Information technology should enable government to better serve the American people. However, according to OMB, despite spending more than $600 billion on IT over the past decade, the federal government has achieved little of the productivity improvements that private industry has realized from IT. Too often, federal IT projects run over budget, behind schedule, fail to deliver promised functionality, or are duplicative of other projects. In combating this problem, proper oversight is critical. Both OMB and federal agencies have key roles and responsibilities for overseeing IT investment management. OMB is responsible for working with agencies to ensure investments are appropriately planned and justified. Additionally, each year, OMB and federal agencies work together to determine how much the government plans to spend on IT projects and how these funds are to be allocated. OMB uses the following mechanisms and processes, among others, to help it fulfill its required oversight responsibilities for federal IT spending. Exhibit 53s and exhibits 300s. OMB requires 27 federal departments and agencies to provide information related to their IT investments, including agency exhibit 53s and capital asset plans and business cases (called exhibit 300s). Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) initiative. In February 2002, OMB established the FEA initiative. According to OMB, the FEA is intended to facilitate governmentwide improvement through cross- agency analysis and identification of duplicative investments, gaps, and opportunities for collaboration, interoperability, and integration within and across agency programs. The FEA is composed of five “reference models” describing the federal government’s (1) business (or mission) processes and functions, independent of the agencies that perform them; (2) performance goals and outcome measures; (3) means of service delivery; (4) information and data definitions; and (5) technology standards. Since the fiscal year 2004 budget cycle, OMB has required agencies to categorize their IT investments in their annual exhibit 53s according to primary function and subfunction as identified in the FEA reference models. Additionally, agencies were required to choose a subfunction for each investment related to the primary function. IT reform. In December 2010, the Federal Chief Information Officer issued a 25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management. This 18-month plan specified five major goals: strengthening program management, streamlining governance and improving accountability, increasing engagement with industry, aligning the acquisition and budget processes with the technology cycle, and applying “light technology” and shared solutions. As part of this plan, OMB outlined actions to, among other things, strengthen agencies’ investment review boards and consolidate federal data centers. The plan stated that OMB will work with Congress to consolidate commodity IT spending (e.g., e-mail, data centers, content management systems, and web infrastructure) to, among other things, eliminate duplication, under agency Chief Information Officers. Further, the plan called for the role of agency Chief Information Officers to focus more on IT portfolio management. In April 2012, we reported on the federal government’s progress toward implementing these actions. In particular, we found that OMB and key federal agencies had made progress on action items in the IT Reform Plan, but that much work remained to be done on action items such as completing data center consolidation plans and launching a forum for agencies to share IT management best practices. Accordingly, we recommended, among other things, that the agencies complete all key IT Reform action items; OMB agreed with our recommendation. IT operations and maintenance. With regard to identifying and eliminating duplication within existing IT legacy systems—commonly referred to as steady state investments—OMB issued the Capital Programming Guide that calls for agencies to analyze (via operational analysis) whether their steady state investments are continuing to meet business and customer needs and are contributing to meeting the agency’s strategic goals. More specifically, this guidance calls for agencies to perform operational analyses annually on each steady state investment and requires that each operational analysis address 17 key factors, including cost, schedule, customer satisfaction, strategic and business results, financial goals, and whether the investment overlaps with other systems. In October 2012, we reported that of five key agencies selected for review, only two had performed operational analyses, and these two agencies did not perform analyses on all their steady state investments.agencies, none fully addressed the 17 key factors specified in OMB’s guidance. Consequently, we recommended that the agencies conduct annual operational analyses on all their steady state investments and in doing, fully address the 17 key factors. The agencies agreed with our recommendations and have taken actions, such as developing operational analysis guidance, to address them. Further, of the analyses performed by the two PortfolioStat reviews. In March 2012, OMB launched the PortfolioStat initiative, which requires agencies to conduct an annual agencywide IT portfolio review to, among other things, reduce commodity IT spending and demonstrate how their IT investments align with the agency’s mission and business functions. PortfolioStat is designed to assist agencies in assessing the current maturity of their IT investment management process, making decisions on eliminating duplicative investments, and moving to shared solutions in order to maximize the return on IT investments across the portfolio. While OMB’s TechStat reviews are intended to examine IT performance at the specific project or investment-level, PortfolioStat reviews are intended to examine the portfolio as a whole and draw on the agency’s enterprise architecture to help identify and eliminate areas of duplication and waste. In March 2013, OMB reported that through its PortfolioStat effort, agencies had identified and committed to nearly 100 opportunities to consolidate or eliminate commodity IT investments. OMB reports that PortfolioStat has the potential to save the government $2.5 billion over the next 3 years by, for example, consolidating duplicative systems. During the past several years, we have issued multiple reports and testimonies and made numerous recommendations to OMB and federal agencies to identify and reduce duplication within the federal government’s portfolio of IT investments. For example, in September 2011, we reported that results of OMB initiatives to identify potentially duplicative IT investments were mixed and that several federal agencies did not routinely assess their entire IT portfolios to identify and remove or consolidate duplicative systems.OMB’s recent initiatives had not yet demonstrated results, and several agencies had not routinely assessed legacy systems to determine if they were duplicative. Accordingly, we recommended that OMB among other things (1) improve its agency guidance on identifying and categorizing IT investments and (2) require the agencies as part of their annual budget and IT investment submissions to report the steps they take to ensure their IT investments are not duplicative. OMB generally agreed with these two recommendations and to address them subsequently updated its Specifically, we found that most of guidance to provide additional clarity on how agencies should characterize investments in order to enhance the identification of potentially duplicative investments. In addition, in February 2012 we reported on potentially duplicative IT investments within DOD, the Department of Energy, and DHS. Specifically, we found that while DOD and the Department of Energy had various investment review processes in place that were partially designed to avoid investing in systems that were duplicative, we identified 37 potentially duplicative investments, totaling about $1.2 billion for fiscal years 2007 through 2012. Accordingly, we recommended that the agencies utilize existing transparency mechanisms, such as the IT Dashboard, to report on the results of the department’s efforts to identify and eliminate, where appropriate, each potentially duplicative investment we identified, as well as any other duplicative investments. We also recommended that these agencies, among other things, report on the progress of their efforts to identify and eliminate duplication. The agencies generally agreed with our recommendations and have taken steps to address them. For example, DOD and the Department of Energy (1) are conducting portfolio reviews, as part of their established IT investment management processes, as means to identifying and eliminating IT duplication and (2) plan to report the results of these reviews via the IT Dashboard. GAO, Data Center Consolidation: Strengthened Oversight Needed to Achieve Cost Savings Goal, GAO-13-378 (Washington, D.C.: Apr. 23, 2013). that while agencies had closed 420 data centers, this was 285 closures short of where OMB expected the agencies to be as of the December 2012 time frame. Further, we found that OMB had not determined agencies’ progress against their cost savings goals because OMB had yet to determine a consistent and repeatable method for tracking cost savings. Consequently, we recommended that OMB, among other things, track and report on key performance measures and extend the time frame for achieving planned cost savings. OMB agreed with the first recommendation and plans to evaluate the second recommendation but did not provide a time frame for the evaluation’s completion. Additionally, the above work and associated reports have been updated and summarized in our 2011, 2012, and 2013 duplication series which reported on opportunities that existed for federal agencies to reduce fragmentation, overlap, or duplication in key areas, including IT, in order to achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness. The three agencies in our review had some IT investments that appeared to be duplicative; of the total investments we reviewed, the number of such investments was small but represented a significant amount of spending. Specifically, of the 590 IT investments reviewed, we identified 12 potentially duplicative investments (within 5 purpose groups) at DHS, DOD, and HHS which accounted for about $321 million in reported IT spending for fiscal years 2008 through 2013. (Our analysis and categorization of the 12 investments by common purposes is included in app. II).