What is the nature of the Federal Chief Information Officer's position? Given that the current one has given his first policy speech, it might be a good time to review.

To call him, as many do, the government's "top technology official" is somewhat misleading. To say, as some have also done, that he "controls the government's $80 billion IT budget" is entirely incorrect.

The second statement usually is an embedded, if sometimes unspoken, assumption in the first, so let's start there. Federal agencies, not OMB, receive money from Congress to buy IT. OMB has two main powers in relation to federal IT budgets--it is the final authority on the size of agencies' annual official budget requests to Congress and can bring down the weight of the executive office of the president on federal agencies as a high-level overseer of major IT projects and as a crafter of IT policy.

The Federal CIO, in other words, lacks direct authority over agency IT budgets. He has the ability to influence them, but not control them. If power is measured by budget authority, the CIO of the Veterans Affairs Department is by far the most powerful, since he controls more than $3 billion annually in IT spending.

The extent of the Federal CIO's influence can depend on several factors, not least of which is the degree to which his policy is implemented inside federal agencies. As the last Federal CIO found out to his chagrin, it's far easier to announce policy than it is to get people to follow it. Institutional resistance, the diffuse nature of accountability in federal government, competing priorities, congressional lack of support, can all conspire to make an announced policy fall far, far short of its goal in implementation.

Such factors aren't always announced with the clarity that a policy unveiling is, so the fact of a policy decomposing in the Beltway murk isn't always readily apparent. It's made even tougher to spot by the fact that agency officials rarely openly contradict OMB policy but instead make a big show of compliance. (Unless you look deeper, as in the agency that said it would meet a "cloud first" deadline by signing up to a Google Analytics account.)

After a bit, the Government Accountability Office or inspectors general will come out with a report saying agencies failed to follow best practices, etc., by which time the Federal CIO may have departed.

To state that the Federal CIO is the government's "top technology official," then, probably assumes that the policy he is crafting is innovative and likely to have a big impact. But, innovation is hardly restricted to OMB and the impact of policy, as discussed, is variable.

To add some more perspective, the position of Federal CIO during the last administration--without any change in the authorization law (.pdf) during the transition from the Bush to Obama presidencies--was then called the "administrator for e-government and information technology." Federal CIO rolls off the tongue a bit more easy--and sounds far less bureaucratic--but in changing the name, it's likely that the current administration thought it could change the nature of the job.

Don't get me wrong, the administrator for e-government and information technology/Federal CIO isn't an insignificant position. But "Federal CIO" is an overstatement of what the person sitting in OMB can accomplish. There really is no Federal CIO, there's just an administrator, who is one of a handful of the most powerful federal IT officials, but not necessarily the top official. There probably doesn't even exist a top official; federal IT isn't a pyramid at whose apex sits an exalted ruler. It's an ecosystem in which even the lions have competition.

Final note--Steven VanRoekel, the new Federal CIO, in giving his first policy speech in Palo Alto, Calif. may have though he was being bold and throwing down a marker that he won't be beholden to typical inside-the-Beltway constraints. Probably he thought that by speaking in Silicon Valley, he could affirm that he is open to new ideas and innovation. But it's not Silicon Valley that he'll have to convince to implement "Future First." It's the people in Washington, D.C. Like it or not, the Beltway is his constituency. - Dave