Page 70 - FCW, November, December 2018

FCWPerspectives Busting IT
modernization myths
Executives from a dozen agencies share the misconceptions they face when it comes to revamping government IT
Modernizing the federal government would be tough even if all the stakeholders were on the same page. Too often, however, agency IT leaders find themselves spending precious time explaining why the conventional wisdom is wrong.
FCW recently gathered a group of IT modernization leaders from agencies large and small to discuss the myths and misunderstandings they most often confront. The discussion was on the record but not
for individual attribution
(see Page 72 for a list of participants), and the quotes have been edited for length and clarity. Here are seven myths the group focused on busting.
Myth 1: My current system is good enough
Although there is certainly pressure from the top to modernize in general, the owners of specific systems and business processes are often loath to change what works. And frequently, participants said, those stakeholders are oblivious to the extreme measures the IT team is taking to keep those sys- tems running.
“Often they’re working through the heroics of the IT organization and kept running,” one official said, “but in some ways, we do ourselves a disservice by hiding how difficult and how fragile [those systems] are. Communicating that, I think, is important to trying to get some buy-in to modernize in the first place.”
Calling attention to shaky systems is a delicate task, another official said. Pro- gram owners might question why such risks have been papered over, while the IT teams keeping the systems alive can interpret the call for modernization as a critique of their efforts.
“There’s a real sense of professional pride,” the official said. “I’m not sure we’re doing a very good job, but we’ve got to figure out how can we lift some of that burden from them and not feel like we’re stomping on their graves. People have been struggling and through heroic efforts have probably hidden the risk and the lack of performance from their customers. It’s one of the things we’re struggling with.”
That’s not to say that every system
must be reinvented, however. One CIO warned against modernizing for the sake of modernization: “I’ve got a lot of old code running on brand-new hardware that’s secure and safe. I’m not going to fight that battle.”
Myth 2: IT modernization is about technology
One of the biggest myths of IT mod- ernization, one CIO said, is that it will “fix all of the decades-old problems the system has” without any need to rein- vent the business practices that system supports. “If you just modernize, you’re just taking 10-year-old garbage and shin- ing it up. There’s this assumption that if we modernize, or if we put everything in the cloud, these 14 different silos will now magically be integrated.”
In government, another official added, a lot of inertia must be overcome before the conversation can turn to IT solutions. “It takes so long to buy things and the contracts are so complex and prone to protests that we tend to reuse contract language from previous con- tracts to try to reduce risks, but that results in the same wording getting car- ried on generation after generation.” Reusing contract language “actually hampers our ability to do some of the modernization.”
“I think modernization really needs to be about the people,” a third offi- cial said. “It’s presented that it’s about technology and it’s this one-shot invest- ment.... We’ll move legacy stuff to mod- ern infrastructure, and we’ll be able to
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