What is FITARA and what does it mean for NIH?

​The Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) is a law that helps to create greater transparency for agency IT spending and provides agency Chief Information Officers (CIO) with the authority they need to improve efficiencies and address challenges.​  What does that mean for NIH? It means that the NIH CIO has been delegated authority by HHS to approve IT acquisitions up to $20M in annual value or $100M in value over five years. In order to maintain this delegation, the CIO must ​​review and approve all planned IT purchasing.  For the purpose of this site, the focus will be exclusively on how NIH has implemented FITARA.