Page 48 - FCW, May/June 2018
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                                 FCWPerspectives
   fact that so much of the existing cost is wrapped up in the employees who manage the legacy systems, which means the true savings will come only if those people are let go or retrained and redeployed.
Another said the key is to define mission-driven ROI. “The conversa- tion should be what is it that we’re try- ing to achieve? How we are going to measure what we’re trying to achieve in mission outcomes? Then you work backward to distributions.”
Several participants said mission owners and agency IT shops increas- ingly seem inclined to approach the conversation that way. Price and internal efficiencies used to be the main drivers for cloud adoption, but “you don’t really hear that anymore,” one said. “Now I actually hear much more, ‘How’s it going to improve the mission?’”
Leaders are now saying, “OK, we’ve got the neat new cloud environ- ment,” another participant said. “Can we actually use it to solve a mission
problem and find out more informa- tion that we didn’t know before?”
Meanwhile, another executive said, more agency IT teams — which have often earned a reputation as change- averse “server huggers” — are mak- ing a big push for the cloud environ- ment. “They’re really trying to shove the application on the load side to the commercial cloud,” the execu- tive said.
That’s not universal, of course. Although some participants noted that the IT team was leading the charge at their agencies and pushing to embrace cloud for its speed and agility, one executive reported the opposite: “Our business lines care about fast, but our IT folks sometimes are saying, ‘But we’ve got this thing that works.’”
And a participant who works with a range of agencies reported that hold- outs are not hard to find. “We’ve been out talking to a number of agencies, and what I’m hearing from folks is, ‘Well, yeah, we’ll delve into it. But we’re not going to move our old stuff.’ They’re not going to redesign it. They’re just not going to do it. They’re saying, ‘Well, maybe I can meet the
spirit of this by starting to just build all-new stuff.’ They’re identifying very baby steps.”
Better security and core competencies
The group also identified two argu- ments that resonate almost as well as cost savings: better security and allowing agencies to focus on what they do best.
Running IT infrastructure is not any agency’s core competency, they argued. Companies can deliver “because that’s their job,” one partici- pant said. “They’re professional data center operators. My agency, to the best of my knowledge, in the last 50 years has not built the data center. We have taken a building and put servers into it.”
“There’s the fear of Microsoft or the fear of Amazon saying, ‘There’s no way that you could possibly do bet- ter than we can,’” another participant said. “What we’ve demonstrated time and time again is that we’re not so good at it.”
“I love what the Defense Digital Service guys and the U.S. Digital
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