The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has drawn the ire of the Government Accountability Office on numerous occasions for its recent slow systems modernization. But HUD chief information officer Jerry Williams told Federal Computing Week the agency is making strides.

Williams has been CIO of the department for a year and a half. He said the agency is moving in a positive direction, meaning the process for completing modernization and other IT projects is improving.

HUD's relatively new IT team is making changes to IT governance and architecture, perhaps to a service-oriented architecture, to remedy some of the GAO's scorns.

"It is really about process and about governance, making sure that you have skilled individuals who are actually leading these projects both on the part of the [Office of the CIO] and as part of the agencies and programs within HUD," Williams told FCW.

In a 2009 report, the GAO concluded that HUD desperately needed to strengthen its ability to manage and modernize its IT environment. Then in November of last year, GAO further scolded HUD for failing to define commitments and identify risks involved in modernization properly.