HHS Executive Session

by Stephanie Sullivan, Consultant

Frank Baitman began his tenure as HHS’ CIO in mid-February 2012,  replacing Mike Carleton (John Teeter had been serving as the Acting CIO in the wake of Carleton’s departure). Baitman outlined specific FY13 priority areas at the recent ACT IAC HHS Executive Session held on September 6, 2012. His initial focus will be to create agency standards, instead of working autonomously across the agency. Baitman stressed that the Office of the CIO will no longer be just a policy shop, but will manage operational responsibility for 12,000 employees.

Other focus areas for FY13 include:

• Stronger technical skills will be sought after at the contractor and federal levels for HR and finance enterprise applications (Baitman is looking to use agile development to solve business problems)
•  A new position has been created for a Director of Innovation to utilize a small core team to identify problems and come up with solutions by partnering with industry and individuals across HHS
• Establish a Vendor Management office to help with coordination efforts to support the agency
• Build tools to provide a comprehensive asset inventory, currently HHS does not have a full view into what their IT assets are
• Adopt emerging technologies more quickly
• Create an HHS-wide roadmap to find out what systems are redundant for consolidation purposes
• Provide workforce development to provide new technical skills within the Office of the CIO
• Identify a collaboration platform that will work across all of HHS (possibly using a secure cloud solution)
• Stand up 3 TIC sites by the end of this calendar year

Baitman also provided some perspective on Steven VanRoekel’s (Federal CIO) call to cut agency IT spend by 10% in FY14 with the goal of reallocating up to 5% of those funds in other areas.  The goal is to reduce redundancy across federal agencies and cut out ineffective spending, while funding priority areas.

Finally, Baitman’s call to action for vendors is to identify how products and solutions will save HHS money by addressing the agency’s need to do more with less. Baitman urges vendors to think smarter and better in FY13.