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Obama's IT reforms saved about one per cent of spending

Report finds small, squandered, savings from cloud moves and bit barn consolidation

In 2010 the US federal government decided it needed a data centre consolidation initiative and a “25-point implementation plan to reform federal information technology management ((PDF) to save dough and improve efficiency, but a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit suggests neither outcome has been achieved.

The name of the GAO report - Information technology Reform: Billions of Dollars in Savings Have Been Realized, but Agencies Need to Complete Reinvestment Plans (PDF) - tells you a lot about the document's contents. The headline figure is “... an estimated total of US$3.6 billion dollars in cost savings and avoidances between fiscal years 2011 and 2014” of which “Slightly more than half of the savings and avoidances were from data center consolidation and optimization efforts.”

The Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Treasury, and the Social Security Administration “accounted for about $2.5 billion (or 69 percent)” of the savings, leaving the other 22 agencies in the program with meagre savings. Two agencies – NASA and the Office of Personnel Management - reported no savings. In NASA's case that's understandable, seeing as it just-about-invented OpenStack and so had a head start on cloudy capering.

There's some good news for US taxpayers in that shared services worked, which isn't always the case, and group buying of software licences made some nice inroads.

On the downside, the USA's federal IT budget (Excel file) for 2016 is $79.48 billion. In 2014 it was $ 75.6 billion. Shaving $3.6 billion across four fiscal years is a decent result, especially as some savings are structural and will therefore improve the bottom line for years to come. On the other hand $900m a year of a $79 billion budget isn't much more than a one per cent saving,

The report also finds that most agencies obliged to adopt the plan haven't followed through with a plan to reinvest their savings in services that would “expected to demonstrate a favorable return on investment.” Just five agencies delivered and delivered on their reinvestment plans.

The cloud-and-consolidate plan was devised by Vivek Kundra, president Barack Obama's hand-picked debutant in the role of Federal CIO. Widely hailed as just-about-visionary, Kundra's legacy looks ripe for re-appraisal. Government agencies are, of course, hide-bound compared to private enterprise, but that reality may not be enough for the lack of reinvestment outcomes to dent the notion that when organisations improve efficiency IT staff are unshackled from their management consoles and become white-hot “intrapreneurs” who fuel startup-speed innovation. ®

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