The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) – spearheaded by its Administration for Children and Families (ACF) division – is reviewing more than 40 IT policies that it hopes to simplify to provide greater transparency to federal employees and the acquisition community.
Robin Collins, the chief information officer (CIO) at ACF, and Kevin Duvall, the deputy CIO at HHS, discussed the initiative on Sept. 3 at AFCEA Bethesda’s Health IT Summit held in Washington.
“We’re looking at over 40 IT policies that were put in place over twenty-something years,” said Collins, who was tasked with helping to lead the effort. “So we’re really looking at how do we put in place policies that make sense and really do make a difference, and articulate what and who we are as HHS.”
“We’re looking at having one policy for IT management and oversight, and one policy for security. That’s our goal, that’s kind of our North Star,” she added.
Collins noted that this initiative will help the federal IT community gain a better understanding of how to do business with HHS, while also enabling the agency to lead effectively in a manner that aligns with the laws, regulations, and directives it is required to follow.
“It is a daunting task to kind of untangle this,” she said, adding, “It doesn’t have to be this convoluted kind of mush of things that it is today. So, it’s been an interesting task. The goal here is to have greater transparency so that we can be more effective.”
Duvall further explained the policy reduction initiative, providing an example of how it plays out. Just the previous night, Duvall said, he received a call from the CIO at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a component within HHS, who told him that one of HHS’s IT policies says “you can’t use personally owned devices for government business.”
However, Duvall said that ARPA-H has embraced a “bring-your-own-device approach,” leaving his ARPA-H colleague concerned with the policy contradiction.
Another example he shared impacts the federal contracting community, in which they will click on a link in HHS’s standard language, and it won’t work because the link is hosted in the department’s internal system.
“So, one of our policy priorities is, once we reduce down policies, they will be on the public internet,” Duvall said. “Anyone will be able to read them and ensure that when you are wanting to do business with HHS, it’s very clear our dos and don’ts about IT policies, IT rules, and things like that to make your job easier, so we can, you know, get out of the way of paperwork and focus more on the mission.”