“A seamless, secure, interoperable infrastructure that enables the mission providing optimal service levels to citizens, businesses and governments and within our own government.”

Those words from GSA's Von Harrison sum up what government and industry leaders see as routine for the government infrastructure of the future.

But first we have to get there.

Say the word “infrastructure” and often eyes begin to glaze. Infrastructure is always someone else’s problem. “How are they going to fix it?” is often the question on the minds of the public.

Infrastructure; it’s not sexy, but essential. The recent collapse of the I-35 bridge clearly demonstrates the need to maintain and constantly upgrade all of our “infrastructures”, including our government’s IT infrastructure.

Everybody agrees it needs to be done. But finding the money is not often easy.

“Money is always an issue. When you look at consolidating or getting multiple stakeholders, the ‘pass the hat’ or ‘dialing for dollars’ approach has always been difficult,” stated Federal Executive Forum moderator Jim Flyzik during the recent program on “Building Government's Future Infrastructure” produced by Trezza Media Group and broadcast on Federal News Radio.

Money was just one of the topics government and industry infrastructure leaders discussed. They delved into planning and implementation challenges, managed services and what the future holds for federal infrastructure optimization efforts.

Taking part in the discussion were:

• John Johnson, Assistant Commissioner, ITS, FAS, GSA

• Barry West, CIO, Department of Commerce

• Bob Suda, Associate CIO for Integration and Operations, Department of Agriculture

• Von Harrison, Infrastructure Optimization Line of Business Program Manager, GSA

• Tom Simmons, Area VP for Federal Systems at Citrix Systems,

• Ed Vacaro, Partner, Homeland Security Federal Systems, Unisys

For Commerce’s Barry West, that means stepping up to the plate on Enterprise Architecture and really treating EA as a true program and quit going through the motions. “We really need to engage enterprise architecture. Maybe we need to change the name to business transformation. Maybe it’s time to get rid of that name.”

For GSA’s John Johnson, “If I had to boil it down to a few words, I would say ubiquitous, secure, and reliable communications. In other words you can send and receive information wherever you are whether it is wireless or wired or what have you.”  READ MORE

Challenges, Challenges, Challenges

Optimize the infrastructure of 135 departments and agencies. Do you centralize or decentralize? Do you keep the effort in house? Do you outsource? How about managed services? Do you use GSA for your acquisition or some other GWAC? Agencies such as the Department of Agriculture are tackling these hard questions.

“At USDA, we have a number of things going on in the areas of both network as well as in our infrastructure optimization areas,” says Associate CIO Bob Suda. “Help Desks, obviously we are looking to consolidate a lot of our Help Desks across the department and consolidate email.” READ MORE

Optimization Begins With Enabling

“What we try to do is be the enabler,” says Unisys' Ed Vacaro.

“When an agency or department is looking at moving in the direction of consolidation or taking optimization into consideration, we work very closely with them looking at what they currently have, where they want to go, and build a vision for the future with them,” explains Vacaro. “We provide the capability along with the people and the services and even the technologies necessary to help get there. We work with all the providers involved and are the overall enabler.”

According to Tom Simmons of Citrix, the company is one of many partners in industry that is looking to help the government provide building blocks to achieve the missions and goals. “Citrix is all about providing access to critical IT resources to users, whether they are citizens, government employees or contractors,” explains Simmons.

“We focus on the changing technology around applications because how they are developed and presented puts a lot of pressure on the network and the infrastructure to connect users to the IT resources.”  READ MORE

In House, Outsource or Managed Service?

Infrastructure optimization and modernization is complicated. Today’s government does not have enough trained professionals to do the job themselves. So do you outsource it? Or do you turn to the concept of the managed service, which isn’t necessarily outsourcing but it’s providing someone with a managed service. So how do you decide whether or not to outsource things or use a managed service or buy it? It is an issue that comes up all the time. READ MORE

Money and Governance

When upgrades are needed the question always comes down to dollars and sense. Infrastructure costs money. There are a variety of viewpoints in and out of government about how to put a governance structure in place or some model in place that allows that finding and that money issue to be resolved. READ MORE