i dunno... it seems to me that the best IT folks have hawaiian shirts, cut-offs, and sandals as the uniform of the day....

Comparing the DoD against all the other Agencies is like comparing apples to oranges. Bear in mind, there are 4 services and each of the COCOMs which all have their own distinct CIO's. Each service by itself is still vastly bigger than pretty much all the other agencies.

I would also say that typically the way these evaluations are done is very subjective and significantly difficult to paint an accurate picture. I'm not saying the DoD does not have it's own problems, but I know for a fact that the way that some organizations (including the DoD) pencil whip the answers for these evaluations, definitely clouds the true picture.

Recently I read an article about NASA's recent network security IG investigation. Never have I seen so many ongoing security issues for a single organization. It's a cyber wild west.

There are a lot of factors which makes the government's job incredibly challenging for IT governance. Obtaining the resources and manpower in the right places is just one of many. Authority to the CIOs is definitely another. A great case in point for that would be the example set by Sec of State, Hillary Clinton, who ignored the warnings of her CIO staff. Why are they just warnings? Why can't they be more authoritative, backed up by the the laws which already exist? The CIO is a position which requires the individual to understand they can be held accountable for the actions taken on the network in their span of control. If this was a delegated authority (i.e. from the head of the department to a CIO), then both the CIO and the head of the org should be held accountable. But in the case of Clinton, no one was really made responsible and punished accordingly. Knowing this, why should the CIOs graded poorly in the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act scorecard care?

H-h-h-m-m-m, I remember hearing at USAREC from former Gulf War combatant commanders that DoD had to hold numerous formations across the Middle East just to count how many people they deployed because the computer systems of the early 1990's were not advanced enough to keep track. Hopefully they fixed that issue but there were a lot of IT issues well into the late 1990's. I do think the Pentagon is hiding the problems as the article implies because that sounds like the Pentagon. Hide the problem from public view until the media blows it wide open for everyone to see......then drag your feet forever at addressing or fixing the issue. I remember the Army Contract guy in charge of our part of the USAREC IT support contract, saying he was going to write the new contract so that only we could fill it which would guarantee the renewal under the company I worked for. Not what was intended by Congress via competitive bid process. Very sad.