The U.S. Department of Agriculture saved money by consolidating 21 different email systems into one delivered from the cloud. "The Secretary of Agriculture couldn’t even send an email to all employees of USDA without someone in IT copying and pasting the email to bridge across all those systems," he said. Consolidation reduced the cost of administering the USDA’s email to $8 per month per mailbox, from $24 before.
President Barack Obama is the first U.S. president to create the position of CIO in the executive branch, and VanRoekel is the second person to serve in that position, having been appointed to the post by the president Aug. 5. The role of the CIO is to oversee the development and procurement of IT to run the government, which spends $80 billion per year on IT and serves 6.5 million end users. Obama is also the first president to appoint a federal chief technology officer (CTO), whose job is to work with tech companies to evangelize the best use of technology, such as promoting wider access to broadband.
Last week, the Government Accountability Office released a report saying federal agency CIOs are limited by current law in doing their jobs. Earlier, VanRoekel urged federal agencies to use online identity credentials from third parties to reduce IT costs.
In addition to using technology standards, VanRoekel said Future First also aims to improve the IT procurement process by sharing resources and other ideas across agencies. Hiring could be made more flexible so that fellowships could be granted to graduate students to work on a project, and the government could establish the "entrepreneur-in-residence" program model common in Silicon Valley companies to bring in a subject matter expert on a project without going through a lengthy hiring process.
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