Page 72 - FCW, November, December 2018

FCWPerspectives
tive. Systems will shut down.”
“It’s a matter, at this point, of buy- ing off that technical debt,” another agreed. “We have cut costs to the point that we’ve accumulated so much tech- nical debt that it’s putting the mission
areas at risk.”
One participant said framing the
discussion that way worked at his agency. “We wound up getting more modernization money than we were asking for. But it wasn’t because we went in and said, ‘We’re moving to the cloud, and we’re going to reduce costs.’ We went in saying, ‘We’re going to move to the cloud, and we’re going to cost you more because you’ll actu- ally have better capabilities that will be stable.’ So it was entirely about the business of outcomes.”
The Technology Business Man- agement framework can be helpful in those efforts, several participants said. “We use TBM, so even though I own the IT budget, I’ll tell everyone exactly what their costs of running their operation is,” one CIO said. “So we’ve got the CFO wanting us to do some cloud work because we’ve shown their internal hosting cost.
I allowed them to make the best decision.”
Myth 5: The mandates always make sense
IT modernization has been a White House priority for years now, and the group agreed there were benefits to that top-down focus. One participant, who came to government after years in the business world, said many of the mandates reflect “what are generally accepted best practices if you’re work- ing within the private sector.”
Others, however, complained that the myriad policy memos can send conflicting messages. “The strategy
is not clearly connected,” one said. “Also, most of these mandates come and they say, ‘Do it now.’ The challenge is we have a two-year planning process. Shaking that up and accommodating this mandate is a big challenge.”
Myth 6: Central funding is the fix
Although it is not a mandate per se, the group cited the Modernizing Gov- ernment Technology Act’s Technology Modernization Fund as a prime exam- ple of top-down efforts that don’t make sense for every agency.
“Our biggest challenge is the payback period,” one participant said. “There’s a lot of hesitation in terms of when
PERSPECTIVES
Participants Rob Adams
Principal Deputy CIO, Department of State
Lawrence Anderson
Associate CIO for Federal IT Business Solutions, Office of Personnel Management
Gordon Bitko
CIO, FBI
Christine Calvosa
Deputy CIO ofTechnology and Resiliency, Federal Communications Commission
Guy Cavallo
Deputy CIO, Small Business Administration
Kevin Coyne
Director of Technology and Services, Bureau of Industry and Security, Department of Commerce
Rob Dapkiewicz
Vice President, Public Sector Civilian Sales, AT&T
Sanjay Gupta
CTO, Small Business Administration
Stephen Holden
Associate CIO for IT Policy and Oversight, Department ofTransportation
Karl Mathias
CIO, U.S. Marshals Service
Mason McDaniel
CTO, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
Elanchezhian Sivagnanam
Chief Architect, National Science Foundation
Chris Smith
Vice President, Public Sector Shared Services, AT&T
Michael Smith
CIO, Office of Inspector General, Federal Housing Finance Agency
Howard Spira
CIO, Export-Import Bank of the United States
Note: FCW Editor-in-Chief Troy K. Schneider led the roundtable discussion. The Sept. 13 gathering was underwritten by AT&T, but both the substance
of the discussion and the recap on these pages are strictly editorial products. Neither AT&T nor any of the roundtable participants had input beyond their Sept. 13 comments.
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