Information technology should enable government to better serve the American people. But despite spending more than $600 billion on information technology over the past decade, the Federal
Government has achieved little of the productivity improvements that private industry has realized from IT. Too often, Federal IT projects run over budget, behind schedule, or fail to deliver promised functionality. Many projects use “grand design” approaches that aim to deliver functionality every few years, rather than breaking projects into more manageable chunks and demanding new functionality every few quarters. In addition, the Federal Government too often relies on large, custom, proprietary
systems when “light technologies” or shared services exist.