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pay that back, and we’re done. That’s completely divorced from the reality, which is that it’s a continuous, in-per- petuity challenge.”
“We always have new requirements,” the official continued. “We always have new technologies that we need to deal with. If we’re not bringing the people along, then we fail.”
Myth 3: CIOs can own the modernization process
As long as IT is seen as the cornerstone of modernization, CIOs will be seen as the owners of those efforts. And that is a recipe for disaster, participants said.
“A lot of us are saying this is a busi- ness transformation,” one official
observed, “but I would poll the CIOs around the room and ask them who’s really on the hook for the moderniza- tion of your agency. Is it the CIO? The answer is probably yes, and that’s not the right answer.”
It is a business transformation, the official added, but nobody is held accountable except the CIO. “He or she cannot transform or modernize without significant influence or buy-in from the business, which we don’t really have.”
When CIOs do seize that role, a dif- ferent risk emerges, another participant said. “When you do that in the absence of a mission owner and they look at it six months later and say, ‘That’s not what I wanted. I wasn’t involved. How did you decide to do that?’ — you just wasted a bunch of time and money.”
“There is fundamentally an issue where the business administration peo- ple think that ‘Yeah, modernization or technology — that’s not my job,’” a third
participant said. “The reality is there isn’t a single part of our space today where even the most senior business folks have to understand the impacts of technology to what they’re doing every day.”
Myth 4: Modernization is too expensive
Costs matter, the group agreed, but too little attention is paid to the costs of not modernizing.
Too much of the conversation focuses on the money that will be saved by modernizing, one participant said, and “we have to say, that’s the wrong discussion. It’s going to cost more. We’ve been cutting costs for so long. We cut our software teams. The technologies that we’re running on have been out of support for four years. If they don’t invest and actually spend more money on it, we will go out of business from an IT perspec-
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