My army admiration has extended to the GAO because every piece of advice I have every written (ok so that’s not really a lot since I’ve only been writing for a few months) is here in this amazing pot of gold>>>>> gao-bpr-guide.pdf 
Honestly, stop and don’t proceed further until you’ve read this guide. If you are like me you’ll be nodding your head and talking to yourself saying ‘yeah’ and ‘right’ and ‘exactly’ and wondering out loud how the government can have such amazingly pure, simple, wise guidance at its fingertips and the rest of us didn’t know about it. And I work on a government contract and I can bet that most people working on government contracts are not aware of the gold mine that exists, publicly, from the GAO. But wait…there’s more!
Where have you been all my life????
I particularly like the Defense Acquisition University site which provides a clear path through visuals from the Clinger –Cohen act through Information Assurance, Business Process Reengineering, Portfolio governance and Management etc. on their IT Center of Practice site.
How to Use this Information
Understand what you are looking at:
The government doesn’t really invent things. The government follows policy. So this represents the set of rules and regulations that the government has to follow concerning how it implements and manages IT. You are looking how the rules for how its done, the map, the set of instructions for IT.
Understand what this means to you:
This means that if you are working on a bid for the government or working on a government contract, you already have a clear set path to follow on your projects that you can reference with your clients to indicate why they should listen to you, and why they should implement what you are talking about. This is the magic mantra that you reference as the reason for why they should follow you. Your client doesn’t have to support compliance to private IT Maturity models like CMMI but they do have to follow the Clinger-Cohen Act and its directives around IT portfolio management.
So here’s a tip…learn this stuff. And reference this stuff on, in and during your contract engagement.
