SIIA has worked closely with Chairman Issa and his staff on the draft legislation to reform federal IT acquisition known as FITARA, and we applaud his efforts to advance the debate. While technology has changed dramatically in the last decade, it’s been more than ten years since the E-Gov Act was signed into law and more than 15 years since enactment of Clinger-Cohen. An update to IT acquisition regulations is clearly overdue.
As today’s hearing clearly showed, there is a great deal at stake in this debate, and a thoughtful and methodical approach is needed. An estimated $20 billion of the federal government’s $80 billion IT budget could be spent on cloud computing and related innovative IT services. With that, it is essential that the government develop new and innovative ways to acquire these services, reducing time to market and maximizing value.
While SIIA is strongly supportive of the objective of legislation to reform federal IT acquisition, we have concerns with several provisions as proposed in the discussion draft. We have shared our concerns with Chairman Issa and his staff and hope that these concerns will be addressed in the revised bill that the Chairman announced today will be “published” prior to the Congressional Spring Recess. We look forward to continuing to work with Chairman Issa and members of the Committee to address these issues and help advance effective, bipartisan legislation to help the Federal government continue to keep pace with IT innovation.
Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.