Annual Strategic Plan

[tmccrosson]

Overall I think this is a pretty good policy. I have a few comments though.

First, you have a section entitle "Annual Strategic Plan" (page 9) but the strategic plan is intended to cover a period of 3 years. It shouldn't be "annual" if it is covering a three-year term. But this issue is related to my next point.

Second, and more importantly, it would be a shame if the data center strategic plan was another one-off plan that didn't integrate with the other IT plans in the organization. The strategy for data centers must work in concert with the strategy for cloud, for security and for mission application development. For this reason I would strongly recommend that this section be reorganized to require a discussion of the data center strategy as a required component of the Information Resources Management (IRM) Strategic Plan which is required every four years under the Paperwork Reduction Act. Doing this will marry the timing (4 years) up with GPRA-M and force consistency among the strategic plan of the Department and the IT plan.

Third, I would strongly recommend a section on transparency. You have a section on compliance reporting and you are proposing to collect data on a quarterly basis. I think that agency performance should be displayed on the IT Dashboard on a quarterly basis at least in the aggregate if not much more detailed. We should be holding agencies accountable to achieving the closure targets as well as the performance metrics identified in Table 1.

Finally, what are the repercussions for agencies that don't play ball? For example, the Department of Energy is woefully under-reporting its number of data centers. Heretofore they have been getting a free pass. How does OMB propose to hold those agencies accountable? It doesn't seem fair that some agencies go through this effort to do the right thing and other agencies ignore the policy with no negative impact.