OMB FITARA guidance coming sooner than expected

The highly anticipated guidance on how agencies should apply the new Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act could come out this week, according to a notice on the CIO Council website.

Federal Chief Information Office Tony Scott told an audience at an Association for Federal Information Resource Management event earlier this month that the Office of Management and Budget draft guidance would likely be released by mid-May. However, in a new Federal Register posting, Scott directs readers to a CIO Council Web page that says commenting is “tentatively scheduled to begin during the week of April 27, 2015.”

The guidance is meant to help agencies best adapt to the law changes in FITARA — particularly, the move to give each department’s CIO more IT budgeting power.

“Where we can see where people might be confused by something, we’ve attempted to clarify it,” Scott said of the guidance at the AFFIRM event April 14.

Scott, who took over as federal CIO in February months after FITARA was signed into law late last year, has emphasized the departmentwide importance of this bill. The new federal CIO said at the event he plans to publish a cover letter with the draft guidance that “will provide some context for not just FITARA but how it fits into an overall … framework that should be guidance in terms of not just CIOs but the whole organization.”

FITARA is meant to better align IT with the mission and business of agencies and departments, Scott said. And for that reason, the draft guidance includes “input from a diverse group of stakeholders, including representatives from the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Chief Human Capital Officer (CHCO), Chief Acquisition Officer (CAO), Assistant Secretaries for Management (ASAM), and Chief Operating Officers (COOs) communities,” the notice says.