They’re operating under a continuing resolution, but agency information technology staffs are working hard on modernizing. Recently the office of the Federal Chief Information Officer came out with what it called a governmentwide operating plan. CIO Clare Martorana said the plan should not be confused with a strategy. At the recent ACT-IAC executive leadership conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin caught up with Martorana and asked what the difference is between a plan and a strategy…
Tom Temin: And a lot of modernization includes new digital services, new applications. And you talked a lot about sprints and the need to do rapid development, so forth. How does that work? And how do you balance that with the need for durability, accountability, long term maintenance, even in the sprint context, so that applications have some consistency over maybe decades?
Clare Martorana: Absolutely. The interesting thing about a sprint is the keys to success are making sure that you have subject matter experts and federal staff on a sprint team, right? There are wonderful contracting partners across government that could come in, air drop a team in, do an enormous amount of things, build a prototype, hand it to you and then leave, what we really find to be effective is actually building a cross functional team. Our vendor partners, our contracting partners, our federal subject matter experts, and people that have digital competencies, so that those people either from the United States Digital Service, or possibly even from a vendor coming in designing a sprint, but bringing our federal staff along on that journey, bringing those subject matter experts along because if you build a prototype of something, the concept of that is in order to allow us to pressure test, a technical concept, a technical solution, without investing, I need $10 million over the next three years, and I’m going to build a thing. And then it is going to be immovable by doing user research rapidly prototyping something to see if you can fulfill the needs of those users, you’re iterating and you are rapidly developing so that you are not pouring cement, until you know actually what you need to build, and then the path for future sustainment. Because one of the most challenging things that you can do is build something that is terrific. That then needs to scale. And you don’t have the funding, you don’t have the staff. And you don’t really have the organizational commitment to make sure that it can be sustained over a period of time. That requires partnership with your CFO, requires partnership with your acquisition team to make sure that you’re designing any of these solutions, so that they’re the most flexible, but also the most sustainable, long term… Read the full interview here.
