By Sarah Vreugdenhil
The Technology Business Management (TBM) Council is honored to announce the establishment of the Commission on IT Cost Opportunity, Strategy, and Transparency (IT COST). This Commission will define a set of recommendations and best practices for federal departments and agencies to transparently measure and communicate their IT costs to better-equip CIOs to govern their IT spending and support agency missions with limited resources.
The federal government spends more than $78 billion each year on technology. Today, each agency uses its own standards to measure, benchmark, and communicate the value of its technology investments to its respective stakeholders. This lack of standardization creates numerous challenges including complexities in budgeting, an inability to benchmark costs against other agencies or the private sector, and difficulties in identifying duplicated resources or underutilized assets.
Leveraging Private-Sector Best Practices
The IT COST Commission was designed by the TBM Council, a global nonprofit organization comprised of more than 1,600 IT professionals, and federal agency CIOs, to leverage private-sector best practices by connecting commercial CIOs with federal counterparts.
The Commission is comprised of three core groups of technology leaders working together towards the common goal of IT cost transparency. Participating commissioners include:
- Federal CIOs: Frank Baitman, CIO of the Department of Health and Human Services; Richard McKinney, CIO of the Department of Transportation; Sylvia Burns, CIO of the Department of Interior; Steve Cooper, CIO of the Department of Commerce; and Joyce Hunter, Acting CIO of the Department of Agriculture.
- TBM Council Board of Directors: Larry Godec, CIO at First American; Rebecca Jacoby, CIO at Cisco; Tom Murphy, CIO at the University of Pennsylvania; Ralph Loura, CIO at the Enterprise Group at Hewlett Packard; Phuong Tram, CIO at DuPont; Mike Benson, CIO at DIRECTV; Don Duet, Co-Head of Technology at Goldman Sachs; and George Westerman, Research Scientist at MIT.
- Private Sector Partners: Sunny Gupta, CEO at Apptio; Doug Lane, CEO at Capgemini Government Solutions; Todd Lavieri, President of Americas at Information Services Group; and Ralph Kahn, Vice President of Federal at Tanium.
"The TBM Council was founded to provide IT leaders with the standards, education, and collaboration they needed to run IT more like a business,” said Todd Tucker, General Manager of the TBM Council. “It is this mission that continues to drive us today and motivated our decision to establish the IT COST Commission. The Board of Directors and I are united in the belief that it's our duty to support our counterparts in the Federal government. We're privileged to do this work and excited to get started."
A Lasting Impact on the Public Sector
The first meeting of the IT COST Commission will take place in Washington, DC in June 2015. The result of this initiative will be a report planned for distribution in early 2016 outlining a series of recommendations for federal CIOs, which will further efforts to:
- Aid in the implementation of the new Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) which gives Federal CIOs centralized control over the government's IT spending.
- Reduce waste and increase efficiency of federal sector IT spend.
- Empower federal CIOs to demonstrate the cost, quality, and value of their IT spend.
"On the heels of the recently distributed draft recommendations for FITARA implementation, my Federal CIO counterparts and I are eager to support the work being done by the TBM Council," said Richard McKinney, CIO of the Department of Transportation. "We believe that the IT COST Commission can give the taxpayers a better return on their investment while simultaneously providing Congress and the Administration with better insight into the value provided by technology."
"We realize that commercial and Federal CIOs approach technology cost accounting and management very differently," said Doug Lane, CEO of Capgemini Government Solutions. "However, there are key private sector learnings that can be applied to the federal space that we believe will have a substantive, lasting impact on the way public sector CIOs manage and communicate the value of their technology investments."
The IT COST Commission work is privately funded by the TBM Council and participating partner organizations. For more information or to join the IT COST Commission, please visit: http://tbmcouncil.org/get-involved/it-cost-commission.html