Public CIO - December 2008/January 2009 - (Page 28)

The Information Resources Management College is an educational destination for middle and senior-level managers. Shown here are students at the Fort Lesley J. McNair campus in Washington, D.C., however, the global learning community caters to distant learning with various online programs. mirror IRMC’s certificates). Such an undertaking will require approval from Congress and the Department of Education, and will likely take one to three years to materialize, but it marks a seminal change in the college’s core identity. The college is currently seeking master’s degree approval. “We’ve long had partner relationships with other graduate schools, and we will continue those,” Childs said. “But now we’ll also have the autonomous ability to grant a degree, and one that is very different from what our partners offer. It’s a pretty big deal for any federal educational institution.” government CIOs need to know what kids in the developing world are using.” By breeding awareness of evolving technologies and their uses, Childs enables students to go forth with a more informed perspective on what types of information resources are finding their way into the mainstream. In addition to showcasing new hardware and software, the information assurance, crisis management and virtual reality labs serve as a proving ground for emerging information security concepts. “Cyber-space is the newest enveloping concept,” he said, pointing to an interactive model city roughly the space of a ping-pong table. “This mock-up demonstrates how cyber-space penetrates every aspect of our life and how our adversaries can use that dependency to their advantage.” Expanding the Mission These labs and their capacity to enhance the student experience are living proof of the school’s ethic of ingenuity. By maintaining a chameleon-like relevance to the present day, the IRMC works to lead, rather than lag the vocational competencies of federal information leaders. This license to invent led to two significant initiatives coinciding with the school’s 20th anniversary. First, the IRMC announced a new Chief Financial Officer certificate, an offering that would appear to be at odds with the traditional CIO role, but is, in fact, entirely supportive of the CIO’s capital planning responsibilities. The other noteworthy development is the potential availability of a full-fledged master’s degree in Government Strategic Leadership (with concentrations that “We strive to go beyond vocational stovepipes and develop courses that make the CIO someone who can reach across all management tiers and really transform the enterprise, not just manage its IT.“ Mary McCully, chair of the Information Strategies Department, Information Management Resources College Despite two decades of reinventing itself and progressively expanding its educational variety, the IRMC — nearly by virtue of its name alone — will always be subject to the catalyzing effects of broad external factors impacting the office of the CIO. Budgets, personnel, disruptive technologies and emerging legislative currents may introduce subtle or even significant new dimensions to the information resources environment. First, where the fiscal landscape is concerned, money will be the surest indicator of how well or how much the CIO continues to play in the new electronic government and in cyber-space security. Undoubtedly the IRMC has benefitted from the conditions created by a meteoric rise in federal IT spending. At the time of its creation, the college was witness to a federal IT budget of some $17 billion, where now the same line item totals $70 billion. Because IT costs are so conspicuous — and because management of these funds is [28]

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Public CIO - December 2008/January 2009

Public CIO - December 2008/January 2009 Contents Contributors Introduction Tense Times Insider Threat Twenty and Counting Labor of Love Putting Process Into Play Crossover Appeal FastGov CIO Central Security Adviser CIOs Pluck BlackBerry Phones From the Field Straight Talk

Public CIO - December 2008/January 2009

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