From: WatchBlog | US General Accountability Office
Last week, we issued our 2015 update to our High Risk List. Today, we take a closer look at 1 of the 2 new areas: Management of IT Acquisitions and Operations.
Big Money, Mixed Results
The federal government spends billions on IT investments. In fiscal year 2015, 27 federal agencies plan to invest about $80 billion in IT, about $40 billion of which will go toward major investments, as shown below.
(Excerpted from GAO-15-290)
Unfortunately, many of these investments fail or don’t contribute much toward accomplishing agency missions. For example,
- DOD spent more than $1 billion on a combat support system that failed to deploy and was ultimately cancelled;
- HealthCare.gov was late, cost significantly more than anticipated, and didn’t work as planned; and
- The Department of Veterans Affairs terminated a $231 million project due to management problems.
Over the past 4 years, we’ve reported numerous times on shortcomings with IT acquisitions and operations, resulting in more than 300 recommendations. However, only 20 percent of these have been fully implemented.
The problems we identified and the lack of progress on our recommendations led us to designate improving the management of IT acquisitions and operations as a new government-wide high-risk area in 2015.
Why So Many Failures?
In reviewing failed IT programs, we identified some common themes:
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