{"id":428,"date":"2011-10-31T09:05:10","date_gmt":"2011-10-31T13:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gsablogs.gsa.gov\/technology\/?p=428"},"modified":"2024-01-11T18:20:43","modified_gmt":"2024-01-11T23:20:43","slug":"will-it-eat-your-agency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gsablogs.gsa.gov\/technology\/2011\/10\/31\/will-it-eat-your-agency\/","title":{"rendered":"Will IT Eat Your Agency?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I attended the Gartner Symposium\/ITxpo 2011<\/a> in Orlando. What a conference! It featured great speakers and great ideas for IT, particularly government IT.<\/p>\n

I was especially intrigued by Andrea Di Maio<\/a> and Jerry Mechling<\/a>\u2019s predictions for government IT spending, because they spoke to problems GSA is already helping to solve.<\/p>\n

Constraints on Government IT Spend<\/strong><\/p>\n

Andrea predicts that by 2013, government financial sustainability will join cost containment as a top driver and constraint for government IT spend. What did Andrea mean by “financial sustainability”, and how does it differ from cost containment? The answer is rather bleak: It\u2019s the survival of the services we\u2019re used to the government providing.<\/p>\n

Jerry said IT spend will remain a greater portion of overall budgets, even as budgets shrink overall. In the past, IT investment was a \u201cnice to have.\u201d Now, agencies must keep a laser-like focus on their technology budget to make sure it contributes to their core mission.<\/p>\n

Who Decides IT Spend?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Andrea also predicts that by 2014, over half of IT spend will be decided outside the IT department in at least 30% of government organizations. This prediction took me aback. If the IT department isn\u2019t deciding what they spend on IT, who is?<\/p>\n

One answer is industry. IT investments will be driven by changes and initiatives in the IT industry, not by IT buyers.<\/p>\n

The other answer is tightening budgets. Agencies are considering consolidation and transition to shared services models, which will require the IT department and CIO to take on new roles to make that happen. In the near future, CIOs may need to see themselves more as “Enterprise Program Managers” than as pure CIOs.<\/p>\n

How GSA Can Help<\/strong><\/p>\n

We have programs in place to assist agencies facing these trends:<\/p>\n

Innovative new acquisition models.<\/strong> Our new IT commodity buying solution<\/a> is coming online this quarter. We\u2019re leveraging the bulk buying power of the government to offer lower prices for leading IT commodities like laptops and warranty services. We\u2019re issuing blanket purchase agreements (BPAs) off of IT Schedule 70<\/a> to leverage existing contracts, and we\u2019ll also be creating a more comprehensive solution that\u2019s not limited by today\u2019s processes and systems. From what I heard at the symposium, we\u2018ll need that future acquisition model yesterday.<\/p>\n

IT consolidation.<\/strong> We can help agencies consolidate both their IT systems and the way they manage their IT programs. Our cloud<\/a> and data center services<\/a> solutions enable agencies to fulfill OMB\u2019s Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative and Cloud First policy. In terms of IT program management, the State Department is consolidating more than 100 existing task orders down to four task orders on our Alliant<\/a> GWAC.<\/p>\n

Innovative shared services.<\/strong> For shared services, agencies can look to TEMS<\/a>, our telecommunications expense management offering, and USAccess<\/a>, which provides end-to-end identity management services to 90 agencies and over 620,000 employees. Our Assisted Acquisition Services<\/a> (AAS) can also manage part or all of the IT acquisition process.<\/p>\n

Do you agree with these predictions? What do you think will happen to government IT spending in the next few years? What do you think agencies will need to do to adapt? And how can GSA help you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week I attended the Gartner Symposium\/ITxpo 2011 in Orlando. What a conference! It featured great speakers and great ideas for IT, particularly government IT. I was especially intrigued by Andrea Di Maio and Jerry Mechling\u2019s predictions for government IT spending, because they spoke to problems GSA is already helping to solve. Constraints on Government … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Will IT Eat Your Agency?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":87,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19176],"tags":[3497,84,3496,19204,106,40,11],"class_list":["post-428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it-services","tag-acquisition-excellence","tag-alliant","tag-cloud","tag-cloud-computing-services","tag-data-center","tag-government-acquisition","tag-gwac"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsablogs.gsa.gov\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsablogs.gsa.gov\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsablogs.gsa.gov\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsablogs.gsa.gov\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/87"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsablogs.gsa.gov\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/gsablogs.gsa.gov\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":434,"href":"https:\/\/gsablogs.gsa.gov\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions\/434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsablogs.gsa.gov\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsablogs.gsa.gov\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsablogs.gsa.gov\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}