you want to acquire in the federal government have been acquired before--it's been rung through the procurement process that often takes months at a time," he said.

When it comes to federal websites, VanRoekel said there will be yet another dashboard to be unveiled soon--in this case, one for the permitting process. He also said OMB is considering a website reduction model under which there exist two federal websites, one for business and one for the public.

The NFL, he added, has just one website for all its football teams.

OMB also will soon unveil a "BusinessUSA.gov" website that brings together information about matters such as export requirements, according to VanRoekel. He added that the will attempt to gain multi-year funding for IT projects from Congress.

For more:
- watch VanRoekel's address at Xerox PARC - the event was sponsored by TechAmerica and the Churchill Club of San Jose, Calif. (embedded video)
- download his prepared remarks from Whitehouse.gov (.pdf)

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