New technology and innovation in the federal government won’t come from increased budget growth as it has in the past, federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel said Tuesday.
Agencies will have to embrace what VanRoekel calls a “cut and invest” strategy by decreasing or eliminating funding for older projects and pouring that into new technology like cloud computing. “In government we don’t have a culture of take from the old and give to the new,” VanRoekel said at the Federal Office Systems Expo on Tuesday.
VanRoekel said funding for new projects will come from initiatives like Shared First and data center consolidation, although savings won’t be immediate as agencies use those dollars to shut down centers and build state-of-the-art facilities.
The Defense Department saw a $300 million reduction in its proposed IT budget for fiscal 2013, driven entirely by data center consolidation, VanRoekel said.
“That is an early indicator of a trend that you’re going to see in a much bigger way across the federal portfolio,” he said.
