Zients to drive Healthcare.gov turnaround
To lead a sort of tech worker surge and software code purge for Healthcare.gov, the Obama Administration has brought in a turnaround guy, Jeffrey Zients.
Republican Sen. John McCain said the White House should send Air Force One to Silicon Valley, "load it up with smart people, bring them back to Washington and fix this problem." Instead, Obama turned to Zients, a native of Kensington, MD (just outside the beltway), who worked at the intersection of technology and business for the past two decades and started working in the public sector when Obama became president and was looking to reform a federal government with a reputation for inefficiency.
In September, as some staff from 55 contractors and at least three federal agencies were frantically trying to get Healthcare.gov up and running, Obama named Zients to lead the National Economic Council. Between now and January, when he starts work at the council, Zients will be coordinating the massive fix-it project for Healthcare.gov.
In some ways, Zients will be picking up where he left off after a short hiatus from government. Early on in his work at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Zients came to this conclusion: "Fixing IT is central to everything we're trying to do across government."
A multimillionaire and philanthropist who co-founded a nonprofit mentoring disadvantaged youth and helping them land paid internships, Zients has spent much of his career in corporate management and investing, including at Bain & Company, at the parent organization of the Advisory Board Company and at Portfolio Logic, an investment firm he founded with ventures in a number of healthcare businesses, including a pediatric home health company and an emergency medicine outsourcing company.
After helping bring a baseball team back to Washington, DC, in 2005, Zients joined the government with the Obama Administration in 2009, named the first U.S. Chief Performance Officer, then twice directing the OMB from July to November 2010 and from January 2012 to April of this year.
At the OMB, Obama tasked Zients with crafting a strategy to "streamline processes, cut costs, and find best practices throughout the government," and after hosting roundtables with business leaders and surveying the vast federal enterprise, one area stood out as ripe for progress -- federal IT.
In 2010, Zients helped develop the OMB's "cloud first" strategy for federal agencies and pushed for changes in a number of areas of federal IT management, urging shorter procurement and implementation timelines and trying to empower federal IT managers to collaborate with private firms with more open solutions.
"Government agencies too often rely on proprietary, custom IT solutions," Zients said at a 2010 speech at the Northern Virginia Technology Council. "We need to fundamentally shift this mindset from building custom systems to adopting lighter technologies and shared solutions."
Two years ago this month, Zients outlined four areas of focus for improving IT across the federal government, from the NIH to the DOD:
•"Reforming and cutting costly IT systems" through strategies like cloud-first;
•"Bringing transparency to IT spending" through initiatives like the IT dashboard;
•"Increasing oversight of financial system modernization projects" through a government-wide review of all projects at the time;
•"Moving to consolidate data centers and deploy cloud computing technology to reduce IT, real estate, and energy costs," with a zero-growth policy on new federal data centers.
"Too often, IT projects run over budget, behind schedule, or fail to deliver their promise of functionality," Zients said at the Northern Virginia Technology Council conference. "Fixing IT is central to everything we're trying to do across government. IT is our top priority."
Whatever Zients' progress in bringing the ideas of modern IT to federal agencies so far, implementing one of the largest health reform programs has been, at least on its initial launch, too complex, politicized and reliant on traditional IT management practices to meet the expectations that Obama laid out for 21st century government when he took office.
Now, with the federal government shutdown over and the media increasingly focusing on the limited functionality of Healthcare.gov, Zients will be leading a "tech surge," working with HHS leaders, contractors and the Presidential Innovation Fellows. Whether that means salvaging the existing software, creating a new site from scratch or a blend of the two remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, rumors are swirling that the Obama Administration may delay the individual mandate, or at the least extend open enrollment, as various congressional committees are directing scrutiny at HHS and Healthcare.gov contractors.
