The Challenges of Federal IT Acquisition

February 05, 2025

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) just released an 81 page report titled “Critical Actions Needed to Urgently Address IT Acquisition and Management Challenges”. You can find the full report and its summary here: High-Risk Series: Critical Actions Needed to Urgently Address IT Acquisition and Management Challenges | U.S. GAO

As someone who has lived within the US Government buying IT systems, I read this with some curiosity. I wanted to see if their core recommendations would have addressed the challenges myself and colleagues faced procuring IT. When I was in the Air Force doing IT procurement, we were still required to follow the classical waterfall process, and it wasn’t until a handful of years before my retirement that they realized that for many IT projects, especially software development, a more iterative approach would be better.

It is interesting that the GAO has been tracking IT acquisition as a High Risk item since 2015 with certain criteria required to be removed from that list. They included: Leadership Commitment, Capacity, Action Plan, Monitoring, and Demonstrated Progress. Nearly ten years later, the US Gov’t hasn’t made sufficient progress in those area to be removed from the list. This really highlights the challenges of IT acquisition and the level of effort necessary to reform it.

In this report they call out nine critical actions that they believe are required to make progress. I’ll list them here, but I’ll point you to the full report for more details:

1. Improve the effectiveness of key IT leadership positions, including the Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO), agency CIOs, and agency chief artificial intelligence officers.
2. Enhance agency efforts to strategically plan for and manage portfolios of IT systems, application, and software licenses, and to manage existing IT system operations.
3. Improve the monitor or, and transparency into, the performance of IT investments.
4. Strengthen planning and budgeting for the acquisition of IT systems and services.
5. Improve implementation of leading IP acquisition and development practices to effectively plan and managed IT project costs, schedules, risks, requirements, and training.
6. Strengthen the planning and management of cloud services, supply chains, and telecommunication services.
7. Address workforce management challenges for the technically capable workforce
8. Improve federal customer experience for digital services.
9. Ensure effective management of emerging technologies.

I’m pretty sure if you remove the word “federal” from this list, you could brief this to any large company’s Board of Directors and have a similar discussion as you might in the government. Really, nothing here is truly unique to the Federal Government, at least until you dig into details.

Unfortunately, the GAO has little influence over how the US Federal Budget is developed and passed by Congress and is left trying to fix everything after the budget is passed.

From the report, we can conclude that:

-   Most federal agencies struggle with IT strategic planning and maintaining a highly trained IT workforce.

-   Federal CIO’s lack sufficient insight and influence over the IT budgeting process.

-   Multiple agencies struggle with IT acquisitions and program management.

-   Most agencies struggle to have an IT workforce strategy or to address the workforce IT skill gaps.

There is a lot of other observations and a wide range of GAO recommendations in this report. I suspect that the federal government’s challenges are not unique, and that most major enterprise companies face similar challenges. My take on this is that it comes to two things: First, federal agencies need to have a workforce that is well versed in IT, IT program management, IT strategy development, and so on. Secondly, the federal government needs to empower the agencies to effectively manage their IT programs while maintaining sufficient and necessary oversight.

Neither of these two things are new, and the federal government must compete for this talent, and there are many obstacles in enabling effective IT program management. Unfortunately, I doubt that the private sector has mastered these as well, so there is only so many commercial lessons learned that can be adopted.

I’m glad that the GAO put this together, and I can only hope that the agencies embrace the recommendations and make meaningful improvements. As our country continues its digital journey, the citizens dependance on these agencies being successful across all IT challenges grows. IT is hard, but I do think that our federal agencies are up to the challenges.

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