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talking ef ciencies and the number of contract transactions that need to take place. When I’m talking to a com- ponent CIO, I need to be able to talk about maintainability, ease and visibil- ity into the costs. When I’m talking to an operator — pick any part of the edge — they need to know what’s in it for them.”
The trick is to knit all those different dialects into a common understand- ing of the challenges and trade-offs, several participants said.
“You have to talk differently, but you have to take a simple common denom- inator” that everyone can understand, one CIO said. For example, taking stakeholders to an agency data cen- ter and then to a cloud service pro- vider’s facility can make the recapital- ization bene ts of IT transformation far clearer.
Similarly, he said, senior execu- tives have slowly absorbed the busi- ness implications of agile. “Our deputy undersecretary for management prob- ably says the word ‘agile’ six times a day. I don’t think he knows what it means, but he knows the concept of what I can get from it.”
As a result of those translation and education efforts, he said, “we become wanted participants at every single meeting the department has because they now know that everything that drives mission is IT in one way, shape or form.”
The importance of getting it right
Again and again, the group came back to the twin pressures of saving money while seizing the chance to truly modernize.
“Outside of it being a contract tran- sition, if you lay out the reform, you lay out the executive orders, you look at this coalescence of this vehicle, it’s forcing conversations about, ‘What are we?’” one participant said.
Yet even the basic migration from Networx to EIS is “a tremendously larger program than it was in that
last transition,” another said. “Before you even get to modernization versus transformation versus delivery, that’s a tight time frame.”
“I would hate to see agencies go through a process where they say, ‘Boy, this is a once-every-15-year opportunity, but we’ve got to stick to like-for-like,’” a third executive added. “I cringe at the thought that part of the calculation is, ‘However, because of the time frames, we’re going to be forced to do this.’”
Others warned against modernizing without regard for mission. “If we start piling money into building new things just because they’re newer than the old things we had, that’s going to be a colossal waste of money,” one par- ticipant said. “What we really need to
focus on is, ‘Are we improving those outcomes? How are we focused like lasers on investing money in IT, in technology, but also supporting cul- tural and other changes that have to occur to drive improved outcomes for our missions?’”
“This is such a big complicated change that we can’t do it all in one bite,” another said. “And if we make the wrong foundational decisions upfront, it precludes options down the road. The challenge is trying to identify what boxes us in and what gives us options.”
He added that “if you can embed that and integrate that with the folks trying to drive mission outcomes and enable them to take risks and to be more inno- vative, then I think you win.” n
PERSPECTIVES
PARTICIPANTS
Richie Balkissoon
Cloud Architect, Department of Homeland Security
Shawn Fitzgerald
Research Director, World Wide Digital Transformation Strategies, IDC Insights
Ed Fox
Vice President of Network Services, MetTel
Robert Frum
CIO, Navy International Programs Of ce, Department of the Navy
Adrian Gardner
CIO, Federal Emergency Management Agency
Diana Gowen
General Manager and Senior Vice President, Federal Program, MetTel
Sanjay Gupta
CTO, Small Business Administration
Michael Hermus
CTO, Department of Homeland Security
Robert Leahy
Deputy CIO, Of ce of Personnel Management
Stephen Rice
Deputy CIO, Department of Homeland Security
Antonio Villafana
CIO, Of ce of Health Affairs, Department of Homeland Security
Robert Williams
Acting Chief Information Security Of cer, National Council on Disability
Robert Wuhrman
Enterprise Architect, Uni ed Shared Services Management, General Services Administration
Note: FCW Editor-in-ChiefTroy K. Schneider and 1105 Public Sector Media Group President and Chief Content Of cer Anne A. Armstrong led the roundtable discussion.The Oct. 25 gathering was underwritten by MetTel, but both the substance
of the discussion and the recap on these pages are strictly editorial products. Neither MetTel nor any of the roundtable participants had input beyond their Oct. 25 comments.
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