Statement
of the Honorable Clay Johnson III
Deputy Director for Management
Office of Management and Budget
before the
Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations
and the Census
of the
Committee on Government Reform
U.S. House of Representatives
March
3, 2004
Thank you
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee for inviting me to testify
this morning. I am proud of our accomplishments on the President’s
Management Agenda, particularly in the area of information technology
management, which we are here to discuss today. I am joined by Karen Evans,
the President’s Administrator of the Office of E-Gov and Information
Technology at OMB. Karen and I work together to improve how the government
manages IT.
The federal
government is becoming results-oriented.
We are asking
whether federal programs produce the intended results, and if they don’t,
we’re working with Congress to decide what to do about it. We are
asking what it costs to produce those intended results, and if the costs
are trending up or considered unacceptable, we’re looking for ways
to become more efficient. We are asking whether we’re effectively
managing and investing in our workforce, and if not, we’re working
with Congress to decide what to do about it. We are asking whether we
are professionally managing and utilizing our vast investments in real
property, and if we decide we are not, we will work with Congress to do
something about it.
Traditionally,
we have focused on the amount of money we spend on a problem or an opportunity
as a measure of our commitment to dealing with it. For instance, we have
said we care a lot about teaching needed skills to low-income adults and
point to our spending more than $500 million on the matter as an indication
of how committed we are to the issue. The better and more relevant measures
of our attention to teaching needed skills to low-income adults, though,
are how many low-skilled adults we’re teaching to read, how many
go on to earn their high school
diplomas, how many learn English, or how many get better job skills. It’s
harder to do this, to determine what we’re really accomplishing
and at what cost, but that’s what we’re doing. For instance,
we concluded that most of the students being served by the Adult Education
State Grants program, the primary program focused on teaching needed skills
to low-income adults, were not getting measurable benefits from the program.
So we proposed legislation to allow us to target grants to educational
approaches that have proven effective in increasing reading and math skills
and making grants contingent on achieving real and measurable outcomes,
like teaching people the skills they need to succeed.
We are looking
at our tremendous investments in information technology in the same fashion.
We spend almost $60 billion in information technology each year, more
than anybody else in the world. With increasing effectiveness we are asking
whether those expenditures are producing or are likely to produce the
desired result, and if they aren’t, we are doing something about
it.
We have agencies
develop a business case for each IT investment, to identify the benefit
to the agency and/or the citizens that justifies the investment. If the
investment is not justified, we do not recommend it be funded.
We have agencies
commit qualified project management resources to each IT project to ensure
execution is timely and on budget, and if those resources are not available,
we work with the agency to identify and reallocate the resources needed
to make certain that the management deficiency has been addressed.
We have agencies
commit funds and resources to securing each IT system, and until that
happens, we limit new starts and other developmental activities until
the security deficiency has been addressed.
We have agencies
work together on government-wide E-gov initiatives to focus on citizen
needs...to inquire about benefits, to apply for a job, to inquire about
and/or apply for a grant, to reserve a campsite, and the like. We are
working with agencies to limit "unique" solutions to "common"
needs.
Results.
We are managing our IT expenditures to produce the results that will more
than justify the taxpayers’ money we are spending.
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