HHS Ups Its FITARA Grade Through Internal Performance Metrics

May 01, 2019 - HHS established internal performance metrics for its component agencies that officials believe led to increased effectiveness in implementing the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA), according to a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.

As a result, HHS improved its FITARA scorecard grade from “D” in November 2015 to “B+” in December 2018.

In 2014, Congress passed FITARA to reform the federal government’s management of IT acquisition. The law required agencies to boost the authority of chief information officers (CIOs), improve risk management of IT investments, review IT investment portfolios, consolidate data centers, and improve purchasing of software licenses.

To improve its FITARA score, HHS created an internal scorecard for each of its component agencies that mapped to the department’s FITARA scorecard. This resulted in greater transparency between the department-level CIO and component agency CIOs, explained the GAO report.

“The effort to establish internal performance measures received support from senior agency leadership. Specifically, it was endorsed by the Assistant Secretary for Administration and the Principal Deputy for Administration, which agency officials believed was a key factor in the effort’s success,” it noted.

HHS officials told the government watchdog that the internal scorecard let component agencies know how well they were doing relative to each other in implementing FITARA. This led to increased cooperation and communication between the component agencies and the department CIO.

The increased cooperation enabled HHS to easily collect data required to update the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The measurement of component agencies’ performance highlighted the importance of meeting FITARA objectives and enabled agency-wide participation in improvement efforts, an HHS official told GAO.

GAO Backs Best Practices for FITARA Implementation

Based on interviews with government officials at nine federal agencies, GAO recommended the following best practices for successful implementation of FITARA: obtain support from senior leadership, treat implementation as a program, establish performance metrics for component agencies, and appoint an executive accountable for implementation in each component agency.

Regarding data center consolidation, FITARA called for federal agency to provide the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) with a data center inventory, a strategy for consolidating and optimizing the data centers, and quarter updates on progress.

GAO recommended that federal agencies conduct site visits to all data centers, transition to a virtual or cloud-based environment, incentives component agencies to accelerate the pace of data center consolidation, and utilize data centers with excess capacity.

GAO also recommended that agencies develop a policy to explain how the expanded authorities of CIOs are to be carried out, perform application rationalization activities, implement a risk rating process for IT investments that incorporate risks, and centralize the management of software licenses.

VA Sets Up Software License Management Team

Regarding software license purchases, five of the federal agencies examined by GAO established a software management team, created contracts with vendors to centrally manage licenses, and establishing governance processes for software license management.

One of the agencies, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), established an enterprise software license management team to centralize the management of its efforts to purchase software. The team conducted weekly meetings with the General Services Administration to discuss software licensing and management issues to ensure that they were aware of opportunities for cost savings.

The VA also set up an enterprise software asset management technical working group to define and document a centralized software license management approach framework.

The VA provided GAO with documentation demonstrating that it had implemented a solution to analyze agency-wide software license data, including usage and costs. As a result, the VA identified $65 million in cost savings between 2017 and 2020 due to analyzing one of their software licenses.

“In summary, as a result of applying the practices identified in this review, the selected agencies were better positioned to implement FITARA provisions and realized IT management improvements and cost savings,” the report observed.