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Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 12/15/03 issue

OMB makes plans for E-Gov’s Act 2

By Jason Miller, GCN Staff

Pushes agencies to finish Quicksilver projects and move beyond green

As the E-Government Act turned 1 year old this month, administration officials were looking forward to how the act would shape the next year’s agenda, rather than back at what had been accomplished in the last 12 months.

The mandate establishes the framework for almost all of OMB’s e-government priorities and goals over the next year and will lead to a new level of electronic government, said Karen Evans, the Office of Management and Budget’s administrator for e-government and IT.

OMB is pushing agencies to move beyond green for the e-government portion of the President’s Management Agenda. Doing so hinges on continued implementation of the law, Evans and other administration officials said.

Up next

In Year 2, agencies must finish the 25 Quicksilver projects, push their enterprise architectures forward and improve systems privacy and security controls, Evans said.

“We are setting the stage for breakthrough performance,” she said. “A lot of these initiatives are becoming a reality now, and agencies are ingraining them in their business processes. When they plan a project, things like e-authentication or online rule-making become an expected part of their business case.”

President Bush signed the E-Gov Act into law Dec. 17, 2002, and OMB issued guidelines in August. Evans said the act codified much of what was already being done through policy or executive orders and at the heeding of the CIO Council.

“Because many of these things are codified, they have stability, and that helps agencies plan better,” she said.

Better planning eventually will lead to better performance, officials said.

For IT managers, what equates to breakthrough performance will be defined in different ways, said Tad Anderson, OMB’s associate administrator for e-government and IT.

“It could mean agencies are using their enterprise architectures as a tool for not just IT managers but for all government managers. It could be where IT investments are consolidated more broadly, across departments and managed as portfolio investments,” he said this month during a panel discussion on federal IT in 2004 sponsored by Dutko Government Markets of Washington.