Page 38 - FCW, May/June 2018

IT TRANSFORMATION
Software
development at
startup speed
Applications built to solve agencies’ mission challenges should be created and deployed in days rather than years
Keith Salisbury
Vice President for Federal, Pivotal Software
however, agencies are now struggling to provide vision and direction, as well as governance and oversight, for modern software development.
Software development involves not just technology; it requires the significant and complex undertaking of transforming people, culture and policy. We’ve seen the most powerful outcomes grow from starting on a small yet meaningful problem and delivering a software-enabled outcome rapidly. Then officials can step back and assess: What did we learn? Where were the friction points? How can we improve?
Then real end users — warfighters in the case of the Air Force, rather than the IT team — answer the question of whether that software-enabled outcome is valuable to the mission. If it is, agencies have the momentum to do it again, and they can improve their software delivery process every time.
With a basic capacity for modern
SOFTWARE HAS
fundamentally transformed every
major industry and has the same potential to transform how government agencies execute their missions.
Silicon Valley’s “cloud-native” companies became extremely disruptive because they can go from an idea to production software in an exceedingly short period of time — days if not hours. By contrast, if a federal agency has a good idea, it typically takes years for that idea to become software that is accredited for production use on a secure government network.
It is possible, however, for government agencies to break that paradigm. The Air Force had cycle times for software development of five to seven years, exacerbated by a two-year testing
and accreditation process on major mission system programs. The same programs, however, leaned in on modern methodologies for software development
and a modern application platform to radically accelerate the way they build, deploy and run software applications.
They can now develop mission applications and have them running in production on classified networks in 120 days or less. More impressive, the programs are pushing 10 to 20 new features to warfighters on each application every week based on real-time feedback. Outcomes like that are demonstrating that the Air Force is moving at startup speed.
Software as a strategic asset
To achieve those outcomes, leaders at the highest levels must decide if the ability to build modern software is a strategic asset. If it is, they need to ask whether the agency has any internal capability for modern software development.
For decades, government best practices included outsourcing software development. With no internal capacity,
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