Two government reports have shed new light on a dilemma:
If US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) chief information
officer Steven Cooper cannot wrestle the agency's sprawling
bureaucracy into submission, can any IT manager be expected to help
fix the nation's problems with terrorism information
sharing?
In July, the DHS inspector-general issued a report concluding
that Cooper did not have the political clout needed to develop an
enterprise architecture integrating the IT systems at the 22
agencies within the DHS.
"[Cooper] is not a member of the senior management team with
authority to strategically manage department-wide technology assets
and programmes," the inspector-general's report said. It added that
there is no formal reporting relationship between Cooper and the
CIOs of major DHS components.
In another report submitted to Congress on this month, the
Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the DHS "does not
yet have the necessary architectural blueprint to effectively guide
and constrain its ongoing business transformation efforts and the
hundreds of millions of dollars that it is investing in supporting
information technology assets".
According to the GAO, the current version of the DHS' IT
blueprint "is missing most of the content necessary to be
considered a well-defined architecture". The GAO described it as
"the result of an amalgamation of the existing architectures that
several of DHS' predecessor agencies already had".
In a written response to the inspector-general's report, DHS
deputy secretary James Loy disagreed that Cooper should be part of
the senior executive team reporting directly to him. The CIO is
"already an integral member at each level of the IT investment
review process", Loy wrote.
The DHS acknowledged the problems with its enterprise
architecture in a response to the GAO report. But the agency added
that the GAO had measured its progress against "unrealistic"
expectations about how comprehensive the first version of the
architecture would be.
The DHS' IT budget for 2004 was about $4bn (£2.4bn) - the third
largest IT budget in the federal government. And in the year since
the agency was established, its CIO has led several initiatives to
boost connectivity among the department's 22 legacy agencies,
including linking e-mail systems and providing access to a shared
online intranet portal.
But the larger tasks of identifying department-wide IT assets
and creating a consolidated and secure IT infrastructure have yet
to be accomplished, according to the inspector-general's
report.
Sateesh Lele, a former CIO at General Motors' European
operations and now chairman of IT services firm Global Data
Systems, said cultural change from the top down throughout the
federal government is desperately needed.
"In my CIO career, I have seen innumerable examples of this
organisational malaise rampant in extremely large organisations,
and I have also seen some tough actions from the top which have
fixed the problem," he said. "This is not an IT problem. It is a
cultural change problem."
But there are real technical issues that make it impossible for
any CIO, regardless of experience, to succeed in fixing the
homeland security and intelligence community information-sharing
problems, said Alan Canton, president of software developer
Adams-Blake.
"The infrastructure is broken," said Canton. "What is needed is
not a CIO who can manage a bad system, but one who has the
experience of building a new one quickly."
Roger Cressey, a former counter-terrorism director on the
National Security Council, said the current CIO status and
organisation at the DHS "is a recipe for failure".
Regardless of who wins the presidential election in November,
there are significant structural changes that must take place at
the DHS next year if the information-sharing problems are to be
fixed, he said. It would be impossible for one person to manage
full authority over both the intelligence and homeland security
missions, and therefore, Cressey said, "we shouldn't try".
Dan Vertonwrites for
Computerworld
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