IT Reform at the Department of State
The first six months of fulfilling the 25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal IT Management have had a positive effect at the Department of State. Our team has been hard at work executing these important strategic changes, and I believe that we have made a great deal of progress so far.
The "Cloud First" strategy is one component of IT Reform that we have embraced. The cloud is enabling us to share information with citizens, via History.State.gov, and internally through the Ralph J. Bunche Electronic Library. Moving it to the cloud reduced costs by 66% while maintaining the functionality and scalability that our end users require. Progress like this is allowing us to close some of our proprietary data centers. We have already closed one, and plan to close three more by the end of the year.
We have implemented a TechStat program at the State Department. Our first directive was to conduct an internal TechStat of our messaging systems, the official means for sharing information within the Department and with other U.S. Government agencies. The outputs from our first session will lead to the retirement of State’s Telegram legacy systems and ideally the integration of other messaging systems internal to the Department’s messaging environment. It will also improve insight into investment performance and improve the acquisition lifecycle to enable comprehensive, integrated system development and transparent performance measurement reporting. Having been through two TechStat sessions, the process was productive in terms of clearly identifying the issues and agreeing to short- and long-term outputs to turn around troubled investments. We look forward to many more TechStat reviews in the future.
In a world where real-time connectivity and communication is an ever-increasing necessity, State is making significant strides to connect foreign affairs agencies overseas on a common state-of-the-art platform-as-a-service (PaaS). The Foreign Affairs Network (FAN) utilizes IT to empower diplomacy, development, and other USG services by providing access to information and technology services anytime and at any mission site. State is making significant headway in redesigning its networks to support the FAN—ensuring security, redundancy, and performance anywhere around the globe—and will capitalize on centralized and regionalized network services as appropriate.
I believe that the sharing of case studies and best practices research is a crucial aspect of IT reform and the Department of State is committed to continuing our collaboration with other agencies. State’s publically available case study on using a working capital fund for IT shares our success in consolidating 27 separately funded IT organizational units into a single group. I hope that other agencies will find our experience to be instructive, just as we have learned a great deal from the experiences shared by our peers. Going forward, continued interagency communication is critical to ensuring that our customers benefit from the effective use and management of IT resources.
Susan Swart is the Chief Information Officer at the Department of State.
