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Cloud
Salesforce, agreed. “I think we’re seeing a big shift right now of putting the cus- tomer at the center of what we do,” he said at the same event, adding that “cus- tomer” can mean a citizen, state agency, federal employee or other partner.
“We’re getting smarter about what worked, what hasn’t worked and about new models that are coming to bear,” Schroeder said, adding that PaaS-based models “offer different benefits in terms of control versus productivity.”
Those models vary widely because PaaS can encompass a range of solu- tions from development frameworks to content management to analytics and business intelligence. There are
think about how they can deliver com- pliance and policy not through paper, but through [the platforms] themselves,” Schroeder said. “That’s a lot of value right there in terms of cost, complexity and time to mission.” And bringing that value gives IT teams the opportunity to form new relationships and partner- ships with business leaders and further advance modernization efforts.
“As you do compliance in a platform world,” he added, “it offers the oppor- tunity to think about what you used to do at the governance table...and think about how you can not have to talk about these things anymore.”
having 22 component-specific CIOs to nine deputy CIOs focused on specific mission areas.
“We’re [no longer] talking about agen- cies,” he said. “We’re talking about a mission area...and then how can we drive solutions to what they need to deliver on that mission. With platforms, it changes the conversations from the very waterfall approach [where mission owners would craft detailed specifica- tions in advance] to where we’re telling developers, ‘Hey, I want this red button right here.’”
That change has also increased the tempo. “It’s no longer going to take me three weeks to develop that red button,” he said. “It’s going to take two minutes. Now I’ve got extra weeks... where we can focus on the
mission.”
PaaS can go beyond the
agile DevOps model to put advanced and configurable tools directly in the hands of end users. Those click-to- code or no-code approaches, however, require a significant culture shift on the part of the users and the IT shops that provide the platforms.
Salguero said USDA is tak- ing a hybrid approach and in most cases is still using PaaS
to build solutions that suit mission own- ers’ needs while handing over the tool- box in a few situations. Most of the lat- ter examples are in the new Centers of Excellence, where USDA is figuring out “the framework of how we want to do this in other mission areas going forward.”
Schroeder sees a similar story at other agencies. “There are a number of different models, and I think there should be,” he said, adding that not all business units want to take hands-on ownership of their tools. “But the advent of these platforms puts us in a position to add value in ways we’ve never been able to before.” n
31 approved PaaS solutions in the Federal Risk and Authori- zation Management Program’s marketplace, including the General Services Administra- tion’s Cloud.gov. At a broad level, however, the benefits boil down to less coding time, a greater ability to tailor through configuration instead of custom- ization, and the outsourcing of basic technical and operational support.
“We’re getting smarter about what worked, what hasn’t worked and about new models that are coming to bear.”
TODD SCHROEDER, SALESFORCE
With Cloud.gov, for example, shouldering a significant portion
of security compliance obliga-
tions is a key part of the value proposition. “One of the reasons
we run Cloud.gov is because we want to take all that burden...so that you can focus on your mission,” a General Ser- vices Administration official told FCW in a recent background conversation.
An official from another agency, who took part in the same discussion, noted that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has taken a similar approach and said that building a PaaS solu- tion to help with compliance could be extremely useful.
Salguero and Schroeder agreed that the compliance benefits of PaaS can be substantial — both technically and politically.
“These platforms position agencies to
Salguero stressed, however, that gov- ernance becomes even more important in a PaaS-accelerated environment. “The speed of things comes so much faster — how do you control that?” he said. Although PaaS is intended to bring greater consistency and manageability to IT portfolios, it also makes it easy to create more one-off solutions.
“Without governance, you’re going to go off and do it based on what that busi- ness unit wants,” he said. “And I don’t want to build that five times. I want to build it once and leverage it. “
For Salguero, the efforts to leverage PaaS dovetail with USDA’s larger reorga- nization. The department has gone from
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