federal

My Wish List for Federal IT Contracting

Jeff Gallimore Uncategorized , , ,

U.S. Constitution

I was on an industry panel at the ACT-IAC DevOps Forum a few weeks ago. The first question the moderator asked was, “From your industry perspective, what could the Federal Government do to increase the adoption of DevOps?” The moderator and panelists had a prep call a couple of days prior to the event so I had a chance to think about my answer in advance. I chose to let loose on something I would like to see in federal contracting (the first one in my wish list below). After the event, I thought about more contracting approach changes I would like to see adopted by more agencies.
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ACT-IAC’s Legacy System Modernization Approach Too Legacy

Jeff Gallimore Uncategorized , ,
Anchor from Kyle James
“Anchor” by Kyle James is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The Federal Government has a lot of legacy systems and spends a lot of money on them. In fact, according to a white paper on legacy system modernization from The American Council for Technology (ACT) and Industry Advisory Council (IAC), the Federal Government plans to spend $37 billion on “legacy” IT in 2017.

Lots of organizations struggle with legacy systems. Or more to the point, they struggle to maintain and make changes to them in a way that provides the pace and value the organization wants. So given the scale of this issue in the Federal Government, ACT-IAC took a crack at providing a “best practice” approach for modernizing legacy systems in the white paper I just referenced.

I read the paper a couple of times. I definitely had some strong thoughts and feels as I read it. I couldn’t keep them bottled up so I suggested some changes to how the Government should think about legacy systems modernization on Excella’s blog. I could’ve written a lot more (like on the role of DevOps, which shouldn’t be in the “DevOps/Sustainment” phase — see page 20 in the white paper), but the post was already getting lengthy. Let’s consider this a good start for discussion and iterate from there.