Page 43 - Federal Computer Week, January/February 2019

company that built it no longer sup- ports it. Whereas if you have a com- mercial product that you’re buying off the shelf, [the company is] doing real- time deployments to address securi- ty concerns. So find something that you can get tomorrow, and maybe it doesn’t meet all your needs, but you can have it address your issues.”
That mentality reflects the funda- mental tension of shared services, another participant said. “Building the project and getting a lot of people to use it when they all have their indi- vidual needs is one of the classic chal- lenges of the open-source world,” she added. With successful open-source projects, “you have people who use it to pull their own things, but then they contribute back. That’s the part that is currently missing in govern- ment, and I don’t have an answer right now on how to get people interested in that part.”
At a certain level, multiple partici- pants said, agencies and components need to stop focusing on their unique- ness and compromise on common solutions for certain commodities — to free up resources for innova-
tion elsewhere and be more efficient in general.
“ItmaybeOKtosay,‘Iwanttodo my own thing because I have a little bit of a nuance to a requirement here or there.’ But I’m sure we can all agree on certain things — financial services, HR, email. Sometimes we’re going to have to make those tough choices and say, ‘You can’t have it all and be totally unique because it’s not your money.’”
There are security arguments as well, another participant said. “Every system that’s unique to an agency has a start-up cost, a maintenance tail, ini- tial security deployment with the ATO and a continuous monitoring compo- nent. Those are four big-ticket items, times 24 agencies, times how many sub-agencies within the big 24. That’s an enormous price tag, and it’s hard to secure. It’s more complicated.”
“I think there’s middle ground,” another participant said. “Sometimes it’s going to be a little bit of a forced agree- ment: ‘These are going to be shared ser- vices. We’re going to save a lot of money there.’ And then we can redirect that money toward the individual innova- tions in the mission space.”
“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.”
The participant added: “We need to think strategically so that we’re actu- ally able to compartmentalize the sup- porting functions of government into shared services and then have these organizations become better at what they do.” n
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