Steven VanRoekel

Posts by Steven VanRoekel

White House Updates IT Dashboard

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Earlier today, The White House updated the IT Dashboard, sharing publicly for the first time detailed IT investment information in support of the President’s FY 2013 Budget.
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This article was originally published earlier today in a blog posted on The White House Office of Management and Budget Website by Federal CIO Steve VanRoekel.
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The Administration first launched the IT Dashboard back in 2009 as part of our effort to create a more transparent and open government. By publicly posting data on more than 700 IT investments across the Federal government, we armed agencies with the tools needed to reduce duplication in IT spending, strengthen the accountability of agency CIOs, and provide more accurate and detailed information on projects and activities. We also gave Americans an unprecedented window into how their tax dollars were being spent. Keep reading →

 /  Published March 6, 2012 at 4:58 PM

Federal CIO Expands Goals In Closing Redundant Data Centers

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The President has been clear that every federal dollar spent must generate a positive return for the American people and that as we tackle our long term fiscal challenges, we must root out waste in government. One area that we know we can do better in is with the thousands of duplicative data centers that sprung up across the last decade.
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This article originally appeared as a White House blog post.
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These data centers – some as big as a football field, others as small as a closet – represent billions in wasted capital that could be better used to improve upon critical services for American taxpayers. By closing data centers, agencies are on track to save taxpayers billions of dollars by cutting spending on wasteful, underutilized hardware, software and operations as well as enhance our cybersecurity; shrink our energy and real estate footprints; and take advantage of transformational technologies like cloud computing to make government work better for our nation’s families. Keep reading →

 /  Published December 22, 2011 at 12:57 PM

A Year Of Change In Federal IT

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As technologists in the private sector know, when money is tight, it’s often technology that enables us to do more with less. In a lean fiscal environment, organizations look for ways to take existing resources and use the latest advances and tools to do the seemingly impossible: improve and expand services while cutting costs. It is no different with the Federal Government. To deliver on the President’s commitment to an effective and efficient government, we are leveraging the latest advances in technology to save taxpayer dollars and cut waste. We are working aggressively to meet the challenge of doing more with less, and we are seeing real results.
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This article was originally published as a blog post Dec. 8 on the White House website.
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By holding underperforming IT projects accountable, we are identifying efficiencies and eliminating waste to deliver better technology solutions sooner, and at a lower cost. This year we took our rigorous Techstat accountability sessions and open sourced the model, giving agencies the tools to turnaround or terminate failing projects at the agency-level. As a result agencies identified nearly $1 billion in efficiencies, bringing the grand total of Techstat efficiencies to $4 billion in less than two years. You can read more about that in the TechStat Report published today.

Having the right people matters too. In order to ensure we have the experienced and talented managers we need to oversee these large, complex IT investments and maximize the return on taxpayer dollars at every step in the process, we created a new role for IT program managers with more rigorous requirements. We also launched the Presidential Technology Fellows Program this fall to attract new talent to the federal IT workforce by reducing barriers to entry for talented young IT professionals. Keep reading →

 /  Published December 9, 2011 at 9:18 AM