Federal CIO Suzette Kent tops the witness list for the House Government Operations Subcommittee’s June 26 hearing to assess implementation of the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA), and to release the eighth version of the full House Oversight and Reform Committee’s FITARA Scorecard that grades Federal agencies on their progress under the law, according to a news release.
The committee’s latest FITARA Scorecard will be released at the hearing, which is set to begin at 2 p.m.
The first panel of witnesses features Kent and Carol Harris, Director of IT Management Issues at the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The second panel of witnesses includes three Federal agency CIOs – Gary Washington of the Agriculture Department, Jason Gray of the Education Department, and Eric Olson of the Treasury Department.
The subcommittee, in a release dated June 24, said the hearing will examine “whether Office of Management and Budget (OMB) policies are in compliance with FITARA,” along with Federal agency implementation of FITARA and other IT laws.
The hearing will also focus on the importance of a direct line of reporting from an agency’s CIO to an agency’s secretary or deputy, and “cost savings that could be realized through data center consolidation.” Both of those issues have figured into grading on previous FITARA scorecards.
The subcommittee emphasized the importance of the CIO reporting relationship in its release, saying “agencies’ grades are given a ‘+’ or ‘-‘ based on whether the CIO reports directly to the head of the agencies. An indirect reporting structure lowers the overall grades by a full letter grade for agencies where CIOs do not report to either the head or deputy head of the agency.”
The subcommittee also said today that the latest scorecard will add a new category relating to the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2014 (FISMA). That category was discussed in the previous scorecard issued in December 2018, but not factored into the final grades.
Previous FITARA scorecards have also included grading on incremental development, risk reporting, portfolio management, data center consolidation, software licensing, and the Modernizing Government Technology Act.
