Federal CIO Sees Upside to Doing More With Less

When information technology officials invoke the budget-cutters' mantra of "doing more with less," they've typically focused on the "less" part of the equation, federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel said Friday. For the federal IT community, that has included commitments to close about 1,200 federal data centers during the next three years and shelving major IT projects that have ambled on too long without delivering results.

The CIO's office, however, has been trying to focus on how savings from closing data centers, improving IT management and moving programs to cheaper cloud computing can be shifted to new initiatives that deliver more and better government services, VanRoekel said during a breakfast presentation sponsored by the Bethesda chapter of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, a government and industry group.

President Obama's 2013 fiscal budget request includes a dip of about 1 percent for federal IT spending, to $78.9 billion. IT spending has been basically flat since the start of the Obama administration, after rising about 7 percent annually during the previous decade.