The senior White House IT official, Karen Evans, said she believes software as a service (SaaS) can improve government IT projects and systems.

Evans made her remarks during a talk at the Saas/GOV 2008 conference. From InfoWorld:

“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.”

Read more at IT Project Failures.