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Army’s Contracting CIO ‘Excited’ about OMB IT Reform

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ACC CIO Gino Magnifico

The Office of Management and Budget’s IT management reform was the talk of the town last month – at least among federal tech circles. But, as the chatter and the buzz dies down, the next step is acting on some of the plan’s provisions, including the plan’s cloud-first strategy.

In an interview with Federal News Radio, Chief Information Officer of the Army Contracting Command Gino Magnifico, who acknowledged he was “excited” about OMB’s plan, said ACC has already been working to implement some of the plan’s measures, especially the cloud strategy.

The cloud-first provision directs agencies to identify services to move to the cloud and to consider cloud services in the procurement process.

The raison d’être for the cloud policy — and one of its benefits — is reducing the number of unwieldy  federal data centers.

ACC, which has 117 servers worldwide, began consolidating them more than a year ago, according the Federal News Radio report. And, Magnifico told the station, 85 percent of the project has been completed.

ACC has also adopted a program track for IT managers to help create more successful projects.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks is overreaching, or trying to do too much too quickly on a project, Magnifico said.

Many IT managers “want to take something large and complex, and they want to do it all. A lot of times, it’s a little bit more than you can really bite off,” he said. “You have to start on a smaller scale.”

Meanwhile, cloud computing continues to make inroads in the armed forces.

The Army announced it was migrating 1.6 million Army email accounts to a unified cloud-computing platform managed by the Defense Information Systems Agency.

DISA Chief Technology Officer Dave Mihelcic said last week the agency is “uniquely positioned” to become the Defense Department’s main cloud provider.

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