The Chief Technology Officer of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services is retiring. This is not going to satisfy those who are suddenly acquainted with the word accountability since it gives them an opportunity to attack their political foes. Only the firing of Kathleen Sibelius will do that because only “getting” someone perceived to be close to President Obama can satisfy them.

If, on the other hand, someone really cares about the many failed government IT projects that pretty much every government department has had then it’s about time for a thorough examination of the purchasing, contracting and management systems across every department of government. Do it soon, make it comprehensive and make it very public. Bring in people with expertise in large systems in the public sector as well as the private sector since large IT projects have a history of major problems whoever is running them. Remember, the actual project was contracted out to private sector businesses. Too many of them, in my opinion. Who was coordinating? What were their procedures? In the “hearings” held so far I haven’t heard that any witnesses have been called to answer these kinds of important questions. Is anyone even being asked to investigate these issues? I tend to doubt it.

I think that a special division of the GSA should be created solely to work on developing and maintaining IT processes. This organization would provide IT services to other departments and be the ones to develop a plan to oversee contractors for services they can’t provide directly and contractors should be rewarded for good work and penalized for shoddy work and missed deadlines. Having people who are not employees of the contractor and also not in the division for whom the project is being developed to oversee it would provide a more disinterested party to guard against some of the things that can go wrong since they aren’t answering to people who might have a vested interest in ignoring problems.

Something certainly needs to be done and given the nature of the problem that almost no one knew about before now it needs to be more than a small quick fix that wouldn’t be a fix.