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it’s security-related,’ so then all of a sudden that piques their interest and keeps them engaged,” one said.
Working with (and waiting
for) the new leaders
To secure executive buy-in, though, agency IT leaders must first get to know those new executives, many of whom are not yet in place.
One participant’s agency does not have a CIO at the moment. “The sec- retary has not been confirmed,” that executive said. “There’s no deputy sec- retary. I’m waiting for those detailed discussions to pick up.”
At another agency, “political leader- ship is trickling in, so we’ve done this sort of canned briefing several times,” another official said. “And we’ll prob- ably have to do it several more times. We’ve worked so hard on moderniza- tion at the department, and we want to keep it going.” There’s a fear that the new administration’s team will come in predisposed to “go in a completely different direction.”
A third official said modernization efforts continue, but “the pace of our releases has slowed down...because we don’t want to get ahead of policy. So we are in a little bit of a slower pace — I don’t want to call it a main- tenance mode — while I’m trying to do that communications job to the new
administration so that we can garner that support and push forward.”
A fourth participant’s agency began planning for such a pause soon after the election and focused on projects that made sense regardless of politi- cal priorities or governance changes. “We are pushing forward on some of that unsexy work, those foundation- al-type modernization efforts,” that official said. “No one’s going to com- plain about the decommissioning of a 40-year-old mainframe legacy system. But some of that flashy, sexy work, we did adjust our roadmaps to push that out to May, June, July so that the new leadership can come in, take a look at what we’re doing and then point us in the direction that they want to go.”
Some participants, however, argued that virtually all modernization efforts should fall into the “full speed ahead” category. “If you slow down, you lose altitude,” one official said. “Our mod- ernization plan has been in place for a little over two years. We’ve invested in certain technologies and initiatives, and we’re moving forward. The CIO and the CISOs were all circled together and said the best way to keep momen- tum is keep going. It can’t wait on the new administration.”
Another participant noted that, regardless of new administration pri- orities, the increased emphasis on
secure modernization will inevitably change agencies’ plans. “When you focus on cyber, I think that will turn over a lot of rocks in terms of some of the cyber-hygiene tools and software that we have in place,” the official said. “So while I don’t think the new leadership has been explicit in terms of modernization, I think that they’re at a high level saying, ‘Well, we need to think about secure systems.’ And I think from that will follow an emphasis on some of the tools that we need to modernize.”
Post-COVID: Orphan systems
and dispersed workers
The group agreed that the pandemic- driven upheaval of 2020 is not yet in the rearview mirror. Although past modernization efforts, especially the government’s move to cloud services, made massive telework feasible, the plans for 2021 and beyond are still adapting to a new normal that has yet to be fully defined.
One challenge will be managing the full life cycle of systems and solutions that were deployed on an emergency basis in 2020. Participants cited the Defense Department’s Commercial Vir- tual Remote environment as a prime example. That DOD-wide instance of Microsoft Teams is now being retired in favor of individual but interoperable
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