Page 57 - FCW, May/June 2018

cesses are evolving, too, because mission areas change,” another participant said. “These older systems that I have were built to support an existing process 15 or 20 years ago. Those processes have evolved. I have to make sure my engine and my system can support those processes to modernize.”
When asked whether and how the Modernizing Gov- ernment Technology Act is helping, one participant said: “It is definitely an enabler. Because MGT is not going to be a one-time effort, it makes IT think differently of their investments. Most of the agencies I’ve seen still think of IT as an expenditure.”
Another participant from a small agency said: “We don’t have a working capital fund, and that’s one thing that MGT authorizes us to do.”
The conversation naturally turned to how cloud and
as-a-service technologies can facilitate modernization.
Participants said they are using whatever fits their mis-
sion needs, which for some agencies means all those
C M
was infrastructure as a service. That was two or three
years back,” one executive said. “Soon we realized thaCtM
cloud is an enabler of innovation rather than just a way
MY
to save money. You have to build a hybrid cloud model
CY
that you need.”
Another participant agreed, saying: “If you want toK
do machine learning and deep learning, you’ve got to be able to deploy large neural networks. You cannot do that in the same environment where you have your mission- critical apps running. You’ve got to have an environment where you can put that stuff and know that you have the bandwidth and the scalability within that isolated environment where you can do that type of work. You’ve got to look at private clouds and hybrid clouds and have the right infrastructure to support this work.”
A third executive added: “I’m sitting on mounds and mounds of data that I need to make sense of. My focus right now is deep learning, but I also want to do some work in machine learning. In the past, we really haven’t had the tools to make sense of it, and I’ve been asked to look at what we can do with that dataset so we can do better market analysis and better protect the country.”
In other words, modernization is not an end in itself but a means to expand agencies’ capabilities in ways that are still evolving.
“MGT reinforces necessity,” a participant said. “It’s no longer just one CIO or one line of business looking for change. It is one department or multiple departments looking at change simultaneously, and that builds energy and momentum.” n
CIS_VERTICAL_HalfPage_Ad.pdf
1 2/27/18 12:47 PM
capabilities.
When it comes to cloud adoption, “the initial driver
at some point because one is not going to give you all
Y
CMY
May/June 2018 FCW.COM 49