Page 42 - FCW, April 2017

FCW Perspectives
playbooks, I think that’s been more at the integrator level, but I think that’s a good idea,” he added.
Yet those playbooks can be taken too far, several participants said. “Our vendor has already done CDM work at other agencies,” said one official whose agency was nearly done with Phase 1 implementation. “They have an assumption that whatever happened in agency one is going to happen in agency two.”
When they learn it can take three months or more “to get a user autho- rized to work on this environment,” he said, the vendor’s playbook doesn’t have an answer.
Agencies must adapt as well, a few participants noted. “Obviously, if you’re implementing a new technology and it’s something that you’re getting through a shared-services type of arrangement, there can be process realignments that need to occur in the way things are
done,” one executive said. And when those chang- es are made, every agency should embrace “this idea of capturing the lessons learned and feeding it back into the playbook for oth- ers,” another participant
said.
Want good CDM? Practice good IT.
Several participants said the biggest challenges they see with CDM are the same ones that crop up with any enterprise IT project.
“What this whole dis- cussion points out to me is that we’ve got a lot of work to do in moderniz- ing the way we do IT,” one executive said. “You don’t make a change to a sys- tem without going through
business process re-engineering. In my experience, pulling federated systems [and] federated organizations together is really about getting in the ditch and developing those relationships so that you can make this work. It’s not specif- ic to CDM. It’s good management, good IT, good relationship building. That’s what gets you where you need to be.”
An executive from a large federated agency, meanwhile, stressed the impor- tance of assembling the proper team. “We are very large, and we came to the party late,” the official said. “Every component that we have is a snow- flake, and it’s important for us to man- age that culture so that we understand exactly what they do.”
The agency created an executive steering committee for CDM that includes not just component repre- sentatives, but “also headquarters, our [chief information security officer], our program managers, our ops,” the exec-
utive added. “Everybody who needs to have a need to know is on there so that when we say something ridiculous, they are here to push back.”
Another participant described a sim- ilar approach and said it is already pay- ing dividends. “One of the things that we are starting to develop is a release management group that includes the different IT departments — not just security operations, but network opera- tions, desktop engineering, enterprise infrastructure, all of these groups,” he added. “They just developed a release management charter. It’s a matter of somebody actually taking responsibil- ity for it.”
Other participants agreed. “One of the things that has happened because ofCDM—andIthinkthisisaplus — this is an enterprise system across the federal government,” one said. “I think this system has now pulled them together to really acknowledge what needs to be done. We now have a tech- nology roadmap that says, ‘Before you put anything in our environment, this is our plan for putting things in.’”
The contractor conundrum
One of the main problems participants reported is a common one in federal IT: not getting the right contractors.
“When you have a time-and-materi- als type of contract, you get not-really- qualified IT professionals who come to us from the integrator,” one agency official said. “They don’t really have full comprehension of what it takes to configure a system.”
“We’re actually going through that right now,” another participant said. “I just had to have that type of phone call with a vendor because they provided us some engineers who were not famil- iar with the federal product.”
All the hours were used up on researching the problem, and only when the agency made a fuss did the vendor send someone with the neces-
26 April 2017 FCW.COM