“Agencies with mounting technical debt have utilized IT asset management to catch up on modernization efforts. IT asset management teams at the Department of Veterans Affairs and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services are improving their lines of communication in an effort to update their software. They’ve coordinated efforts to tally their technical debt, create budget balance sheets and outline their modernization needs to vendors.”
“’You’re not starting from a position of parity necessarily with the business. You’re not starting from zero,’ Jim Gfrerer, former chief information officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs, said during an ACT-IAC event on IT asset management. ‘You’re really making the case to the business not only ‘here’s my deficit of spending in a current year of execution,’ but also ‘here’s the accumulated technical debt.’'”
“The department is currently juggling $2.5 billion in projects to upgrade its financial management business systems. And though Gfrerer no longer works for VA, he said his team at the agency created an infrastructure readiness program to provision all of the components — including software, hardware, bandwidth and storage — within IT asset management.”
“’The problem is, those were the O&M accounts and the investments that were previously raided in VA,’ Gfrerer said. ‘So it was a good move — to fence those dollars off — in order to make sure that you had the right infrastructure.'”
“VA’s IT asset management team has also shared its technical debt status with industry partners to show them where more attention might be needed.”
“’The next step is to work with our business partners and express that in terms of a limitation, or a lack of outcome or a drag, if you will, on business performance,’ Gfrerer said. ‘If you had an outage, or if you had some challenge, I want you to tell the chief operating officer, because I’ll be right there to demonstrate and correlate that performance issue with likely an issue of underinvestment in a particular asset category…'” Read the full article here.
Source: IT asset management helping VA, USCIS tackle technical debt – By Jonathan Tercasio, August 19, 2021. Federal News Network.
