New Today, Legacy Tomorrow: Reimagining Federal I.T.

Technology and workforce demands are rapidly shifting. Tech solutions that were once par for the course are often now outdated, expensive and inefficient (often by the time they’re finally put in place), causing agencies to reevaluate how they go about achieving their missions. The solution, however, is more than just a simple software update or migration to a new platform. It’s also a new style of approaching technology—a way of remembering that the best solutions are not static but dynamic.

Scott Gaydos, Chief Technologist, US Public Sector at HP Enterprise Services, discusses the best ways to approach new technology adoption. Gaydos shared how agencies can optimize performance and stay ahead of upcoming trends by evaluating IT solutions not simply as products, but as complex, evolving processes. What follow is his vision for a new style of federal IT.

In the past decade we’ve seen the proliferation of countless technological solutions and there’s no sign of stopping. New advances are announced every day. With progress constant, how can government agencies determine which solutions are right for them?

Looking at the technologies that have come out over the last few years, one of the biggest things for government agencies to do is really to create and look at multi-year technology plans. It’s very difficult to take these technologies and tactically say, “Here’s the answer. Take this technology, put it here. We’re done.” You’re never really done. It’s an evolution. So looking at it via a multi-year roadmap ends up giving you the big picture view of where you want to go. Now, how do you select the right ones? What do you actually do first? What do you do fifth? It’s those steps along the roadmap that are critical. It’s important that you not try to force-fit technology. Identify business challenges and then implement the right piece of technology to solve each challenge in a deliberate, multi-year period broken into steps. That’s the best way forward. One step at a time.

When thinking in terms of multi-year plans, how can federal agencies keep from getting locked in to outdated technology? If today’s climate is characterized by unpredictability and change, what should organizations know about staying prepared for the future?

One of the best ways to future-proof yourself from being locked in to any given technology is through abstraction. What I mean is to think about everything through the “as a service” model. Now, the underlying technology that’s in that service can and most undoubtedly will change in the years to come. The idea is to figure out what is the appropriate service level of that particular service. Then, allow the technology to evolve over time. The consumers of that service—be they agency employees or be they citizens—are constantly getting that same service, but the technology powering that service will be constantly evolving and innovating.

The word “innovation” is thrown about these days very easily, but what does it mean in actionable terms for agencies looking to stay ahead of the curve?

Innovation is a great word, and it’s a loaded word—because it means a lot of different things. Where innovation really starts to hit home is in applied innovation: How do I take a particular technology, and how do I apply it to me, to my situation, my business, my needs?

According to HP’s Cyber Risk Report 2013, nearly 80 percent of applications contain vulnerabilities rooted outside their source code, and nearly 50 percent of mobile applications studied use encryption improperly. In light of recent high-profile cybersecurity threats, how can organizations improve their security risk posture?

If you look at some of the latest statistics, it looks like every cybersecurity event will cost the owner $8 million in recovery alone. One of the best things that can be done on security is to be proactive. We will always need intrusion protection and detection, but where even more value for the dollar can be had is at the front-end: at system design time, at architecture design time. When you build code, you should examine the code before you’ve ever deployed it, looking for security holes so you can have preliminary defenses built right in. There needs to be a lot more emphasis on that upfront security, and unfortunately it’s one of those things that goes out the window very quickly, especially as deadlines loom and software needs to be rolled out. Rolling that back a bit and looking at what really needs to be done at the onset, during design and construction, is how agencies can dramatically improve security while still realizing huge savings.

Security really becomes a challenge when thinking about the vast amounts of government data. With so much data out there—both structured and unstructured—how can organizations harness big data to improve operational performance?

Data is a very interesting challenge. I believe today we’re looking at about four zetabytes of total stored, world-wide data. Projections currently say that by 2020 we’ll probably have about 35 zetabytes, the vast majority of that being unstructured information—be it unstructured email, unstructured tweets, unstructured Facebook statuses, etc. The tools we need to best evaluate unstructured data are very different than those we’re looking at for structured data. But at the end of the day both kinds of tools are necessary for an agency or an enterprise to really get the most value. So where the winners are going to fall out of all of that—and by winners I mean winners of delivering valuable government services, both internal and external to the government—are the ones that are going to be able to leverage that tool set and leverage the appropriate solutions in both the unstructured and structured space.

Fundamentally, how can tech solutions empower organizations to realize their mission?

It goes back to some of the things that we’ve talked about—looking at a multi-year strategy and focusing not just on the technology but also on the business value that an agency wants to produce. I can guarantee you: Three or four years from now there will be technologies out there that seem new and seem present-day, yet we didn’t really think about them a few years ago. The plan needs to be broad enough to ingest new technologies along the way and specific enough to tackle the right business challenges confronting government today and in the future.

For more about IT modernization, visit The New Style of IT.

About HP

HP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. With the broadest technology portfolio spanning services, IT infrastructure, software, personal systems and printing, HP delivers solutions for customers’ most complex challenges. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at hp.com/gov/transformation.

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