Federal CIO Outlines Second-Term IT Priorities

Amid continued cost cutting, the White House will seek to drive innovation, ROI and cybersecurity.

Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel laid out the Obama administration's second-term IT priorities in a congressional hearing on IT reform. The White House will focus on increasing the return on investment of its $79 billion annual IT budget, strengthening cybersecurity and driving new forms of innovation.

Over the past four years, the administration focused on eliminating duplicative IT systems and services, reforming IT management, and streamlining service delivery, VanRoekel said at the Jan. 22 hearing by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Going forward, he said, the objective is to "balance cost savings with innovation by continuing to cut costs while we invest in technology that security serves the American people."

To drive innovation, VanRoekel said he will guide federal agencies to apply IT to simplify the complexity of government and make more government data available to feed "the new data economy." In the area of ROI, VanRoekel said the feds must increase adoption of technology-as-a-service as a way of shifting from "asset ownership to service-orientation." He called cyber threats "one of the most serious national security, public safety and economic challenges we face as a nation."...