Stories about: Federal CIO Council

On June 30, US federal government officials expect to declare an early victory on the IPv6 front. But they admit that meeting their much-heralded June 30 deadline for IPv6 compatibility is just the opening salvo of a long-term battle to get their networks ready for the Internet of the future.

US federal government officials are confident they will meet a June 30 deadline to support IPv6 on their backbone networks, but they see challenges ahead in transitioning their production networks to this long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has outsourced about half of its desktop computers, totalling some 44,000 PCs and Macintosh systems. That's one of the federal government's larger IT outsourcing projects to date, but many more deals of its kind could be on the horizon.

The federal CIO Council is drafting a strategic plan for the next fiscal year that calls for its committees to move e-government projects forward on a brisk timetable.

Three years ago, when companies everywhere were competing frantically for mainframe programmers to fix the Y2K bug, Dan Stanley, secretary of administration for the state of Kansas, responded with a corporate solution: He gave key workers and new hires extra cash. Now, although the millennium bug has been vanquished, Stanley is still handing out bonuses to keep state IT salaries "in the ballpark" to ward off private employers that pay 15 percent more.

The National Association of State Information Resource Executives has teamed with the federal CIO Council to work on intergovernmental projects, including a single public-safety network for the 2002 winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Prepare the way for the information technology czar. There is growing support in Congress for one, a presidential advisory committee recommends one, and presidential candidate George W. Bush wants one. Every time a security breach occurs, many politicians and government IT experts line up to call for one.

Gov. George W. Bush has promised to appoint a chief information officer for the federal government if he is elected president.

The federal government is probably still years away from delivering the kind of convenient, interactive services over the Internet that citizens are coming to expect from state and local governments and businesses, according to a senior federal e-government planner.

Believe it or not, there are businesses in the United States that simply hand over money and resources to Uncle Sam to help make our government more efficient. They receive no remuneration for their efforts, no inside information, no pork-barrel legislative extras. These companies pony up $10,000 a year or more for the privilege of performing pro bono work for federal agencies, and they freely offer the executive-level expertise of their CIOs, CFOs and other senior technicians.

The key to improving management of federal information technology projects may rest in giving federal CIOs (chief information officers) the same kind of power and recognition that their private sector counterparts have.