Employees of an obscure Department of State office responsible for planning information technology investments at the heart of U.S. diplomacy spend “comparatively little” time on that task, according to a government watchdog’s report.
Instead of planning and managing State’s $1.4 billion information technology investments, the Strategic Planning Office focuses mostly on its own $550 million annual budget and on short-term IT operational problems.
“Widespread organizational turmoil, lack of clarity in mission, dubious product outcomes, commonly diverted resources, and a generally misnamed office,” are the result, according to the Department of State Inspector General in a report made public Friday.
The SPO is located within the State Department’s Bureau of Information Resource Management.
The SPO’s top responsibility is preparing the State Department’s long-term strategic plan for IT investments, a job that is analogous to planning how a human brain sorts and classifies the trillions of information bytes it receives on a continuous basis.
“Yet the office is two levels removed from the [Chief Information Officer] in a bureau that controls only 40 percent of that spending and cannot compel cooperation from stakeholders across the department when necessary,” the IG report said.
“Moreover, approval for many of SPO’s functions rests at higher levels … In meetings with senior [SPO managers] strategic planning as a functional responsibility of the office was rarely the first priority,” the IG report said.
The report noted that the State Department’s current IT investment strategic plan was only made official six months after it was completed and printed.
And in a rare occurrence in the federal government, another result of the SPO’s isolation and lack of authority is that hundreds of millions of dollars that are supposed to be spent on needed IT initiatives goes unspent, according to the IG.
The IG report said “approximately $400 million in unliquidated obligations are still needed for valid purposes. Of this amount, $50 million is related to fiscal years prior to 2011.”
Go here for the report.
Mark Tapscott is executive editor of the Washington Examiner.
