Page 30 - FCW, July/August 2018

FCWPerspectives
Are agencies ready for EIS?
The massive telecom contract has the potential to reinvent IT infrastructure, but finding the bandwidth to take full advantage could prove difficult
The Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions contract is intended to help agencies transform their IT and telecommunications architectures, and a few fast movers are close to making awards through the $50 billion acquisition vehicle. But as the migration to Networx — the previous governmentwide telecom contract — proved a decade ago, reimagining and then moving to new infrastructure is a daunting task. And although the General Services Administration applied those lessons when it crafted EIS, most agencies are still approaching the transition carefully.
FCW recently gathered a group of IT leaders from across government to discuss their migration plans and the anticipated problems.
The consensus: EIS is a huge opportunity, but it could be tough to carve out the time and ensure the executive buy-in necessary to take full advantage of EIS.
The discussion was on the record but not for individual attribution (see Page 28 for a full list of participants), and the quotes have been edited for length and clarity. Here’s what the group had to say.
EISasameanstoanend
IT modernization can be much broad- er than the EIS contract awards, of course, but the degree to which that is true depends on the agency. Offi- cials from smaller agencies told FCW that the move from Networx to EIS would be the central driver of their modernization efforts — at least in part because the migration is mandatory.
“Everything’s waiting for EIS for us,” one participant said. Although resource constraints have often hamstrung other modernization efforts, the sunsetting of Networx means sticking with the status quo is not an option. “I quickly realized what we have to do is not just the network but also the strategies, the cloud and the security. We used to have four different plans; now we have one plan. We put the four together, and EIS has really played a central role.”
For some of the larger agencies, however, EIS is a piece of a bigger puzzle.
“I think for us it’s just one of many things, unfortunately,” another par- ticipant said. “We’re going through data center consolidation, network convergence, this whole zero-based security construct and standardizing our security stacks. EIS is one of many things. It’s unfortunate those aren’t all synchronized. It’s kind of up to each
agency to synchronize that flow.” Nevertheless, a third participant said, “I see EIS as an enabler. So I’m really excited about doing it, and we’re looking at ways you can really leverage
it and challenge it as well.”
Avoiding the temptation to lift and shift
For EIS to be used as an enabler, however, agencies must first figure out what their future infrastructure should look like — a difficult task for which few participants felt fully prepared. Several voiced concerns that time pressures and lack of inter- est from senior agency leaders could lead to “like-for-like” upgrades that don’t reflect changing needs.
“For us, the IT modernization is not just the network. It is the cloud option, it is the data center consolidation and all of that,” one participant said. “That’s going to play a factor in what we’re doing from a planning perspective.”
“There’s also the challenge of the timing,” another added. “Our custom- ers haven’t stopped demanding serv- ices. It’s not like we have the chance to just step back and retool our systems while our customers wait patiently on the side and say, ‘OK, whenever you get to us, we’ll be happy to take it.’ They’re screaming for the services. I
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July/August 2018 FCW.COM