A new report draws on expert insights to frame a roadmap for successful technology change in government.
By Dan Chenok, Executive Director, IBM Center for The Business of Government
Federal technology leaders face the tension between pushing too hard toward new tools and piling on more systems, vs. moving too cautiously such that legacy platforms keep draining budget and blocking progress. A new report by the IBM Center for The Business of Government in collaboration with the Foundation for American Innovation – The Innovation Adoption Kit: A Data-Driven Playbook for Enterprise IT Modernization in Government -- argues that this is a false choice. Agenciesneed not opt for either path in isolation— they can do both at once, if they change their approach to scaling innovation.
That “both at once” idea sits at the center of a challenge federal IT leaders face constantly: retiring systems that are decades old, chipping away at accumulated technical debt, and answering to a growing list of stakeholders—Congress, oversight bodies, employees, and the public—who all expect results. None of that happens in isolation. Agencies have to modernize as new technology emerges, without losing sight of the mission served by that technology.
Rethinking Technology Change as a Portfolio Problem
Author Kevin Hawickhorst, Research Fellow with the Foundation for American Innovation, grounds the report’s analysis of this challenge based on a roundtable of government leaders and stakeholders that featured remarks from Justin Fanelli, the Department of the Navy’s chief technology officer, who has led work on a strategy to scale innovation into operations successfully. The report’s central argument: agencies will see far greater success by treating modernization within portfolio to manage, rather than as a string of individual acquisitions. Many past efforts have focused on improving one project at a time. This report asks a harder question—how do isolated projects advance operational capabilities across an entire technology portfolio?
From the roundtable discussion, the author pulls out three practices that agencies can put to work right away.
Know the current portfolio. Modernization priorities succeed best if viewed as part of an agency’s existing technology estate—what exists, and how the pieces connect. The report points to successes from agencies that have used process mapping, data analysis, and financial discovery to develop an inventory of their technology footprint before deciding how to adapt the next innovation.
Test new tools against a real baseline. A pilot may look promising in isolation, but to merit scale the pilot needs to outperform what it would replace. The Navy’s standardized outcome measures, applied consistently across its technology portfolio, give leaders a way to make that comparison directly rather than relying on intuition.
Buy with a migration plan already in hand. The report’s third recommendation involves building retirement of old systems into the planning for acquisition of new ones— migrations plans should be written into solicitations, project plans, and funding milestones from day one. The Navy’s Investment Horizons model offers a template for treating the system sunsets as standard processes for modernization, not unplanned cleanup efforts down the road.
Building on a Larger Conversation
This report has broad implications. The findings can help senior technology executives trying to move fast without adding sprawl, program and contracting officials shaping the next generation of IT solicitations, and oversight staff looking for results-based pathways to evaluate progress. The report frames out a shared playbook for a clearer, more disciplined way to adopt emerging technology at an operational scale.