“Our leaders understood the Clinger-Cohen Act and saw the success in the corporate world,” said Dave Wennergren, former Navy CIO and current deputy CIO and deputy assistant secretary for information management and IT at the Defense Department.

“It was the intent of the secretary of the Navy when he hired Dan Porter as CIO [in September 1998] for him to be a transformation agent. Some CIOs go through an evolutionary process, but in the Navy, the creation of the CIO went hand-in-hand with the ideal role of the CIO as an information leader and not a technologist.”
Few doubt the Navy was ahead of its time.

The Navy’s vision for the CIO is one many agencies have yet to realize, according to current and former CIOs. But the evolution of the CIOs’ role to meet the requirements Clinger-Cohen laid out 10 years ago is happening.

“The way we got out of the gate with the Clinger-Cohen Act wasn’t very effective,” said Paul Brubaker, who helped draft the law when he worked for former Sen. William Cohen (R-Maine) and is now CEO of Procentrix Inc. of Reston, Va. “We didn’t see a level of hard pushing in the right direction until Mark [Forman] and Karen [Evans] got [to the Office of Management and Budget].”

Forman, the first administrator for e-government and IT and a former Hill staff member who worked on the law as well, pushed CIOs to think more about the effect they can have on the business of their agencies instead of implementing technology for the sake of technology. Evans, the current OMB administrator for e-government and IT, has expanded the CIOs’ focus and brought them into areas such as human resources and financial management.