A top official with the U.S. White House's Office
of Management and Budget (OMB) gave her strongest endorsement yet to software
as a service, saying Wednesday it can help federal agencies cut development
costs.

A speech on Wednesday at the SaaS/Gov
conference in Washington, D.C., wasn't the first time Karen Evans, administrator
of the OMB's Office of Electronic Government and Information Technology, endorsed
software as a service. Despite Evans' continuing advocacy of the concept, adoption
has been slow among government agencies, according to one vendor.

Asked whether the OMB should more strongly promote software as a service, Evans
said U.S. agencies need to weigh cost, security and other factors. But the U.S.
government needs to move to a more service-oriented software model, she said.

"Our track record is clear -- we are not very good at delivering our own
software in the time frame set," Evans said at the conference.
"We're also not very good at managing large projects."

Some agencies haven't embraced the service approach, often because they want
hands-on control of software development, Evans said. But government agencies
can't afford to keep developing their own software without sharing with other
agencies, she said.

"We can't continue to maintain all of the things we have," she added.
"We have to start shutting down some of our legacy systems. We really have
to move to a ... service-oriented market."

Although there's been no prohibition against U.S. agencies using software-as-a-service
models, many agencies have been reluctant to move to a service-based approach,
partly because of concerns about the security of Web-based services, said Dan
Burton, senior vice president of global public policy for Salesforce.com.

Evans' speech on Wednesday could create a "tipping point" for the
use of software-as-a-service models in the U.S. government, Burton said. Many
agencies seem to believe that they don't have the authority to take a chance
on the new model, he said.

One step that service-based software vendors can take is to seek security certifications
and map out how their services meet Federal Information Security Management
Act (FISMA) requirements, Evans said. Some agencies are reluctant to move to
software as a service without certifications, she said.

However, some agencies are already using software as a service to cut down
development times. Rezaur Rahman, enterprise architect and Web services manager
for the U.S. Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, said his agency began
using Salesforce.com offerings in its information management systems in recent
months. Budget constraints helped push the agency toward software as a service,
he said.

The agency is using services to take care of many functions it would have had
to write its own code for in the past, including reading and writing to databases,
Rahman said. The agency can often make tweaks to its information management
systems in a day or less, he added.

IDG News Service

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