Steve VanRoekel’s decision to move out of the federal chief information officer’s role and to a more operational role at the U.S. Agency for International Development last week caught most by surprise.

But after spending more than three years as the federal CIO, many experts surmised VanRoekel’s decision was as much about stepping into a new fray as it was he probably needed a change.

Few people last too long in any of the top jobs at the Office of Management and Budget. It has been called by many previous OMB officials the hardest and most demanding job they’ve ever loved.

The rumor mill was fairly strong that VanRoekel has been looking to make a move over the last year or so. Sources say he was hopeful for a larger role in the administration, whether it was deputy director for management at OMB, a deputy secretary or assistant secretary for management type of position or something similar.

But when that didn’t materialize, VanRoekel’s decision to jump into the Ebola fray is a logical move for many reasons.

In some ways, VanRoekel’s decision harkens back to the move by Dee Lee, going from administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy to a career position where she was the head of the Defense Department’s acquisition policy. But the difference is VanRoekel remains a political appointee as the chief innovation officer at USAID.

VanRoekel replaces Maura O’Neill, who left USAID in August 2013 after spending more than 3-1/2 years as chief innovation officer and senior counselor.

“It is admirable that Steve has chosen to devote his knowledge and skills to assist the government’s response to the Ebola outbreak in Africa,” said Trey Hodgkins, senior vice president of the public sector at the Information Technology Alliance for Public Sector (ITAPS). “The U.S. response and the victims of this disease will benefit tremendously from his commitment, and we applaud and thank him for his continued public service.”

So what will VanRoekel be remembered for as the fourth federal CIO?

Most experts in the federal technology community agreed his legacy will be a good one, but well behind his three predecessors.

One former federal CIO, who requested anonymity because they now work in the private sector, said VanRoekel’s legacy is highlighted by the Digital Government Strategy and the path it set the government on over the last two years.

But the former federal IT official said VanRoekel and OMB didn’t drive implementation as aggressively as some would have liked. Additionally, VanRoekel didn’t have a grand vision or a transformative strategy to move government IT forward fast enough, as is usually expected from the federal CIO.

Another area of frustration was around VanRoekel and the White House’s lack of support for CIO authorities and the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA).

One industry source said VanRoekel may have had his hands tied due to the administration’s stance when it came to fixing the structure problems with the CIOs’ position.

“He could have made the case more strongly in the White House that FITARA or something similar was needed,” the source said.

Others credited VanRoekel for the impact PortfolioStat has had on how agencies now view and manage IT investments across mission areas.

“Through PortfolioStat, the work Steve did with agencies to move to better managed technology projects through the consultation with industry and across government is what led to some of the ideas that went into Digital Services Playbook and TechFAR,” said Dan Chenok, executive director of IBM’s Center for the Business of Government. “He’s helped raise the general level of capacity to do IT programs across the government. He was certainly instrumental in supporting GSA’s 18F and most recently the Digital Services Group to help agencies address technology challenges.

Mike Hettinger, senior vice president for public sector at TechAmerica, said VanRoekel was effective behind the scenes when working with industry.

“He did a lot of sit downs in small groups with all of industry represented and was very effective in small settings understanding our concerns and challenges,” he said. “He was very open talking about ideas he had like Digital Services Group and the TechFAR.”

Now the rumor can begin about who will step into the federal CIO role. No one expected VanRoekel’s name to be called when President Barack Obama nominated him, and a lot of the obvious candidates have left government over the last two years — Dave McClure, Roger Baker and Richard Spires.

The White House could leave deputy administrator for e-government and IT Lisa Schlosser in the interim role for the next two years considering the next person would need to get Senate confirmation, which easily could take six to nine months, thus leaving them only 15 months in the role.

“The current makeup of OMB’s E-Gov is undergoing significant change,” said a senior government IT manager, who requested anonymity because they didn’t get permission to speak to the press. “Steve is back in USAID, and Scott Renda, who was the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative’s backstop, has taken a position with the private sector in Washington State with Amazon. The next two years might be steady as she goes with an indeterminate sense of direction.”

Chenok said the next CIO should be someone who can come in and quickly pick up the agenda that’s in process. The person should identify two or three priorities of their own that can be accomplished in a short window.

Spires, the former DHS CIO and now CEO of Resilient Network Systems, said the next federal CIO needs “to bring leadership in driving the government toward more consolidation of its infrastructure through use of cloud and shared services, and focus on continuing to improve the ability to successfully deliver IT programs that support improved mission outcomes.”

Hettinger added the next CIO needs to be someone who understands technology and acquisition, and the growing intersection of the two.

“A lot of what is going on inside government between the Digital Service Group, GSA’s 18F and things like the TechFAR. The next CIO needs to understand technology and acquisition all fits together properly,” he said.

No matter who ends up as the next federal CIO, VanRoekel is leaving them with solid foundational capabilities around digital services, and a growing maturity around IT investment and project management.

The E-Government office isn’t just losing Steve VanRoekel, but a steady stream of key policy analysts have left over the last year.

The latest is Scott Renda, who has been at OMB for about five years. Renda’s last day was Sept. 12. Sources say Renda is moving to Seattle and joining Amazon Web Services, where he will be working in a strategic position looking at how best to expand the company globally.

At OMB, Renda worked on initiatives ranging from PortfolioStat to implementing the Open Data Executive Order and policy to cloud computing and data center consolidation initiatives.

Sources say Renda was replaced by Trevor Rudolph, who has worked at OMB on cybersecurity strategy issues since 2012.

Renda becomes at least the third e-government office staff member to leave. Dominic Sale left in January to take a detail to the General Services Administration and now is the acting deputy associate administrator in the Office of Governmentwide Policy. Haley Van Dyck left the e-gov office in June, but ended up joining the Digital Services Group under Mikey Dickerson.

The White House’s tech staff isn’t losing everyone. Jenn Gustetic, NASA’s Prizes and Challenges Program Executive, joined the Office of Science and Technology Policy this week on a one-year detail.

Gustetic said in an email obtained by Federal News Radio that she will be the assistant director for open innovation in the Technology and Innovation Division of OSTP.

“In this role, I will work on scaling the use of open innovation approaches like prizes, crowdsourcing, and citizen science across the federal government building on the monumental leadership of OSTP’s Cristin Dorgelo and leveraging NASA’s depth and breadth of experience with these tools for almost a decade,” she wrote.

OSTP promoted Dorgelo to chief of staff this week as well.

Gustetic has been leading NASA’s prizes and challenges efforts for almost three years.

Another IT executive is calling it quits after more almost 30 years in government. Sources say Eric Won, the Small Business Administration’s director of performance and program evaluation, and entrepreneur development, is retiring in the next two weeks.

Sources say Won will return to the private sector where he will be a senior official at a service disabled veteran-owned small business firm in Washington metro area, which focuses on cybersecurity.

Won has held assorted high-level IT management roles during his career, including deputy associate CIO at the Agriculture Department, chief technologist for governmentwide policy at GSA and, most recently, SBA’s chief information and privacy officer.

Finally, Bob Brese, former Energy CIO, announced his big secret new job. Brese, who left government Sept. 5 after almost 30 years of service, joined Gartner Executive Programs where he will advise public and private sector CIOs, and other IT executives on meeting the cybersecurity challenge and managing associated IT and organizational risk.

IT Job of the Week:

The Justice Department recently added a chief information officer and now wants a new chief technology officer. The CTO would be “responsible for establishing the agency’s technical vision and leading all aspects of the agency’s technology development. The CTO is the agency top technology executive, playing an integral role in the agency’s strategic direction, development, and future growth.”

Applications are due Sept. 25.

T his just in Friday — the Treasury Department officially is kicking off the implementation of the DATA Act on Sept. 26.

In a notice in the Federal Register, Treasury will host an all- day town hall at its Washington headquarters.

The goal of the town hall is two-fold. First, it’s to educate federal employees on how to implement the act. Second is to hear from members of the public about why government transparency is important.

The meeting also will feature presentations “from experts that have implemented data exchange standards (e.g., Extensible Markup Language (XML), Xtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), National Information Exchange Model (NIEM)) to increase transparency and reduce reporting burden.”

The first public meeting comes almost four months after President Barack Obama signed the measure into law.

OMB hasn’t been ignoring the law that it half-heartedly supported. It sent out a CFO Management Alert in June reminding agencies that that DATA Act is law and is updating Circular A-11.

The Office of Personnel Management’s Innovation lab has been eerily quiet over the last year or so. We haven’t heard much from them, nor have we seen representatives speaking on the local circuit. But OPM Director Katherine Archuleta recently offered a little insight into what they have been up to over the last year.

Archuleta, who spoke Sept. 3 at the Association for Talent Development government workforce conference in Washington, said the Innovation Lab recently added two new capabilities — human centered design and Lean Six Sigma.

“We are using both of those strategies to address most of the issues we are confronting today,” she said. “We just used Lean Six Sigma and human centered design together to look at customer service in retirement services and have come up with some fantastic ideas and new steps that we are taking.”

Archuleta didn’t offer more details on what were those new ideas and steps.

She did say, however, that other agencies have been and should continue to take advantage of the services offered by the Innovation Lab.

“It is so booked that for me to use that in that space and those resources in the lab, I have to schedule it months in advance,” she said. “The word is spreading not only as a place where good conversations happen, but also good work in solving difficult issues happen.”

The growth of labs such as the one at OPM is both interesting and, for some especially in industry, concerning. Some staff members on Capitol Hill also are starting to pay attention to the different labs popping up across the government.

Along with OPM’s lab, GSA’s 18F and the National Cancer Institute’s User Experience Lab are others among a growing forest of these offices.

18F is trying to improve the online Freedom of Information Act process with new tools.

“This effort will be conducted with the assistance of a number of agencies and offices within the federal government,” stated a blog on the 18F website last week. “A FOIA Task Force, which consists of representatives from the Department of Justice, Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Science and Technology Policy and others, has been created to oversee the creation of these open source software resources.”

Among the tools the task force is looking at are:

• Improving the FOIA request submission experience;
• Creating a scalable infrastructure for making requests to federal agencies; and
• Making it easier for requesters to find records and other information that have already been made available online.

What’s interesting about this effort is whether it already duplicates what’s happening at least at two agencies. The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Federal Housing Finance Agency and the Comptroller of the Currency in the Treasury Department are using a FOIA system that lives in the cloud.

And, of course, the governmentwide FOIAonline.gov site hasn’t seen the take up of use by agencies as many would have hoped. This, in and of itself, may be why 18F is looking at the online FOIA process in the first place.

The National Cancer Institute launched the Audience Research and Informatics Laboratory in August — the official kickoff is scheduled for Sept. 11.

“It’s a dedicated space to collect data on the customer experience of many of the digital services that NCI provides, including websites, mobile sites, apps and other systems,” NCI wrote in a Sept. 4 blog post. “The lab is complete with modern equipment allowing for a variety of user research: eye-tracking studies, usability testing, in-depth interviews, testing of printed materials and more. It resembles the type of modern user research lab you might see in any major university or large corporation, and joins at least five other federal usability labs in the Washington, D.C., area.”

NCI stated the majority of work in the usability lab is done to address the needs of people affected by cancer. But the lab also reaches out to researchers, scientists, grantees, caregivers, healthcare professionals, health educators and people who want to know about cancer.

G SA’s chief financial officer Mike Casella is shifting jobs. An email Casella sent to CFO colleagues and obtained by Federal News Radio on Sept. 5 says he will move over to support GSA’s contributions to the President’s Management Agenda.

Casella said in the email that his new role includes “leading the agency’s effort to help the entire government improve its financial management by working with OMB and Treasury to support financial system migrations to financial shared service providers.”

Casella said he will stay in the role of CFO until the agency hires a new one.

“Since I arrived at the GSA in early 2013, I have been honored to work alongside all of you. Together we have helped manage the finances of this agency during a time of shrinking federal budgets and consolidation of financial and other services at GSA,” he wrote. “Your efforts have resulted in two budgets that redirect resources from overhead to direct program support and investment, a clean audit opinion, and significant progress in standing up a consolidated OCFO, helping our coworkers at GSA and throughout the federal government provide the American people with the highest quality of service possible.”

Casella came to GSA after spending time as the director of the office of budget and resource management at the U.S. Agency for International Development. He also spent time at the Millennium Challenge Corporation and 13 years with OMB.

A troubled fiscal 2014 for the administration’s strategic sourcing program may have a silver lining.

The General Services Administration continues to face protest after protest around many of the programs — office supplies namely — but just this past week got the go-ahead for the unrestricted version of the OASIS professional services contract.

The much-anticipated unrestricted version of the One Acquisition Solution for Integrated Services (OASIS) has been on hold since May when GSA awarded 74 vendors a spot on the multiple award contract. A series of protests to the Government Accountability Office and the Court of Federal Claims delayed the full roll out of the program until last week.

GSA had opened the OASIS Small Business version of the contract earlier this year. It awarded 123 firms a spot on that MAC.

GAO issued its opinion on Sept. 5 on the last remaining protest by Aljucar, Anvil-Incus & Company of the unrestricted version of OASIS. GAO dismissed AAI’s request for reconsideration of the challenge of the awards. GAO says in its decision that AAI repeated the same arguments it made previously when the company saw GAO dismiss the protest as untimely.

GAO also denied a protest by VSE Corporation on Aug. 25, while other complaints by the Logistics Management Institute, American Systems Corporation, Phacil and Smartronix were withdrawn in June or July.

At the same time OASIS received the go-ahead, GSA launched its new effort to consolidate and improve how it provides professional services contracts.

As we first reported last week, GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service wants to reduce the number of services contracts under the schedules program from seven to somewhere between one and three.

GSA is using the interact site to create a discussion with industry and other stakeholders about its plans for consolidation.

The blog post includes important details of GSA’s plans and several FAQs around what this initiative means to vendors and their current schedule contracts for professional services.

The Labor Department and the General Services Administration will spend more than $23.5 million to rescue systems and data from a key vendor going bankrupt.

Global Computer Enterprises runs Labor and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s financial management systems in the cloud. But GCE filed Sept. 4 for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Eastern District, Alexandria, Virginia.

In what many see as an unusual step, Labor will pay GCE more than $5 million for software licenses and interfaces for its financial management system in the cloud.

GSA will give GCE more than $18 million for hardware and software in order to keep Labor and EEOC’s financial management system alive until it can move to a federal shared service provider.

These are the final steps in what has been a tumultuous leap of faith by the Labor Department.

In January 2010, Labor awarded GCE a contract worth less than $10 million to put its financial system in the cloud. Labor was one of the first large agencies to outsource its financial system to a cloud provider.

While the system worked well, Labor’s acquisition experience has been filled with lessons learned.

The most recent lesson came from Labor’s IG when it issued a redacted copy of a report Aug. 15 detailing concerns that the department may be in trouble should GCE stop supporting them all of sudden. The GCE contract was scheduled to end in June 2016, according to Labor.

Labor also had to pay GCE to gain ownership of its data. In December, the agency issued a sole source justification saying it had to pay GCE to obtain its financial management data.

Now that GCE filed for bankruptcy, Labor will transfer the running of its financial system to Booz Allen Hamilton, according to court documents.

Court documents say GCE will lose its leased space in Reston, Virginia, on Sept. 30 and must transfer all hardware, software and data to the government by Sept. 18. Booz Allen will take over the financial management system beginning Sept. 20.

“In the event that GCE is unable to complete the conditions precedent on Sept. 20, 2014, the result would have a significant impact on GCE’s operations, and as a result, have significant consequences for the core financial functions at both DoL and EEOC, particularly at the end of Fiscal Year 2014,” GCE stated in court filing.

GCE argues that the court must approve the sales to Labor and GSA because if not, DoL and the EEOC “will each lose the basic automated capability to manage their finances, creating disastrous effects to those federal agencies and the public they serve for an unknown and potentially long period of time.”

This statement by GCE directly relates to what Labor’s IG found. Auditors say Labor “does not receive contractor-provided copies of recent New Core Financial Management System (NCFMS) application and data backups. Further, the primary and alternate NCFMS processing sites, as well as department financial databases, are owned and operated by the same contractor [GCE].”

The IG said as of its July 15 review, Labor had weaknesses in its continuity plans that could result in financial management system shortfalls.

“Those recovery plans include the resumption of certain high priority core financial operations by manual processes. We noted, however, that those plans contained incomplete and insufficiently detailed financial transactions and processes,” the IG reported. “Further, the department had not fully developed a comprehensive plan for the recovery or reconstitution of financial data into an approved financial system after a disruption, compromise or failure. Lastly, we noted additional considerations for the department regarding coordination with its Emergency Management Center, as well as using an existing federal shared service provider with a standardized financial management system solution.”

Michael Kerr, the assistant secretary for administration and management, responded to the draft IG report on Aug. 11, saying since the IG first issued its draft report, Labor has made “important additions and refinements from extensive consultations and actual exercises with DOL agencies.”

Kerr said Labor has taken steps to mitigate risks of improper payments and continues to refine its approach to COOP.

Kerr also said Labor is working with the Transportation Department’s Enterprise Services Center to migrate its financial management system to ESC’s shared service.

But first, Kerr said Labor must stabilize its interim financial system, which means taking more and more control away from GCE.

“Once DoL is confident that the interim financial system is stable, DoL will resume working with DoT/ESC to prudently plan DoL’s transition to DoT/ESC’s shared service offering, which likely will occur over an 18 month to two-year time frame,” Kerr wrote. “Transitioning from one financial system to another, even to a federal shared service provider, takes significant time to properly plan and implement, and the department wants that transition to be as seamless and smooth as possible. Indeed, it is for this very reason that we asked DoT/ESC to assume operations and maintenance of NCFMS as an interim measure, so they would be knowledgeable and familiar with DoL financial management requirements as we plan for and transition to the DOT/ESC shared services. Indeed, one of the goals of the contingency efforts is for the same transition from the current financial system to the shared service provider to occur, and that this interim measure will improve that transition.”

As for the future of GCE, it’s unknown.

GCE recently changed its name or created a subsidiary called Data Analytics or Serendipity Now — it’s not exactly clear what these two companies are in relation to GCE. GSA, however, recently extended GCE/Serendipity Now/Data Analytics contract to run the Federal Procurement Data System — Next Generation and the USASpending system. In the notice on FedBizOpps.gov, GSA wrote “Serendipity Now (formally Global Computer Enterprises) developed, built and implemented FPDS-NG in 2003.”

An email to GCE founder and CEO Ray Muslimani wasn’t immediately returned and no one answered the phone at GCE/Data Analytics/Serendipity Now.

GCE’s downfall came as a result of too much reliance on federal customers and the costs to deal with an FBI investigation starting in 2013 over allegations that the company used foreign nationals and had other violations on contracts that were prohibited. GCE says in court documents that it opposes any civil or criminal penalties, but is cooperating with the FBI. Court documents say GCE and the FBI have not been able to negotiate a settlement.

GCE spent more than $4.6 million on legal fees thereby running out of cash to run its business.

Court documents show GCE tried to sell its business, but didn’t have any takers. And despite employee layoffs over the last year, GCE couldn’t survive.

IT Job of the Week: It would be easy to highlight the HHS CISO position now that Charest has left. But instead, I’ll offer up two positions at the Veterans Affairs Department. VA is looking for an assistant deputy CIO for application support, and a deputy CIO for product development.

This may be the first of several job openings at VA as several high level IT executives are on the move or could be on the move.

Applications to be the assistant deputy CIO for application support are due by Sept. 4.

Applications for the deputy CIO for product development are due Sept. 11.