Leaders from government and industry see a rosy infrastrucuture future -- once we get there. 

“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 Von Harrison at GSA sum up what government and industry leaders see as routine for the government infrastructure of the future.

But first we have to get there.

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.”

Routine Part of Business

West advocates that EA really becomes a routine part of our business analysis and integrated into our routine business operations and strategic decision making. “That has to happen,” says West.

“Then the two underlying factors I think in making a common government infrastructure is security and then second the health of our government IT workforce of the future.”

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.”

Johnson says people are looking at the infrastructure to serve more as a utility to send and receive information so they can focus more on outcomes.

“Mission accomplishment,” says Johnson, “do I have what I need where ever I am whenever I need it. We’ll be looking at simplifying interfaces for security and reliability and focusing more on dominant business space awareness.”

Expanding Access

Expanding access to information is the goal, but there have to be some limits on access even though it may not be popular says USDA’s Bob Suda.

“I’d like to talk for a minute about the next generation coming into the government. We’ve got to make sure that they realize what they have access to. We can’t give everybody access to everything. The new generations are used to that.”

Suitor is concerned about things like records management and what is going to be affecting us from a legal standpoint down the road. For example, what emails do we save, which ones don’t we save from a more detailed perspective.

“But I think it’s getting bigger than that with enterprise contracts, how we look at those,” says Suitor. We are looking at short term and long term from those perspectives. But it all comes back to what is the information that is needed for somebody to do their job in the future.”

Situational Awareness

“Some of the things like iPhones and iPods, how does that have applicability to what we are doing here in government?” asks Ed Vacaro from Unisys. “Forget about the hardware and stuff and think about what is going on with the information.”

What’s going on is we need to think more about the need for situational awareness in what we are doing today says Vacaro. “In all aspects of government, in all aspects of what we do today, situational awareness has a lot to do with how we use the information.”

It’s all about access and control Vacaro goes on to say. “Take a look at a program like Networx that brings together the ability to take our entire infrastructure and create access to large amounts of information, it’s all about access presentation and control.”

“Now you have various forms of media and access devices that you can use to get to it. Once we have those capabilities and control mechanisms in place now anybody that needs to have the information any time they want it, anywhere they want it, that’s the vision of the future, so that you can do your job and have the information available any time anywhere.”

Next Generation Workers

Seconding Vacaro’s motion was Tom Simmons from Citrix.

“Our CEO has a term for the next generation of workers coming out of the colleges and universities today, he calls it the “echo generation”, says Simmons.

“They are used to this on demand environment where they get their news, instead of from CNN or CBS from My Space and You Tube. They file their assignments electronically over the web. They do this from their dorm rooms, from Starbucks; they do this from the beach.”

Simmons says these are the folks that are now coming into IT in both government and the private sectors. “It will be interesting to see how we accommodate this next generation coming on with that on time, on demand, anywhere availability of information as these guys come on line.”

Jim Flyzik summed it up. “As these new generations come up that they will assume a lot of these things in the case of infrastructure will be in place; just like they are today with the cell phones and the iPods and devices.”

“They don’t worry about how it works, they just make it work. I actually think we will see the day where we have, I actually wrote something about this thing, instead of a General Services Administration, there might be a Government Services Administration where there will be an agency providing government services and the agencies themselves will be focused on their critical mission, policy and the services and the infrastructure will be there as a utility to support them whatever they choose to do.”

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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.

For GSA’s John Johnson, funding depends on providing services that people will buy. And being very mindful of the need to provide customers with what they need in a timely manner as well as providing it as cost effectively as possible.

“I think we have a natural structure and that is customer feedback. If we don’t produce or provide them with what our customers want at the most reasonable cost possible, then we have issues.”  

So for GSA, funding is performance based. If GSA performs, they get their money.

Commerce Consolidation

Commerce is in the midst of a consolidation effort, which leads to interesting discussions about funding.

“It is a tough one,” says Commerce CIO Barry West. “We have several options and strategies to fund IT requirements programs and make enterprisewide purchases. West works closely with the CFO and with procurement executives on procurement and acquisition to ensure Commerce uses the best funding strategies.

“But what we are really finding tough is when you get into some of the issues where you have to roll your sleeves up and get into some of the tough issues like email consolidation and server consolidation,” says West. “It’s when you need some of that up front funding is really where it gets tough and you’ve really got to open up the hood and look under and really look at contracts.”

UDSA Framework

According to USDA’s Bob Suda, the department established an IT governance framework where agencies sit down prior to budget time to discuss their budgets for both infrastructure as well as their business applications.

Along with the approval process that agencies must go through the CIO shop for any IT procurement over $25,000, USDA has been able to find out what they are purchasing.

“We are going to be tracking those purchases through the procurement system to make sure that what we are buying is effecting the investment that they asked for up front,” says Suda. “We are going to be able to do the whole life cycle process of how we are actually providing the money and looking at savings while we can. We are consolidating a number of our contracts that we have for software.”

Right now UDSA agencies are buying their own software, but there are efforts underway at looking across the board through the EA process to determine what is being bought and make an effort to consolidate some of those contracts.

“We are moving forward from a procurement standpoint and a budgeting stand point, working very closely with our CFO and also our procurement executives as a team to try to carrel a lot of those costs that are occurring today,” declared Suda.

GSA LOB Priorities

“It’s how to spend money more wisely as opposed to spend more money,” says Flyzik. “You have to get over that first hump of getting that initial investment but then over time the goal obviously is to reduce the overall per unit cost of providing government infrastructure services.”

That point is not lost on GSA’s Von Harrison, who faces the task of setting up a line of business and getting money to fund that business.

Harrison approaches that task from two fronts.

“Clearly agencies need to prioritize their requirements,” says Harrison. “Sometimes that is easier said than done. Every agency is required to have some kind of governance structure; their architecture review board should have the ability to review investments, to reprioritize, to move money around to do whatever is necessary within that agency to make the right choices to support the mission.”

Agencies should also be maximizing the use of acquisition vehicles that are available to them, service level agreements and putting in place best practices that they’ve seen done in other places.

“From the perspective of the line of business itself, there are various funding models,” explains Harrison. “Some of it is agency contributions only. Some other eGov initiatives are a combination of agency contributions and funding by the managing partner or the lead agency.”

In the case of this line of business it’s a combination according to Harrison. “In the first year it was agency only, I think that speaks to the interest of the agencies in making sure that this line of business gets off the ground. In FY ’08 we will have additional funding kicked in by GSA and so managing that is probably far easier than the job that agencies have to do to manage their funding and governance issues.”

Private Perspectives

‘We look at governance from a couple of ways,” says Unisys’ Ed Vacaro. “Obviously we are a business and we have share holders and responsibilities to make sure that we keep up with those. But we’ve always worked in partnership with government and many times we’ve been called upon based on situations to step up and do that and we’ve done so willingly knowing that there will be something on the end that makes it whole.”

In the long run it’s always pretty much worked out for Unisys. The key thing here, however, is to make sure that when you get into situations like this that you have a very, very clear set of understandings with the program, with the contracts officer and with the whole management structure and make sure that that governance structure is well understood and in place,” says Vacaro.

“Otherwise you get a lot of misunderstandings and into a lot of long discussions later on about what did you really mean and how much is it going to cost?”

As time goes on, share-in-savings and performance based contracts are going to continue to be necessary to get the government where it needs to go. “Performance based is really the way it goes and we fully believe that getting paid for quality work is the best way to measure the effectiveness of a contract.”

We develop technologies and position them and develop them around our ability to either do a job better, or do a job more efficiently,” explains Tom Simmons from Citrix.

“A lot of what we do in presenting that technology as a solution has to do with the finances. What is the return on investment, what is the total cost of ownership? It wasn’t too long ago that I visited with a CIO, who is not represented on this panel, who said, I know that you are here to talk about my $1.3 billion IT budget but let me tell you that 90% of that is spent before I ever get it.”

For Citrix, the challenge is to show government how they can create budget for your solution out of what they are already doing.

“I think that’s the big challenge is to try to participate in those budget decisions and clearly articulate the areas of cost savings or cost avoidance,” says Simmonds. “We must stress how quickly you can get a return and then how often you can maintain that cost savings with cost of ownership analysis and other similar analyses.”

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In House, Outsource or Managed Service?

What do you do in a world where there aren't enough professionals to go around?
 

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.

Determine Priorities

“There are a number of agencies that are in the throes of A-76 studies,” explains GSA’s Von Harrison. “They are evaluating internally how they need to reorganize and what pieces of it they need to outsource.”

Harrison reports that one of the first things that they need to do is to determine what their security priorities are and what levels of security their infrastructure needs to address. And then they need to determine which parts of those are inherently governmental and which parts can be outsourced to companies that either will provide them either with a full slate of services or even partial.  

“Seeking managed services is one way of addressing the desk top,” says Harrison. “There are agencies that are already buying much more than that, their data centers are included in what they are buying.”

“There are agencies that are selling some of those services to each other. If they have good contracts, good practices, good processes, and other agencies, usually smaller agencies find it more economical to buy from another agency than to try and do it themselves. So there are a number of things that have to be considered when they do that.”

The bottom line is for agencies to be able to optimize they are going to have to consider all of their responsibilities. Everything is going to have to be on the table. Agencies can no longer turn away from considering options that in the past some of their employees were not in favor of considering because it may have meant that there would be a reduction in the number of government personnel.

Driven By Variables

Commerce is facing many of the same issues says CIO Barry West.

“It seems like the decisions are driven by many variables as far as outsourcing goes, including expertise in the vendor community, in house expertise, partnering with other federal departments and so on,” says West.

“Each decision is also impacted by the realities of available funding, lead time, future trends, and initiatives. Another key factor to consider is the service part of the mission of the organization. Outsourcing can relieve an organization of the chore of the routine IT function so that resources can spend time on the core business functions.”

One area West is looking closely at is email consolidation as many bureaus have embraced email as part of their core function.

“We are looking at setting up email Help Desks. It is something that can be outsourced, but only if you have the proper security, privacy, identity theft task force issues are considered first. Then, we can outsource a lot of this material and move on and really focus on the core mission of the department.”

Back To Security

It comes back to security, says USDA’s Bob Suda. “As far as whether we want to have internal staff or external staff do an IT job for us, it depends on the function.

For Suda whether it’s a small Help Desk or whether it’s a large Help Desk, whether it’s a Data Center or not, it goes back to what kind of systems we are housing in those locations and what are we using the data for.

“We are taking the approach that we want to make sure that we have a secure facility, a secure USDA and as part of that whole process is to make sure that there’s the right mix between management and the activities that are done day to day within the department itself,” declares Suda.

GSA Perspective

I think this outsourcing initiative or these managed network service initiatives are really spawned from a couple of different perspectives,” says GSA’s John Johnson.

“First of all there’s an erosion of our intellectual capital within the government and folks realize that it’s very, very hard to keep pace with the evolution of technology,” explains Johnson. “With the erosion of our intellectual capital one way to address that would be to rely more on the service provider to provide requisite services required.”

Johnson also says government is evolving and learning “how to manage in a Service Level Agreement driven environment; where we are looking at performance based contracts and we are measuring the effectiveness of our service providers in terms of them meeting what we need.”

Johnson predicts future growth as government managers become more comfortable operating in these arrangements. Johnson says today in the area of network services about 35% are managed network services arrangements.

Managed Services and The Evolving TSA

“Five years ago when we started up TSA we offered a managed service program where TSA was a nascent agency that had nothing and we came in as a complete provider and gave them everything,” explains Ed Vacaro of Unisys.

“It was a total turnkey solution. But as the agency has matured the mission has changed a little bit and their ability to manage more things and the need to control more of the IT infrastructure and information, we’ve realized that we have had to morph that. So what we are finding is that we have had to change our service offerings as the customers have changed and now we are offering a broader range.”

To do that Unisys is altering their ways of delivering the services as the customers are changing. “What we are really finding is that it’s not a kind of a binary thing where it’s either all in-housed or all outsourced, it’s a matter of we tailor it now to what is right for the particular agency,” says Vacaro.

“Is it that we just simply provide you with a consultancy service or staff augmentation? Or do we really take on more and more and become part of your IT organization where we do more and more of the stuff that you can’t do?” asks Vacaro.

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