CIO turnover, is it time for CIO 2.0? – Plus the 7 Gov Stories

On GovLoop Insights’ DorobekINSIDER:

• Government and industry associations are undergoing major changes and shifts right to keep pace with government transformations. One of those groups is the Professional Services Council. They are moving their focus towards services rather than hardware. We get insights from President Stan Soloway.

You can find all of our programs online: DorobekINSIDER.com and GovLoop Insights at http://insights.govloop.com.

But up front: CIO turnover – is it time for CIO 2.0?

Is it time for government CIOs: The next generation? In some ways it is happening.

We told you yesterday about the departure of Robert Carey, the Defense Department’s widely respected principal deputy chief information officer. (Read the note to his staff on GovLoop’s DorobekINSIDER.)

But Carey is not the only one. In fact, he is only the latest in what feels like something of a parade:

• Casey Coleman, the CIO for the General Services Administration, left for AT&T;

• Simon Szykman, the Commerce Department chief information officer, is leaving for the private sector;

• Horace Blackman, the Veterans Affairs regional CIO and director of IT support services, joined Lockheed Martin after six years in government.

This certainly isn’t a flood and we all acknowledge a certain amount of ebb and flow. That being said, we also know that there are many CIOs that will be leaving in the coming months as the presidential transition starts to loom. (Yes — it isn’t that far away.)

Yet it also feels as if there is a certain transition going on… maybe even a changing of generations.

It has been 18 years since the Clinger-Cohen Act created agency chief information officers. Yet nearly two decades later, there is still debate about the role, whether IT has a ‘seat at the table,’ and even if CIOs should have authority for agency IT spending, sometimes called the power of the purse.

Interestingly, these discussions go on in the private sector too. Earlier this week, Andrew Horne, the managing director at Corporate Executive Board, wrote an oped for The Wall Street Journal that could have been written for the public sector:

Bringing Business-Led IT Out of the Shadows: How CIOs can tap business-led IT spending. Business leaders and frontline employees are best placed to identify the technology that meets their needs. Horne shows four areas where progressive CIOs can support business-led IT spending while increasing their own impact and their companies’ success at obtaining full value from technology investments. But to address these interests, “CIOs will need staff with strong communications, negotiation, and teaching skills, who don’t shy away from challenging their counterparts outside IT,” he said.

To that end, I will be moderating a discussion on Thursday, April 17 at the Association of Federal Information Resource Managers (AFFIRM) where we will be discussing the changing role of CIO with Karen Evans, the former federal CIO, Dave Wennergren, formerly with DOD now with CACI, Szykmam, and others.

The SEVEN stories that impact your life

1. FedNewsRadio: Cuts to military pay and benefits can’t wait, Pentagon tells Congress – “Pentagon leaders say the reductions to military personnel spending they are proposing as part of the fiscal 2015 budget weren’t easy decisions, but Congress needs to okay them this year, or the overall military budget picture will get far gloomier over the next five years.”

2. Washington Post: Secret Service incident in Netherlands was on heels of car wreck during Obama’s Miami trip – “As the U.S. Secret Service arrived in the Netherlands last weekend for a presidential trip, managers were already on high alert to avoid any further em­barrassing incidents involving agents. The agency’s director had admonished supervisors after two counter-sniper officers suspected of drinking were involved in a March 7 car accident during a presidential visit to Miami, according to several people with knowledge of the incident. The driver passed a field sobriety test and was not arrested.”

3. Washington Post: Even with more than two years to go, the chances for Obama nominees are falling rapidly – “Even with more than two years left in his term, President Obama’s ability to fill many of his administration’s most important jobs is rapidly diminishing. White House officials are scrambling to reassess their confirmation strategy in the wake of two major setbacks this month: the Senate’s rejection of lawyer Debo P. Adegbile to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division and signs that surgeon general nominee Vivek H. Murthy could go down in defeat as well. On Tuesday, the administration appointed Karl Remón Thompson as acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — bypassing the Senate confirmation process.”

4. GovExec: IRS Chief Warns Delivering Documents to Congress Could Take Years – “After three months on the job, Internal Revenue Commissioner John Koskinen faced a grilling on Wednesday from House GOP lawmakers who accused him of withholding internal agency emails demanded in a February subpoena. But Koskinen said his staff is fully responding to the request as originally defined, warning that a broadened interpretation of which categories of documents are relevant ‘will get you not thousands but millions of documents, and we’ll be at this not for months, but for years.’”

5. FedNewsRadio: OPM’s focus in hiring reform shifting from speed to quality – “Starting this year, agencies will no longer be required to report the percentage of new hires completed in under 80 days as mandated in a 2010 OPM roadmap to improve the hiring process. Agencies will still report the average number of days a new hire takes.”

6. GovExec: Bill Would Give Feds a 3.3 Percent Pay Raise in 2015 – “Federal employees would receive a 3.3 percent pay raise in 2015 under a House bill unveiled by a Washington-area lawmaker. The legislation, introduced by Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., would apply the increase to both General Schedule employees and wage-grade workers.”

7. Gigaom: Amazon Launches Workspaces, New Government Certifications and (Finally) Price Cuts! – Amazon Web Services has received Defense Department approval, meaning that the AWS GovCloud, which earlier received FedRAMP certification, can be used by “more security-aware agencies,” GigaOm reports.

DorobekINSIDER water-cooler fodder… yes, we’re trying to help you make your water-cooler time better too…

• Tim O’Reilly on the challenges of getting the best and brightest in government technology: “They have no use for someone who looks and dresses like me”: Bringing in Silicon Valley’s best and brightest is a powerful part of the solution, but it can blind us to the harder work still to be done.The most poignant lesson comes at the end of the article, when Google Site Reliability Engineer Mikey Dickerson (the guy in the T-shirt), reflecting back on his months of nonstop work to fix the broken healthcare.gov site, puts words to the social and status structures that so clearly divide the Federal government from “metaphysical Silicon Valley.” “It was only when they were desperate that they turned to us…. They have no use for someone who looks and dresses like me. Maybe this will be a lesson for them. Maybe that will change.”

• The Medal of Honor Disgrace: The system for military awards is broken [The Daily Beast]: Why is it that the Congressional Medal of Honor has been awarded only 13 times in over a decade of two wars? Brian Van Reet writes the military’s highest honor has been bestowed more infrequently for Afghanistan and Iraq than any of America’s past wars. The system for military awards is broken. We have become miserly when it comes to the top valor medals, while we hand out more of other types of awards. These awards must not be given carelessly, but they must be given. There are too many deserving candidates for it to be any other way.

• Deep pockets and paranoia are fueling a tech buying spree, as the industry’s giants race to stay on top [The Wall Street Journal]