The Association for Federal Information Resources Management (AFFIRM) has recently released the report from their annual survey of the senior federal Information Technology (IT) managers to determine the most critical challenges facing federal Chief Information Officers (CIO).

The survey found the top challenges, which have not changed since last year, include:

  1. Obtaining adequate funding for IT programs and projects
  2. Hiring and retaining skilled professionals (good news for folks like me, who'll soon be looking for a job)
  3. Formulating or implementing an enterprise architecture
  4. Implementing IT capital planning and investment management across the agency
  5. Unifying "islands of automation" within lines of business (across agencies)
  6. Making the business and cultural changes necessary for full e-government transformation
  7. Aligning IT and organizational mission goals

The most vital tecnologies / uses were:

  1. Internet/ Intranet/ Web applications
  2. Security Infrastructure
  3. Data warehousing/data mining
  4. Security Applications
  5. Knowledge management
  6. XML and/or web services
  7. Records management/electronic document management systems

Most interesting to me was that less than federal IT mangers felt only 21% of intitiatives would successfully initiated in 2004. (Another 76% responded intiatiives would be "somewhat" successful). This doesn't seem to bode well for the President that their isn't a great deal of confidence in his eGov Agenda. Still, these confidence numbers have increased significantly each year, so there is a liklihood those with negative projections will be change their opinions once the plans are in place and working.