Page 48 - FCW, Nov/Dec 2017

FCWPerspectives
Are the stars aligning
for IT transformation?
The migration from Networx to EIS offers a forcing mechanism for rethinking IT infrastructure — if agencies resist the temptation of “like-for-like” updates
Cloud- rst mandates, cyber vulnerabilities in legacy systems and the budgetary drain of keeping old systems running have combined to make IT modernization a central emphasis throughout 2017. And now with agencies beginning their mandatory moves from Networx to the Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions contracts for a vast range of infrastructure and services, government has a rare chance to rethink IT.
According to the CIOs and other IT leaders FCW convened on Oct. 25, however, there’s
no guarantee agencies will seize that opportunity. As
the following recap of their discussion makes clear, legacy mindsets, cost concerns
and the EIS timeline itself could all work against true transformation.
The discussion was on the record but not for individual attribution (see Page 29 for a list of participants), and the quotes included below have been edited for length and clarity.
The EIS opportunity
“We’re seeing a coalescence of events take place,” one CIO said. “You see modernization plans coming out of the White House. You have executive orders on ef ciency and effectiveness. We’re trying to formulate our thoughts around how to provide better gov- ernment — a better, more effective approach.”
The EIS transition, that CIO and others said, provides a rare opportu- nity to rethink agencies’ approach to IT infrastructure, but the emphasis to date has been on speed and cost sav- ings. “It’s how to be ef cient fast,” the CIO said. “As we start formulating how EIS plays into transformation for our agency, we’re asking: How do we drive down costs quickly? And how do we ensure that we understand how that affects each of the mission spaces?”
Another CIO characterized EIS as an opportunity to optimize agencies’ infrastructure rst and only then think about transformation. He said the Net- worx contract was really about stabi- lization and standardizing the govern- ment’s approach to telecom — and those standards are now due for an update.
Because the EIS contract is designed to evolve over its 15-year duration, a crawl-walk-run approach makes sense, the CIO said. “As long as the vehicle allows us to go from opti-
mization to transformation, that’s the key,” he said. “I don’t think you’re going to get transformation right out of the box because many of us are going to be trying to just gure out how to actually address the challenge of resources and the need from the CFO community for this stuff to cost less.”
Others agreed that EIS’ exibility was encouraging. Although it’s possi- ble that some “quantum shift in tech- nology” could render portions of the contract obsolete, one said, EIS was designed with “the idea that we can’t have a 15-year vehicle that looks great at the beginning and is crap at the end.”
Some, however, expressed concern that there would not be the time and resources to rethink fundamental approaches, and the existing archi- tecture would essentially get baked into EIS task orders.
“That idea of expending the energy and time upfront to think through your strategy, and having the capital budget to be able to do that, is sometimes hard to get to,” one said, citing some cloud migrations as an example.
“Folks are saying, ‘Yeah, we’re mak- ing that move to cloud,’” he said, but they simply detail the systems and applications they’re already running, then tell a cloud service provider to “carve out some space for me in your cloud that does that kind of stuff, and then I’m just going to pick up the
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November/December 2017 FCW.COM