With technology now at the center of every aspect of American life, the Government Accountability Office took a look at the state of federal IT acquisitions and came up with a list of the 16 most important technology buys going on right now.
Every federal agency and program office has at least one major IT project in the works, with many juggling several simultaneously. But a report released Tuesday puts a spotlight on major ongoing IT acquisitions that will have the biggest impact on some of the most critical government services like paying taxes, managing biometrics databases, making sure planes don’t crash and maintaining the health of soldiers and veterans.
“Our specific objective was to identify essential mission-critical IT acquisitions across the federal government and determine their key attributes,” GAO auditors wrote.
To find the most important IT acquisitions in government, GAO began by issuing a questionnaire to the 24 agencies covered under the CFO Act. All but one agency—the Defense Department—responded with their five most critical programs, giving auditors a starting list of 98 acquisitions.
After reviewing the Office of Management and Budget’s IT Dashboard, GAO added three more programs to the list—two for DOD and one for Treasury—bringing the total to 101.
Auditors then assigned point values to each acquisition based on how important the program is to accomplishing the agency’s mission. The analysis resulted in 20 programs scoring above 75.
“In order to provide a larger representation of agencies’ acquisitions across the federal government, we selected the two highest-rated IT acquisitions per agency,” and consulted with former Federal CIO Suzette Kent “to confirm that the acquisitions we selected were critical to federal government operations,” th ..
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