What is Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA)?
The federal government invests more than $90 billion annually in information technology (IT) services, products, and projects. The USDA is projected to invest over $2.4 billion for IT products and services.
Many of the federal IT projects fail, incur cost overruns, schedule slippages, or contribute little to enhancing mission capabilities. This underperformance of federal IT projects can be traced to a lack of disciplined and effective management and inadequate executive-level oversight.
In June 2015, the OMB issued the Management and Oversight of Federal IT Memoranda (M-15-14) to provide specific guidance on the implementation of FITARA across the federal sector and ensure that government-wide implementation is consistent with existing laws, policies, and management practices.
OMB requires agencies to publish the following information related to its FITARA implementation.
- Common Baseline and Implementation Plan (PDF, 964 KB), a plan describing the changes USDA will make to ensure that all Common Baseline responsibilities described in M-15-14 are implemented.
- Agency IT Policy Archive, an archive containing USDA’s general IT policies can be found here: ZIP
- Bureau IT Leadership Directory, a listing of USDA employees with the title of CIO can be found here: HTML | JSON
- CIO Governance Board Membership, a listing of USDA governance boards the USDA CIO is a member of can be found here: HTML | JSON
- FITARA Milestones, a dataset of reviews and updates of the USDA FITARA Implementation Plan can be found here: JSON
- Cost Savings/Avoidance, a dataset of realized cost savings and/or avoidances since 2012 can be found here: JSON
- Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) Strategic Plans reporting requirements can be found here: JSON | Certification