Federal government pursues a 'shared services' strategy

White House's cut-and-invest strategy aims to redirect billions of dollars in IT funding toward shared technology platforms and services.

With an IT budget that hasn't grown in three years, federal IT leaders are looking for ways to make their agencies more agile and efficient...

Key to the effort is a "shared first" strategy that VanRoekel introduced last October, which calls for agencies to used shared services such as enterprise e-mail. The Office of Management and Budget last week released the new Federal IT Shared Services Strategy , which lays out the plan in detail and provides deadlines for next steps.

According to the shared-services strategy document, a review of over 7,000 federal IT investments found "many redundancies and billions of dollars in potential services" that could potentially be achieved through consolidation and use of shared services. Agency CIOs should work with other agency executives to identify opportunities to consolidate redundant IT services "at all levels, in all federal sector lines of business, in all program areas, and with all IT acquisition vehicles," according to the report...