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The biggest horror stories are already baked into program offices that resisted help from the CIO or where the CIO organization was unable to fix systems needed for the COVID-19 response.
tify spending by funding source. Twenty years ago, it would have been impos- sible to pull together the information needed to understand this history. This is important for the government to bet- ter manage its response to the next cri- sis, as well as answer the congressional inquiries that will inevitably follow for years to come.
• Financial and performance management required under OMB M-20-21. Aging financial management systems and long-standing system interface issues will make it difficult to reconcile expenditures and obliga- tions related to the coronavirus. The last couple of years of financial audits show gaps in controls and system capa- bilities. To manage trillions of dollars of stimulus and public health spending, agencies will need extensive investment in open application programming inter- faces, robotics and AI, or they will need to overhaul their financial systems.
• Home-based federal work- force. Government cannot go back to an operating model based on 25% of people teleworking on any given day. I was once told that understanding how government can best leverage technol- ogy requires understanding informa- tion flows in daily operations. People, processes and technology will have to reflect a virtual workforce, which requires workflows shifting from doc- uments and consensus to fact-based decision-making and accountability for results. Government will need to deploy a tiered digital architecture to unteth- er people from their desks, leveraging cloud and virtualization techniques with a mixture of open standards, APIs, and
chunking of databases and legacy code into interoperable modules.
So what makes this the most chal- lenging time for CIOs? The biggest hor- ror stories are already baked into pro- gram offices that resisted help from the CIO or where the CIO organization was unable to fix systems needed for the COVID-19 response. If it’s not already a partner in the response phase, it will be very difficult for the CIO team to be the source of digital transformation
needed in the recovery phase. In the past, agency leaders replaced their IT leadership team and contractors.
We face difficult times ahead, with challenges at a scale that few, if any, of us have encountered in our lives. And ready or not, we’re going to need IT modernization with an urgency agen- cies have not experienced before. n
Mark Forman is vice president of digi- tal government strategy at SAIC.
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