CIO Council stands up office to support governmentwide collaboration pilot
The Federal CIO Council has established a program management office to support policy, cybersecurity and other compliance challenges as it continues to build out a cross-agency collaboration tool capability.
Deputy Federal CIO Maria Roat detailed the new program management office at the ACT-IAC 2021 Imagine Nation conference in Hershey, Penn., saying the CIO Council completed the initial collaboration pilot in July but realized there was a need for an entity “to help manage not just the technical, but also the policy and some of the cybersecurity and the processes around federating across the federal government so we could collaborate share calendars, documents, and those kinds of things.”
During the pilot, the Department of Education, NASA, National Science Foundation and Small Business Administration were able to expand their Microsoft Teams uses to allow employees chat to chat across agency borders.
Roat said the PMO is “just now standing up” and that the council had a call last week with the agencies involved to consider how they can expand the work of the pilot, starting with extending chat and calendar-sharing functions across the government.
Federal CIO Clare Martorana has set a goal of accomplishing this by sometime in December, Roat said.
“We put we put the line out there for the CIOs to say, ‘Let’s get this done,'” Roat said.
Next up, in addition to chat and calendar-sharing, will likely be document sharing, she added. “What’s the difference between sharing documents and emailing stuff around like we do all the time?” Roat said, adding that it involves the same compliance requirements.
“This is where the PMO is going to help us out,” she said.
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