Progress is like water: it can come in a trickle or it can come in a wave.
On the issue of finally modernizing the government's cybersecurity and information technology, acting Federal Chief Information Officer Margie Graves is hoping to soon see a tsunami.
With the House passing the Modernizing Government Technology Act, the White House's formation of the Office of American Innovation and the American Technology Council, as well as the utilization of 18F and the U.S. Digital Service, momentum is building toward a swell of potential innovation that could position agencies on sound IT footing after years of leaky legacy systems.
"I feel like for the first time in a long time that the stars are somewhat aligning in the sense being able to bring forward the appropriate funding mechanisms and the appropriate acquisition approaches," Graves said, speaking on a panel at the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council’s (ACT-IAC) Management of Change conference.
The MGT Act sets up the mechanisms for agencies to reprogram unused funding to finance individual IT projects, in addition to an Information Technology Modernization board and central fund to oversee the application of larger scale upgrades.
With the Trump administration’s continued focus on innovation — and the hope that MGT will find favor in the Senate — Graves said government’s approach to technology procurement could soon start looking a lot more like Silicon Valley’s.
"My expectation is that we are going to be able to pull together this board — which is going to be heavily influenced by the Office of American Innovation as to what particular opportunities they are obliged to pursue — once the MGT Act passes Congress, and drive it like we would a venture capital board," she said.
"It’s going to have professionals on it that are from all disciplines, not just the technology area, so there will be some heavy emphasis on true technology architecture."
To help deliver that innovation with speed, the Trump administration put a broader focus on utilizing shared services as a strategy, citing it both its recent cybersecurity executive order and in its executive branch reorganization order.
Graves said that given the emphasis that shared services will command, the next step is to set the marker will provide industry with insights on what the goals will be.
"We’re going to adopt this plan on a scale that we’ve never done before. Therefore, we actually have to send a demand signal to the market," she said. "People in industry have come to us often and said, ‘We’re at the ready. We just need to see what kind of real handshake that we are going to have on the other side from government.’
"The handshake requires the preparation that we need to do internally within the federal government to set standards, to unify processes, to be able to get to a point where we, as the entirety of the federal government, can adopt and make best use of shared services."
The MGT Act now awaits a vote from the Senate.
