According to Meritalk, many lawmakers have come to the consensus that the FITARA Scorecard should see an evolution that encompasses agency infrastructure for a better analysis of an agency’s IT management maturity.
The American Council for Technology – Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) released a report detailing several recommendations on how the Federal government can evolve the FITARA Scorecard. Currently, the FITARA Scorecard grades Federal agencies in seven key areas including agency CIO authority enhancements (incremental development), transparency and risk management, portfolio review, data center optimization initiative, software licensing, modernizing government technology, and cyber.
According to Meritalk, the recommended changes include:
- Evolve the current incremental development category to encompass modern system development practices with a category measuring the use of agile, DevSecOps, and customer experience (CX) best practices in an agency
- Evolve the enhanced transparency and improved risk management and portfolio review categories to the IT modernization planning and delivery category, which will codify the need for agencies to do proper IT modernization planning and develop the execution capability to deliver on those plans
- Evolve the Federal data center optimization initiative category into a cloud computing adoption category to reflect the necessity of migrating to a new, modern, interoperable IT infrastructure
- Evolve the modernizing government technology category into an IT budget category that recognizes the importance of IT activity-based cost accounting along with an agency’s ability to benchmark elements of its IT infrastructure and services with other agencies and private-sector corporations
- Evolve the existing cybersecurity category by measuring an agency’s cybersecurity posture, including adopting modern practices, notably implementing a zero-trust architecture
- Keep the transition off General Services Administration’s expiring telecommunications contracts category as it is
- Evolve the CIO authority category to reflect the criticality of the CIO having insight and real authority over the total agency IT budget and the procurements related to the purchasing of IT-related products and services
- Create a new IT workforce category that measures an agency’s ability to address its IT workforce challenges, including an agency having understood its workforce gaps and having the ability to recruit, develop, and retain IT staff
For the full article from Meritalk, click here.
Click here to check out our blog on the latest version of the FITARA Scorecard.