To meet dynamic business needs and evolving requirements, today’s government IT leaders must move faster and adopt a future-focused mindset.
Old technology deployment approaches that take months or years to deliver results won’t work in this new environment, said Alexis Bonnell, a Google Cloud emerging technology evangelist who spoke to public-sector IT leaders at a recent Government Technology Digital Government Summit.
Bonnell — the former chief innovation officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development, who joined Google Cloud in 2020 — recalled working on IT initiatives that produced “time capsules” of past-their-prime technologies. Her mission now: helping agencies figure out how to modernize when mission requirements and the technology landscape are evolving at a breakneck pace.
"If we know everything's going to change,” she said, “then how can we be intentional to build a change engine instead of a time capsule?"
INCREASING SCALABILITY AND AGILITY
In the Government Technology session, which took place in Salem, Ore., in May 2022, Bonnell explained why CIOs must be more intentional about modernization. Industrial revolutions used to span decades, she noted. Today, they might take six months to a few years. Managing extreme change in a compressed time frame requires bold leadership.
The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, required agencies to transform operations in a matter of days.
“What happened in the last two years is that when agencies started needing to digitize their missions, technology teams and leaders like CIOs found themselves with more robust seats at the mission and business strategic table,” she said. “My CIO, CTO and technology peers are expected to have a point of view around the mission and the business in ways we maybe weren’t asked for before.”
Moreover, if IT leaders must constantly adapt to change, then flexibility must be top of mind for technology strategy. “I'm not going to do vendor lock-in anymore,” Bonnell said. “I'm going to demand interoperability. I'm going to want portability."
Fortunately, she said, new technologies and approaches offer CIOs new options to increase scalability, flexibility and agility. APIs can connect legacy mainframe systems to modern, decentralized architectures. Third-party vendors and organizations can contribute talent and creativity to public sector projects. Smart automation helps orchestrate complex environments, enabling faster, more effective solutions.
Savvy public-sector IT leaders will see opportunities to converge the best of their legacy systems with innovative cloud services to introduce new capabilities and produce new insights. Ultimately, this approach will help governments stop building technology time capsules and start creating IT engines that help future-proof their agencies and missions.
THE AGE OF CONTEXTUAL DATA
New demands also are driving government IT leaders to think differently about data, Bonnell said.
For example, as agencies become more data-driven, they’ll need to analyze mountains of information. But transferring data sets into centralized analytics tools becomes costly and cumbersome as data sets grow. New technologies are making it practical to bring analytics algorithms to the data instead of the other way around. That's a much more flexible and cost-efficient approach, Bonnell said.
She also noted the growing importance of supplementing traditional structured data with information that provides context for government decision-making. “We're in a day and age of contextual data,” she said.
How can government organizations best make sense of so many new variables? Bonnell suggested adopting an approach she called “information intentionality,” which involves deliberately creating frameworks and strategies to make the most of data-driven opportunities. This starts with identifying the data that’s most integral to your agency and then exploring your organizations goals and intentions for that data.
Perhaps that intention is to reduce software licensing fees without losing access to crucial data. Or an agency may want to determine how much value its legacy systems still deliver. With information intentionality, IT leaders can better map the flow of data required to improve operations, understand important issues and support decision-making.
Information intentionality, Bonnell said, ultimately comes down to using data to answer a straightforward question: “What are you trying to do, and what information do you need to do it?”
MORE MODERNIZATION TIPS
The Government Technology session included multiple best practices for successful IT modernization based on in-the-trenches experience. The top suggestions:
- Don’t go it alone. Most government agencies lack the in-house skills and experience required to modernize their IT systems. So, it’s essential to cultivate partnerships with vendors that have the right skills and to collaborate with other agencies or departments that share common goals.
- Manage change. The days of top-down mandates are fading fast. Today’s government IT leaders need change management techniques that bring stakeholders along and help their organizations and workforces adapt to new systems and approaches. When working with vendors, make sure they have change management frameworks and strong methodologies for training and encouraging adoption.
- Prioritize cost savings and security. Moving on-premises systems into the cloud reduces hardware expenses. Adopting more secure cloud platforms and applications eases anxiety about cyber attacks and data protection. These are the kinds of safety and savings issues that legislators and city council members can relate to. This doesn’t always mean eliminating legacy systems outright. Squeezing the last value out of legacy systems as you create and connect new, more agile systems is often a smart way to reduce risk while achieving impact.
With the future arriving faster than ever, government IT leaders need new technologies and approaches that help them react faster and navigate potential disruption. Bonnell summed up the essentials of the new modernization mindset this way: “In this constant state of change, resilience and flexibility are keys to the future.”
Visit Google Cloud’s State and Local Government Solutions site for more ideas and information.
