White House Forum on Modernizing Government

January 21st, 2010 by Valerie Barber

Looking to close the technology gap between the public and private sectors, the White House hosted the White House Forum on Modernizing Government, bringing together many top US CEOs and Deputy Secretaries from government agencies. Chief Performance Office Jeffrey Zients noted that one reason for the forum was to allow public agencies to leverage on the leaps in technology that the private sector has made in recent years. “We wanted to find out how they did it,” he said. The forum included breakout sessions on transforming customer service, streamlining operations and maximizing technology ROI.

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra cited a number of improvements over the past year, but also identified some systems that still need to be overhauled, like the paper-based processes for the Veterans Administration’s claims processing and the Patent and Trademark Office that prints and scans applications that it receives electronically. “Today is about unearthing the best ideas in the country,” he said.

Many of the suggestions and input are posted, with more to come, including:

• A critical need for standardization in software and data centers
• A warning about costly customization, when commercial-off-the-shelf solutions often suffices
• Centralizing the federal government’s IT budget
• Requiring periodic IT investment reviews
• Collecting citizen feedback on government services
• Benchmarking
• Breaking big IT projects into smaller chunks

President Obama kicked off the meeting by directing the Office of Management and Budget to provide federal agencies with a plan – including firm milestones and ownership and accountability requirements – to implement some of the CEO’s ideas gathered during the forum.

See who participated on each of the panels.

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