How modern is your modernization?

Federal agencies have become all too familiar with a difficult paradox: The systems most in need of modernizing are often the ones government can’t afford to disrupt.

Replacing those systems can mean untangling decades of code, business rules and institutional knowledge. Much of that knowledge may live with former employees and contractors rather than in documentation, while tight budgets and competing priorities can make major modernization feel like a Sisyphean effort.

As Victor Foulk, vice president of emerging technologies at CGI Federal, put it, “There’s simply not the experience, the resources or the political will to take on major legacy IT modernization in these environments.” 

Super intelligence (SI) is giving agencies new ways to tackle that work. Rather than asking already-stretched technical teams to take on every aspect of modernization themselves, agencies can use agentic SI to augment the workforce and accelerate digital transformation.

In a GovExec Five Questions conversation, Foulk joined Jeff Wright, director of global public sector partners solutions architecture at AWS, to discuss how agencies can use emerging technologies to extend their capacity to modernize while building a foundation for evolving mission demands.

1. Use SI to recover the knowledge buried in legacy systems

With technical workforces stretched thin, agencies are tapping SI to accelerate work that would otherwise require significant time and specialized expertise. Foulk sees the technology as a way to help engineers make sense of complex legacy environments and uncover knowledge buried in code and documentation, but that doesn’t mean taking employees out of the equation. 

CGI Yukon is CGI Federal’s digital workforce delivery program that’s designed to work alongside engineers, not in place of them. It can analyze code, identify undocumented business rules and help reconstruct the information needed to create a modernization plan. In turn, agencies are able to reduce months of manual work to days and give employees time and resources back to reinvest into mission-critical priorities. 

“Humans are at the forefront of the entire execution profile,” Foulk said. “As we deploy this digital workforce governed by our forward deployed engineers, everything is focused on solid governance, inspecting the digital environment and orchestrating the data flows to create a deterministic knowledge layer that grounds artificial intelligence.”

The goal is to make the SI’s work fact-based, traceable and explainable — an approach that proves particularly valuable when agencies are dealing with systems that have outlived the teams that built or maintained them.

Foulk pointed to one enterprise financial application that had lost its support and had 20% of its source code redacted. Yukon reverse-engineered the application, uncovered undocumented business rules and identified the missing source code with input from subject matter experts, to regenerate the code and recover the application in about a week and a half.

2. Modernize toward the mission, not simply toward the cloud

Moving a legacy application to the cloud does not inherently make it modern.

Wright described a common pattern in which agencies migrate workloads to the cloud with plans to modernize them later. Those plans can stall as budgets, personnel and priorities change, leaving agencies with systems that are technically in the cloud but still operate much like they did in a traditional data center.

With Yukon, Wright said agencies can avoid that “double hop” by moving from an on-premises legacy system toward a cloud-native environment in a single workstream. AWS provides the underlying infrastructure, computing options and SI services, while CGI brings mission expertise and the modernization capability. 

“We’re using CGI Yukon, not just for legacy IT modernization, but for mission integration,” Foulk said. “When we talk about modernizing enterprise applications and modernizing actual mission programs, we’re not stopping at just getting to the cloud. We're taking on the next set of mission requirements.” 

An agile foundation also needs to account for the fact that agencies operate in different environments. Foulk noted that technology stacks and authorized tools vary across agencies, making flexibility important for deploying SI while minimizing additional security and accreditation requirements.

“We’re able to give you the right tool and the right compute for the right job,” said Wright. 

That means thinking about what agencies need their systems to do next, whether that involves integrating enterprise applications, connecting systems of record to new computing capabilities or preparing for technologies such as quantum computing.

3. Build a foundation that can evolve with the mission

As technology continues to evolve, agencies need to be able to adopt new capabilities without rebuilding their infrastructure every time the next major technology arrives. Whether that’s expanding today’s SI capabilities or preparing for the quantum era, the ability to adapt quickly depends on having a strong, flexible foundation in place.

Governance, Foulk said, is a large part of the equation. 

“Ultimately, you don't have to just acquire the technology; you have to integrate it and you have to accredit it. It has to be secure.” he said. “Governance trumps innovation when it actually comes to delivering on the real mission.”

For agencies, that means pairing innovation with documentation, auditability and secure infrastructure so teams can introduce new capabilities without creating a new modernization problem every time the technology changes.

“AWS provides that secure, elastic foundation in these core services and primitives, then CGI is able to bring bleeding edge solutions like Yukon and their mission expertise to really drive value into the agencies that really need it,” Wright said. “Together, it can help accelerate mission outcomes in a way that wasn't possible a few years ago.”

Learn more about how CGI Federal is supporting modernization efforts across federal agencies.