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GCN Home > 09/22/03 issue

Agencies take comprehensive approach to managing IT assets

By Richard W. walker, GCN Staff

When the Navy began rolling out its Navy-Marine Corps Intranet, the service’s managers were doing portfolio management. They just didn’t know it.

As part of getting NMCI in place, the Navy designated functional-area managers to evaluate applications against their business processes and decide which applications would be on the new network and which they didn’t need.
David Wennergren
Image: David S. Spence
The Navy “actually snuck our way into portfolio management” through NMCI, CIO David Wennergren says.
In the ensuing vetting process, managers got rid of legacy applications by the thousands.

That was a form of portfolio management, said Navy CIO David Wennergren.

“One day you wake up and say to the managers, ‘Do you guys know what you were doing? You were doing portfolio management,’ ” he said. “ ‘You understood what your business processes were and then you understood the portfolio of applications and systems to support those processes. And then you began to manage them.’

“So we actually snuck our way into portfolio management,” added Wennergren, co-chairman of the CIO Council’s Best-Practices Committee, which is developing guidelines on portfolio management.

Although there’s more to the process than pruning legacy applications, the Navy’s approach illustrates the underlying philosophy. In a portfolio system, IT is treated as a collection of assets to be monitored and manipulated for maximum results, much like a stock or real estate portfolio—except that the goal in government is to increase mission effectiveness rather than profits.

The idea of managing IT as an investment has been around for a while, springing from the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996.

But the concept of portfolio management is only just catching on in government IT; use of the term itself is fresh.

The 2000 revision of OMB Circular A-130, for example, requires agencies to “prepare and maintain a portfolio of major information systems that monitors investments and prevents redundancy of existing or shared IT capabilities” as part of the capital-planning selection process.

More news on related topics: Defense IT, Executive Center, Management