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                                                                                             FCWPerspectives
those lines, another participant said.
The idea is to use EIS “to organize a service that we can package and small agencies can grab and use. They can either run it themselves or we can assist them.”
Such a bundled service could also appeal to large agencies, another participant said. With EIS’ basic structure, “I’m still dealing with multiple vendors, and I don’t want to deal with multiple vendors. I want one button to push because I’m tired of being a soccer referee like I used to be. I retired from that.”
Speed, scale and shiny objects
By far, the group’s most common concern was whether agencies can move quickly enough to effective- ly transform their infrastructure before the clock runs out on Net- worx services.
For most government agencies, one said, fielding new systems takes so long that the next iteration is missed by the time the original deployment is complete. “That’s the challenge: It’s scale and speed,” he said. “That’s why we’d really like to go fast with EIS. It’s probably going to evolve, and if you take more than two or three years to get there, it’s going to be something different.”
“And traditionally the government can’t handle that much inbound work in less than five or six years,” another participant added.
Indeed, GSA officials are con- cerned about bottlenecks with the initial solicitations. One participant predicted that most agencies will issue theirs by the end of the year, but that surge “is going to be really tough for all those service providers.”
There’s also the challenge of con- vincing agency leaders that it’s worth the time and investment to truly trans- form the underlying infrastructure.
“Management likes the shiny object things —the mobile computing, desk- top-to-laptop conversations, picking up
the smartphone,” one participant said. Although such changes have posed challenges for existing network infrastructure, they also offer an opening to explain the importance of
modernization.
“There are a few shiny objects
that they actually value,” another participant agreed. “So you can tie it back to that and talk about how important that foundation piece has to be there. Then there can be more conversation, [and] there can be understanding.”
Few expected agency heads to fully engage with the ins and outs of EIS, however. “We’ll never get them fully onboard, to be honest,” that same participant acknowledged.
Making EIS about the mission
Getting executive buy-in is crucial, another executive said, because oth- erwise IT infrastructure will be an
afterthought. “It’s always measured by the mission. Always. You can have a really crappy IT structure, but if you can get the mission done in a timely development, it doesn’t really matter.”
“If you’re trying to be an enterprise architecture to a mission person, you’re not going to get anywhere,” another participant agreed. “It has to be a mission architecture, not an IT architecture.”
A third participant noted that enter- prise architecture, when done right, should capture the business drivers of any agency’s mission. The second participant agreed but warned that the focus can get lost when “there are a bunch of IT geeks on it.”
A fourth participant returned to cost as the key to securing agency execu- tives’ attention. “Mission is No. 1,” he said, “but showing cost savings is 1.000001 right behind it.” n
    PERSPECTIVES
Participants
Tony Bardo
Assistant Vice President for Government Solutions, Hughes
David Bennett
Director of Operations and CIO, Defense Information Systems Agency
Gerald Caron
Acting Director for Enterprise Network Management, Bureau of Information Resource Management, Department of State
Michael Fairless
Branch Chief, Servers and Storage Branch, Securities and Exchange Commission
Jeffrey Flick
Director, Enterprise Network Program Office, Office of the CIO, and EIS Lead Transition Manager, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Gregory Garcia
CIO/G-6, Army Corps of Engineers
Dyung Le
Director of Systems Engineering, National Archives and Records Administration
Crystal Philcox
Deputy Assistant Commissioner, Category Management, Office of IT Category, Federal Acquisition Service, General Services Administration
Dan Rasmussen
Senior Vice President, Hughes
Francisco Salguero
Deputy CIO, Department of Agriculture
Note: FCW Editor-in-Chief Troy K. Schneider and 1105 Public Sector Media Group President Anne A. Armstrong led the roundtable discussion.The June 14 gathering was underwritten by Hughes, but both the substance of the discussion and the recap on these pages are strictly editorial products. Neither Hughes nor any of the roundtable participants had input beyond their June 14 comments.
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