The Promise of IT: Educating the Federal Government

According to former US chief information officer Vivek Kundra, "Information technology should enable government to better serve the American people. But despite spending more than $600 billion on information technology over the past decade, the federal government has achieved little of the productivity improvements that private industry has realized from IT. The problem isn't in the technical training of IT professionals working for the federal government. Rather, we need to better educate the nonIT professionals among federal employees-in particular, those in management positions. They need to understand IT's role as a business-enhancing tool, even if the "business" here is serving the American people. This will require a major shift in government culture. To help promote such a shift, I suggest an IT curriculum for educating the federal government on realizing the benefits of IT. The goal is to develop partnership building blocks among the three groups that compose the federal government IT community: the cadre of IT professionals who provide critical IT services for the government, the nonIT workforce benefiting from such services, and the government leaders providing the overall vision that such services support.