Page 42 - Federal Computer Week, January/February 2019

FCWPerspectives not a part of whatever the mission
owners want to do. If you’re just say- ing no, they stop working through you.”
Who’s going to support your great idea?
Not everyone wants to run their own innovation shop, however — and not many mission owners are prepared to scale and support new systems over the long term.
One of the executives championing decentralized efforts acknowledged that when a new system breaks, the innovators often go running to the CIO shop to fix it. “And so it starts fights [over] innovation versus structure.”
Another participant cited the inspector general community as an example. “They don’t want to be in the IT business; they want to be in the enforcement business. They don’t want to be worrying about clouds and infrastructure. So when the govern- ment has successes, why can’t other
agencies essentially find ways to lever- age that?”
And another spoke of her search for a permanent home for a system that grew out of mission needs. After bootstrapping a machine-learning solution, she said, “we go to our lead- ership and say, ‘Look what we built!’ And leadership says, ‘Wow, that’s rich, but that’s not what we do. We’ve got to find someone else who can take this amazing thing you guys built because we can’t sustain it. We can’t afford it.’”
That executive said her team is still looking. “Everybody said it’s great, but no one’s writing a check. And our par- ticular division is not supposed to maintain and stand up products and put them in production.”
Coming to terms with COTS
Several participants argued that com- mercial off-the-shelf solutions are the only practical way to innovate with- out running up unsustainable techni- cal debt.
“We just can’t do custom devel- opment on a large scale,” one said. “The challenge is then the policy changes and mindset shift. It used to be: ‘We’re all going to have a perfect requirements process and a perfect building process and work to a 100 percent solution.’”
Few mission owners are willing to adapt their approaches to the “70 per- cent solution” that a COTS product can offer, and they instead hold out for a custom solution.
But requirements evolve quickly, he noted, so “in five years, that custom system is not 100 percent. It’s 10 per- cent. So you’ve got to break that men- tality, which is hand-to-hand combat.”
“We want to bend the organization to what’s available in the commercial space rather than the commercial space bending to the regulations, requirements and compliance of government,” another executive said. “What happens when you build it? You can’t find additional funding, or the
PERSPECTIVES
Participants Jose Arrieta
Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary for Acquisition, Assistant Secretary for Financial Resources Department of Health and Human Services
Clare Bayley
Director
U.S. Digital Service
Office of Management and Budget
Avi Bender
Director, NationalTechnical Information Service Department of Commerce
Kevin Carter
Digital Service Expert, Defense Digital Service U.S. Digital Service
Office of Management and Budget
Nora Dempsey
Senior Advisor for Innovation Department of State
Mark Fisk
Partner, IBM Digital, Public Service Blockchain Leader IBM Services
Marina Fox
DotGov Domain Services Program Manager General Services Administration
Polly Hall
DHS Procurement Innovation Lab Department of Homeland Security
Marj Leaming
Chief Privacy Officer Department of Agriculture
Bridget Roddy
Virtual Student Foreign Service Coordinator Department of State
Ron Ross
Computer Scientist, Fellow National Institute of Standards andTechnology
Ari Schuler
InnovationTeam Director, Customs and Border Protection
Department of Homeland Security
Susan Wedge
Vice President and Partner, Cognitive Process Transformation, Digital
Strategy and Interactive Experience
U.S. Public Service, IBM Services
Note: FCW Editor-in-Chief Troy K. Schneider and 1105 Public Sector Media Group Chief Content Officer
Anne A. Armstrong led the roundtable discussion. The Dec. 4 gathering was underwritten by IBM, but both the substance of
the discussion and the recap on these pages are strictly editorial products. Neither IBM nor any of the roundtable participants had input beyond their Dec. 4 comments.
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January/February 2019 FCW.COM