For decades, many felt that the term “government innovation” was an oxymoron, but for the current crop of federal agency CIOs and how they’re leveraging IT this is simply not true. Spurred by incidents, such as the OPM breach and rapid advances in technology, the pace of change in federal government IT has accelerated. Some examples of creative change include an agency that has created online innovation sandboxes to draw great ideas out of its business units to give those who have an idea a place to “play” where their ideas are nurtured and possibly implemented.
This example and several others were shared at the recent FedScoop Public Sector Innovation Summit, at which federal executives, along with Tony Scott, U.S. CIO for the Executive Office of the President, gathered to discuss innovation in public sector IT. They shared examples of current innovative IT efforts, discussed the priority they all must place on cybersecurity, as well as what stands in the way of innovation and a new initiative the fed government has proposed to spur it.
During the keynote, Scott highlighted a proposed bill that would provide $3.1 billion in funding to agencies for IT modernization. In the past, IT funding was attached to programs and not necessarily funded on its own. As a result, according to Scott, IT then became a part of the ecosystem, which made it hard to update or refresh technologies. FITARA, he said, gives us opportunities to have more visibility into what we have in terms of the established base of applications and infrastructure holistically across the federal government and agencies. This IT modernization fund comes into play to help fix the underlying issues unveiled by FITARA.
“We want agencies to leverage cloud, security, virtualization all the modern tech that is available today while we encourage projects that fundamentally replace – on a prioritized basis – the oldest, most insecure and most mission critical apps and infrastructure,” Scott said.
Joel Dolisy, CIO for SolarWinds, noted that this new approach to funding could be a successful way to help the federal government keep up with the rapid pace of change. “Agencies tend not to have a blueprint of their networks or technology assets. That, coupled with device proliferation, the expectation for anywhere, anytime data and the Internet of Things, has created an environment in which the ability to assess, inventory assets, and be agile are as important as the drive to IT innovation.
“A panelist at the Innovation Summit noted that IT used to define itself by knowing where the ‘edge’ was, but we don’t really have an edge anymore. Devices connecting to networks can range from cell phones to high-performance computers, and the panelists and Scott said it is a big challenge to determine what IT assets are in place, because much of it was created on an ‘as needed’ basis and then forgotten,” Dolisy shared.
Gartner refers to this environment at Bimodal IT, in which CIOs in both private and public sectors are looking to innovative their networks and leverage technology, such as cloud and virtualization, while they have a set of old, legacy technology that runs their organizations. Scott said CIOs need to find a way to manage the old stack and new stack at the same time.
The underlying message of the FedScoop Public Sector Innovation Summit, according to Dolisy, was that agencies and the federal government want to bring about the best of modern technology and platforms and do it in the fastest way possible. To provide the foundation for the innovation necessary to accomplish that, they must get away from a “wait until it breaks or wait until a crisis” mentality and move to a continuous upgrade and refresh mindset.
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