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FCWPerspectives
take. I think you have to start with,
‘How would we operate if we didn’t have system constraints?’”
She added that “tools solve a prob- lem that exists with my existing sys- tems. But they don’t help me get to an optimal business process. I think the discussion has to occur as, ‘Can we get to an optimal business process at a low cost and in a flexible way?’ If you don’t start at that point, you’re starting on the wrong foot.”
Good governance can also facili- tate standardization, which most of the participants said should be a high priority. “If you’re building policy to address your problem now, you’re not building the right policy,” one executive said. “Your policy really needs to have the future vision of interoperability and of normalized functions.”
“One of the challenges is to abstract away from the symptoms themselves and understand what are these dis- crete problems that we’re trying to solve,” another added. “Use standards- based integration approaches instead of tools.”
“And it should apply to all the gov- ernment because we all want to be on the same page,” yet another said.
In some cases, being on the same page should mean being on a com- mon platform. Several participants argued that ticketing systems, cer- tain finance operations, and security information and event management could all benefit from solutions that bring intelligent automation to most or all of government.
Other participants, however, raised concerns about aiming for the lowest common denominator. “I agree with the interoperability,” one said. “Cen- tralization is what scares me. Cen- tralization slows business processes down. Centralization really creates a lot of frustration if you’re an operator.”
Another participant agreed: “It doesn’t matter what tool you pick if you have a vision of how you’re going to interact with that tool and others. If the standards are there, fantastic.”
To strike that balance between stan- dards and mission-driven focus, sev- eral executives advocated a microser- vices approach. “If we start smaller, we can talk about data elements and attributes,” one said. “The fact that we can come to some sort of agreement on five or seven is big.”
“It’s a specific business problem where you can do a proof,” another
noted. “Get some measurable return- on-investment numbers out of it and then you can try to build your business network and scale it. But agencies aren’t structured to execute in that way. That’s where the big challenge is.”
Moreover, the “start small” advo- cates argued, picking a single busi- ness process and getting its owner on board facilitates the most important part: rethinking that process before you automate it.
One participant objected, saying: “If you have that opportunity to do blue sky, that’s awesome. But a lot of us are trying to build the plane while we’re flying it, so we don’t have that opportunity to start completely from scratch.”
“But if you write a performance work statement by asking people what outcome they want,” another countered, “they’re going to write it on the basis of what they do every day.”
A third executive suggested a differ- ent approach: “If you take a step back and say, ‘Are there any new capabili- ties in the marketplace that we could use, that we could redesign for the way we work, so that we could man- age that issue?’ Then the outcome may be completely different.” n
PERSPECTIVES
Participants
Jose Arrieta
Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary for Acquisition, Department of Health and Human Services
Ira Baron
CTO, Office of Justice Programs, Department of Justice
Bryan Biegel
Director, National Coordination Office for the Networking and IT Research and Development Program, Office of Science andTechnology Policy
Kirke Everson
Managing Director, KPMG
Robert Hembrook
Director of Cybersecurity, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Tony Hubbard
Principal, KPMG
Nisha Kappus
InsiderThreats Program Lead, Department of Health and Human Services
Frank Konieczny
CTO, U.S. Air Force
LaChelle LeVan
Lead Architect, Federal Identity, Credential and Access Management, Office of Governmentwide Policy, General Services Administration
Oki Mek
Program Manager, Department of Health and Human Services
Mamta Nagaraja
Science Engagement and Communications, Science Mission Directorate, NASA
Andy Seymour
Public-Key Infrastructure Manager, Office of the CIO, Department of Defense
MeghanWhite
InsiderThreats Program Lead, Department of Health and Human Services
Note: FCW Editor-in-ChiefTroy K. Schneider led the roundtable discussion.The April
11 gathering was underwritten by KPMG, but both the substance of the discussion and the recap on these pages are strictly editorial products. Neither KPMG nor any of the roundtable participants had input beyond their April 11 comments.
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May/June 2018 FCW.COM