The Karen Evans era
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OMB's administrator for e-government and IT retired Jan. 16, bringing to a close an important era in government information technology.
Karen Evans has become such a fixture—as well as a driving force—in the federal government IT community that it was hard to reconcile the scene in an upstairs dining room at Clyde’s restaurant in Washington last Friday as 100 or so colleagues bid her farewell with a series of tributes and gifts (all, of course, under $25.)
Jan. 16 was Evans’ last day as the Office of Management and Budget’s administrator for e-government and information technology—bringing a long career in public service to a close and, in many regards, an important era in government information technology.
As the federal government’s de facto chief information officer, Evans earned both the scorn and respect of many federal IT chiefs for the work and performance demands that she and OMB placed on agency IT staffs.
But few who cared about improving the workings of government could deny the need for and importance of developing an enterprisewide architecture for government IT, or standardizing the systems for physical and virtual identity management, or reducing the government’s exposure to Internet security threats, or bringing about the disciplines to justify or abandon duplicative IT systems.
And while much remains to be done, it is also hard to deny the progress the federal government has made on all of these IT fronts, as well as a wide range of other electronic government initiatives, under Evan’s watch since taking over the OMB post in 2003.
Indeed, while the likes of Health and Human Services Department CIO Michael Carleton, Defense Department Deputy CIO Dave Wennergren and former Transportation Department CIO Dan Matthews took their customary tribute shots today at how tough Evans could be, they and others were also full of praise for Evan’s passion for results, her technical know-how and her concern for helping so many in the federal community.
Anyone who has visited Evans at her now-vacant office in the Old Executive Office building knows of her enduring connection to the federal workers and firefighters in New York City whom she helped in a federal IT capacity in the aftermath of Sept. 11. Her commitment as a public servant–which probably began as the daughter of public servant–continues to draw admiration in and outside of government.
Her experience in leading IT initiatives with the Justice and Energy Departments, among other assignments, gave her a rich command for technical matters that also made her a force to be reckoned with when it came to managing the federal government’s IT investments.
There is a perverse irony over just how much Evans’ miniscule staff managed to accomplish during her tenure, as one OMB insider observed.
That Evans’ got so much done with so few resources may draw the Obama Administration to the wrong conclusion the office charged with administering the federal government’s $70 billion-a-year IT budget is sufficiently supported.
But given the importance of IT to the government’s work, and the need to develop more efficient and more secure enterprise-wide IT systems, the better conclusion would be this: To recognize just how strong a foundation Evans and her team succeeded in building and give her successors the necessary resources to build the kind cross-governmental IT systems the federal government truly needs.
For our part, we’ll miss Karen’s animated IT musings and her knowledge of all that was taking place across the federal government. And we wish her well as she begins to contemplate what life will be like not having to commute from West Virginia each weekday morning.
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