What Keeps Federal CIOs Up at Night?

The Association for Federal Information Resources Management (AFFIRM), just released its eighth annual CIO Challenges Survey of the senior federal information technology (IT) community, to determine the most critical challenges facing the federal CIO.

The AFFIRM survey explores how the top challenges have changed from 12 months ago and also seeks to illustrate any changes in the priority among the top 10 critical technologies. In addition, for the second year, the respondents were also asked to respond to the following five special questions:
1. How is the president's management agenda impacting your mission?
2. Based on your experiences at your agency, do you foresee successful implementation of the president's 24 e-government initiatives?
3. Based upon your IT workforce, where are the skills/knowledge gaps (more skills needed)?
4. What effects have homeland security-related initiatives had on your IT budget?
5. In terms of vulnerability, since Sept. 11, 2001, has the IT infrastructure that supports your department/agency's mission become more or less vulnerable?

Survey Results
The top 10 2003 challenges were:

• 1 Obtaining adequate funding for IT programs and projects
• 2 Hiring and retaining skilled professionals
• 3 Formulating or implementing an enterprise architecture
• 4 Implementing IT capital planning and investment management across the agency
• 5 Unifying "islands of automation" within lines of business (across agencies)
• 6 Making the business and cultural changes necessary for full e-government transformation
• 7 Aligning IT and organizational mission goals
• 8 Consolidating common IT functions
• 9 Simplifying business processes to maximize the benefit of technology
• 10 Balancing public access to information with the need for information security.

The top 10 2003 technologies and solutions were:

• 1 Internet/ intranet/Web applications
• 2 Security infrastructure
• 3 Data warehousing/data mining
• 4 Security applications
• 5 Knowledge management
• 6 XML and/or Web services
• 7 Records management/electronic document management systems
• 8 Internet/intranet/Web infrastructure
• 9 E-mail
• 10 Wireless technology.

AFFIRM is a Washington, D.C.-based council of the Federation of Government Information Processing Councils, and is a non-profit, volunteer, educational organization whose goal is to advance the state-of-the-art in federal information resources management (IRM). Founded in 1979, AFFIRM is large and diverse, composed of federal agency information resources management professionals, federal oversight agencies, congressional staff, and industry representatives.