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whole thing and move it over.” “There are so many changes that are going to come in the network world,” another executive said. “Is this vehicle designed for that? Will it stay two steps ahead of what the requirements are, or will it stay behind the curve and then
we are always catching up?”
Yet several participants said the real test was not whether EIS is adapt- able, it’s whether agencies are able to answer fundamental questions about their IT strategies while still adhering to the three-year timeline for migrating
from Networx to EIS.
“We’re not just having that con-
versation about whether we need to modernize the network we own,” one executive said. “We’re having a con- versation about ‘do we even need to own a network?’”
“Those are big, thorny conversa- tions where the right level of legwork needs to be done to know what the secondary and tertiary effects are,” he added.
Another participant agreed that a fundamental question agencies should
be asking is: Do we really want to be in the business of owning a network? “You’ve skipped right past that if you’ve already written into a contract that you’re going to do these sets of things for me,” he said.
‘There’s IT modernization, and then there’s transformation’
The roundtable participants said they are doing their best to seize the oppor- tunity. “What I’m trying to gure out is how we get to the agility, performance and security that the network needs in the new world order of cloud, of agile, of DevOps,” one said. “These are buzz- words, but they are real things that have real consequences in how we operate the business. If the network doesn’t enable that, then all we’ve done is gotten a new network that works in the old way.”
“There’s IT modernization, and then there’s transformation,” another said, and the latter requires more than technology. “To truly transform our respective agencies requires process changes, requires cultural changes,
requires looking at how we do busi- ness differently.”
The CIO who stressed the need to optimize rst agreed, asking, “How many agencies are ready to do trans- formation right now?”
The pros and cons of White House interest
The slow pace of political appoint- ments at many agencies is frequently cited as a problem for federal IT, but roundtable participants said top-level leadership has not been an issue on that front.
“They want us rolling,” one CIO said, referring to both agency lead- ers and White House of cials. “They are expecting plans. They’ve given us some hard dates. They’ve given us some monumental challenges, and we need to start this. Every conver- sation we have with leadership ties to ef ciency and effectiveness.”
Another participant agreed, add- ing that some smaller agencies feel as though their very existence depends on meeting the modernization man-
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