Privacy still a low priority, CIO study finds

Federal agencies basically don't care much about privacy, the only exceptions being agencies where negative publicity has forced the issue, according to the International Technology Association of America's 16th annual Federal CIO survey (PDF). A report on GovExec.com reports:

"We found that privacy is a much less mature area in government, and there is less progress to report," Wohlleben said. "Fewer agencies have addressed [privacy programs] as a priority ... the security programs [are] a bit more mature [and have been] addressed over a long period of time."

In some agencies, the CIO was charged with privacy leadership and in a smaller number of agencies, the general counsel's office was assigned the responsibility, the survey found.

Meanwhile, several CIOs included in the survey stated that they wanted to focus IT security efforts on areas that would "clearly increase security" while "minimizing requirements that lacked clear benefits."

In other IT areas:

None of the CIOs interviewed reported fully completing and implementing an enterprise architecture -- a technique for describing the structure of an organization's processes, IT systems and personnel organization -- a majority said they have completed the "as-is" component, giving agencies a baseline for determining gaps in IT systems' performance.

CIOs reported increased involvement in governmentwide IT consolidation projects, stating that the initiatives had the potential to save money. But they were concerned about losing control of the systems and an inability to deliver on the projects' projected benefits.

According to the survey, agency IT leadership remains "very much fixated" on the President's Management Agenda and the red-yellow-green score card reports, but some CIOs are questioning the grading system's ability to benefit agencies.

Other priorities cited by the CIOs interviewed for the survey included portfolio management, strategies for managing data and information sharing.