White House looks to industry for IT management advice

The White House is building a database of private sector CEOs on whom it plans to call for advice when facing management challenges, states a White House report.

The names were culled from a forum on modernizing government the White House hosted Jan. 14; in attendance were 49 private sector executives, deputy cabinet secretaries and administrators, White House staff and federal union representatives.

"The database captures the private participants' specific areas of expertise and interest and allows us to efficiently 'match' these CEOs with Federal Government management challenges," states a report on the forum's proceedings. "We will broaden this database over time to include other interested private sector experts and academic leaders," it adds.

The White House is also considering whether to create formal advisory boards staffed with private sector executives, the report adds.

One area of focus within the forum was IT program management. Federal IT projects, by comparison to private sector IT projects, "are too large and not sufficiently integrated into business unit operations," the report states. Milestones are spaced too far apart and changes in business operations aren't accounted for, it adds.

The government will adopt private sector review tools and processes; the CIO Council will "develop a set of streamlined tools" for us across government, the report states.

"While reporting processes and tools are only as good as the data within them, and only effective if they do not become cumbersome, we believe the structure of the tools themselves is valuable," it adds.

For more:
- check out the White House report (.pdf)
- read this March 30 blog post from Aneesh Chopra, the federal CTO
- see a video of President Obama's opening remarks at the forum
- see a video of a forum breakout session on "Maximizing Technology Return on Investment"

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