Government/Military Trends

CIO: Navigating toward Tomorrow's Standardization

Issue Table of Contents

Outsourcing MRO Sourcing of Parts for Aging Aircraft Wiring: A Critical Issue in Aging Aircraft

The federal CIO Council was established by Executive Order 13011 as the principal interagency forum for the management of agency information resources. It is part of a group, in concert with the Office of Management and Business (OMB) along with Office of E-Government and Information Technology (Office of E-Gov and IT) and the General Services Administration (GSA) that launched the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) to build a business-driven blueprint for the federal government.

The CIO Council’s objectives are driven by legislation, including the E-Government Act of 2002, the Government Paperwork Reduction Act, the Government Performance and Results Act, and the Information Technology Management Reform Act, among others. Its purpose is to improve federal agency practices in information development and management.

Among the many functions of the CIO Council are responsibility for developing recommendations for the OBM on information resources requirements and management, sharing innovations and best practices in information resources management, bringing multi-agency projects and innovative practices into OMB to spur improvement in government performance, working with the U.S. Archivist to assess how agency’s information resource management activities address the Federal Records Act, and more.

The CIO Council is also charged with working with the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Office of E-Gov and IT to offer recommendations on information technology standards developed under section 20 of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Act and to make best use of commercial standards and specifications.

Numerous standards are available (many dozens from IHS) including those related to guidelines for interconnectivity and interoperability, which are described in the NIST Act, standards and technologies on the use of XML (extensible markup language) as discussed in the E-Government Act of 2002, information systems security and privacy specifications, and IT personnel considerations, such as training, classification, and professional development.

The CIO Council uses standards and specifications when it works closely within the FEA in the development of its reference models, the five modules that are its foundation. The CIO Council’s Architecture and Infrastructure Committee (AIC) aims to integrate higher-level efforts within OMB, to facilitate simple and consistent EA taxonomy and terminology, to support cross-agency efforts, and to operationalize EA efforts.

Subcommittees of the AIC also work toward actualization of FEA objectives. The expected outcomes of the Governance Subcommittee include effective initialization of the FEA, alignment throughout agencies with FEA reference models, and expansion to state and local governments for selected lines of business. For the Components Subcommittee, goals include identification of technologies for reuse, reduction of IT costs, solution development, including E-Gov solutions found in component-based architectures. The Emerging Technology Subcommittee works to improve the understanding and value of the FEA, to develop performance models and reduce risks, to enable faster investigation and acceptance of validated capabilities for use in FEA, and greater use of market-based, open standards technologies and decreased use of proprietary technologies. These and numerous other responsibilities put the CIO Council in a place of prominence for FEA development, implementation, and growth.

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