3 Reasons We Don't Need Federal CIOs

There's no shortage of advice on how to improve the lot of CIOs in the federal government. We centralize, reorganize, and agonize over memos, orders, legislation, and other well-meaning corrective actions. But with all these efforts -- and the marginal success that follows -- perhaps we should consider whether or not the federal government even needs CIOs. Here are three points to consider:

1. The federal enterprise architecture program is an utter failure
I'm a strong advocate in the use of enterprise architecture (EA) as a critical planning tool. But the Federal implementation makes this difficult and often impossible.

According to research and advisory company Gartner, enterprise architecture is defined as "a discipline for proactively and holistically leading enterprise responses to disruptive forces by identifying and analyzing the execution of change toward desired business vision and outcomes."

[Agencies are increasingly adopting social technologies and open standards. Read Open And Social: New Path For Government Agencies.]

Gartner goes on to explain that EA delivers value by "presenting business and IT leaders with signature-ready recommendations for adjusting policies and projects to achieve target business outcomes that capitalize on relevant business disruptions." Just in case you overlooked it -- "signature-ready recommendations?" How can something with this much potential benefit be so bad?

Sisyphys, painting by Titian
(Source: Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain,
via Wikipedia)

First, there is no "enterprise." Cabinet-level departments are polylithic organizations with diverse policies, missions, and business challenges. To manage the Executive branch -- or even a large complex agency like the Department of Homeland Security -- as a single enterprise is an exercise in futility. Perhaps it's the mathematician in me that demands we reduce complexity to problems we can solve, and then move forward.

The Federal EA drives us to increase the complexity of problems to some hypothetical place where one size fits all and we are able to find commonality. That's a dream. Expending resources in the attempt to achieve it is not money well spent.

Second, EA is given a bad name because there are too many pompous framework-spouting propeller-heads who have lost sight of the agency missions and the need for the planning discipline. Agencies don't need to spend millions on volumes of fluff; all they need is a mission-savvy CIO leader with an hour of time inspired by two fingers of bourbon neat who can articulate the mission and the principles that are needed to guide technical decision-making. From this point, a strategy-driven mission-enabling EA is born.

Finally, CIOs have been constantly pressured by compliance requirements from both the Executive and Legislative branches of our government. The pressure causes this valuable planning process to be reduced to a worthless compliance exercise. As a CIO, I found myself faced with making the decision to take a "D+" in compliance so I would have enough money to plan our data center consolidation.

If federal CIOs are to be valuable business leaders in their agencies, they need to get beyond the groupthink of taxonomies, reference models, TOGAF, and DoDAF. Instead, they must use the language of their mission and lead their enterprise toward outcomes that will help achieve mission success rather than mindless compliance.

2. IT is not really considered a strategic asset
The notion that IT is a strategic asset is laughable to many agency executives. Many of them view IT as a tool -- like a file cabinet or a stapler, albeit expensive ones. I had one agency C-suite leader compare IT to toilets -- just necessary infrastructure, nothing special.

When IT is viewed more tactically, specialized "tools" promulgate across the organization. This leads to custom websites, data centers, "boutique" applications, and other point technology

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