How Your Agency Can Make IT Modernization Work

The message gets thrown around ad nauseam, but it doesn’t lose significance: government must reform its legacy IT systems. The time to modernize is not now — it was yesterday.

With legislation like FITARA, modernization inches closer. Federal CIOs are now exploring how they can efficiently bring about change in their agencies.

“FITARA is yet another catalyst to allow agencies to start using PortfolioStat,” Grant Thornton Global Public Sector Principal George DelPrete says, referencing an OMB tool for locating wasteful and duplicative spending on internal programs.

“But it’s never ending,” DelPrete says. “New needs keep coming up.”

As it stands, 75 percent of the government’s annual IT budget goes directly to supporting legacy systems, GAO Director of IT Management Issues David Powner says.

In an effort to decrease the need for that spending, the FY17 budget proposes a $3 billion revolving fund to help agencies upgrade outdated systems. The point of the fund is to support great ideas, but it does so on the premise that those ideas will yield a return that then goes back into the fund.

“This is a self-perpetuating thing,” McKinney says. “Accountability is critical.”

Part and parcel to that accountability is selecting the right projects for the fund. And when agencies propose a project, they must pinpoint the area in which they can make the most effective change.

“We have to break down and define legacy systems,” DelPrete says. Once that’s been done, agencies should analyze the components of each system and funnel resources to the most fixable problem areas.

Having proven the feasibility of modernization, DelPrete says, agencies will be able to scale the process to more impactful projects.

To take full advantage of the kind of work the fund aims to support, agencies must also strive for agility. For federal IT, that means seeking constant internal and external feedback as well as observing the market trends of the industry.

“Look at things that are happening in industry, and find a way to apply that within your own business processes,” DelPrete says.

This could be piloting new technology in a sandbox environment or strengthening research and development, but the end goal is finding areas ripe for modernization and moving forward with them.

Pending the affirmation of this revolving fund, government is on the right track to updating the cinderblocks of its IT systems. And as less money falls from the budget directly into operations and maintenance of those old systems, agencies will have a growing financial resource at their disposals.

But the success metrics of modernization are not solely about numbers; they are also about people.

“As we design new legacy systems modernization plans, the core of each should be how that effort benefits the mission and the end customer,” DelPrete says.

For more information on federal IT modernization, watch this recent viewcast with Grant Thornton.

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