“The unthinkable has become thinkable,” a senior federal procurement official declared today as agencies consider new technology solutions in the face of increasingly stark budget choices.
“Five years ago, decisions we would not touch,” such as giving up control over agency IT systems,” today are on the plate and (we are) seriously considering,”said Mark Day (pictured at left above), director for Strategic Solutions the General Service Administration‘s Integrated Technology Services, a part of the GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service.
Moreover, “Government IT is at an inflection point,” said Day. “We will either become transformative–and have a greater impact on government–or we’ll become less relevant, with less budget, and (by default) have less impact” than technology departments generally have today, he said.
Speaking at a government technology forum sponsored by Cisco in Washington today, Day suggested how an “email system in the cloud that has 80% of the capability you need (at your agency), for 80% of the people, for 80% of the time,” which once would have been regarded as “crazy is suddenly thinkable.”
But as agencies contemplate savings of between 50% and 60% over traditional replacement systems, those types of choices are ones agencies are “starting to think about.”
Mobile is changing the entire delivery model for information, not only in government, but everywhere.”
Federal agencies are on the cusp of benefiting from an unprecedented array of technology innovations, as rapid gains in broadband capability, mobile technology, cloud computing and software applications are redefining how people work.
However, federal IT departments need to begin demonstrating that investing in those innovations is beginning to pay off, said Dave McClure (pictured at right above), associate administrator of GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies.
At the same time, they need to be careful to avoid making “a false choice between innovation and cost savings, or innovation and security,” he said.
McClure highlighted three developments that he sees redefining the discussion about IT in government:
“We are now at the point where IT is being asked to deliver on the (promise) of efficiencies,” within federal agencies, McClure said. “We’re also at a time for IT itself to be more efficient.”
McClure said federal IT departments are just beginning to see major budget cutbacks impacting their operations. Even then, few departments have had to contend with the 40% and 50% cutbacks that have forced state CIOs in recent years to rethink what is possible in IT, including using free solutions. Federal IT staffs need to think about how to deal with those kinds of dramatic changes and as importantly, how those changes could offer an opportunity to serve the public in new and more innovative ways.
Another development reshaping federal IT practices, McClure said, is the “tsunami of information” inundating agencies. While the potential for overload is high, so is the promise of harvesting value from that information in what McClure described as “the age of analytics.”
McClure suggested government IT departments need to “shift our focus from managing equipment and processes…and look at the troves of information… and how we can do more problem-solving through discovery and predictive mining of information.”
The other development McClure called “game changing is mobile. Mobile is changing the entire delivery model for information, not only in government, but everywhere,” he said.
“We thought of taking web screens and putting them on mobile devices. But now it’s about really delivering information on mobile devices,” he said, but doing it securely, and with privacy concerns kept in mind.
Mobile technology is changing how government views “how people will interact with us,” he said, with far reaching implications. “The app space, the procurement space, the management of data space, the operating system space are all changing because of mobile,” he said, calling the changes “refreshing.”
Solving the acquisition challenge for mobile, and how to address the bring-your-own-device phenomenon remains a major challenge for the federal government noted the McClure and Day, as well as fellow panelists, Mark Emery, vice president, CSC and Greg Sanchez, a chief technology officer at General Dynamics IT.
“We need to embrace (BYOD),” as part of the broad consumerization of IT, said Sanchez. “We are working on ways to secure BYOD at our company…looking at how do we protect our assets, and our customers’ assets,” that General Dynamics IT manages, he said.
At GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service and its ITS unit, “We’re having to think about standards that are not device-driven,” said Day, but “What is the functional capability that has to be on the device, and how we can allow the ability to do device wipes, etc.”