Government agencies are technology procrastinators and having a board to oversee project timelines will help keep IT projects on track and accountable, according to Department of Energy Chief Information Officer Max Everett.
“The way that procrastinators get stuff done [is] we set external milestones. Somebody else has to know and keep you accountable,” said Everett at a June 26 AFCEA event. “I have noticed over my years that the federal government shares that trait with me.”
The Technology Modernization Fund, established by the Modernizing Government Technology Act in December 2017, provides agencies with financial grants for IT modernization projects, but the money is doled out based on the achievement of project milestones.
The Department of Energy was one of the first three agencies to receive funding from the TMF to help expedite its migration to cloud-based email across the agency.
“I walked in the door, as my team will tell you, talking about this when it was simply just proposed legislation,” said Everett. “I understood the model that the MGT Act was going for, the one that’s intended to encourage, the one that’s intended to address in a fundamental way the way that we manage technology in government.”
According to Everett, many were apprehensive that requesting funding from the TMF would result in cumbersome oversight from the Office of Management and Budget and the General Services Administration, which manage the fund.
Everett, however, said that the oversight provided by those two agencies acted as a “stake in the ground” to move his team and the entire agency forward on the proposed changes.
“The teams who worked with GSA and OMB were actually incredibly helpful. They wanted our feedback, they asked for our feedback, and they incorporated it in real time as we worked with them, and I couldn’t be more impressed with that. That’s the picture of how we should work together as government,” said Everett.
Beyond DoE’s email upgrade, Everett said that the process of going through the TMF proposal helped to improve the culture in his agency, by forcing multiple components to work together and report a cohesive plan all the way to the agency secretary.
“One of the things I think was really important about TMF, and was important for my entire team, was this idea of building a business case about having a holistic picture that you could present to leaders about where you’re going and why,” said Everett. “This project was not just moving people to email; it’s much, much broader than that and it’s going to infect all of these different areas that we have to improve upon.”
The TMF board has been active in encouraging agencies to apply for funding, even if only to test out the viability of certain IT projects on a new set of eyes. Since the first set of awards, the fund still holds $55 million of its original $100 million in potential awards.
“I would challenge you to go after that money. I would challenge you to go put a proposal together. We’ll meet with you, I’ll share anything we did, I’ll share our numbers and everything. Any of that. We’ll be happy to sit down and talk about our lessons learned, and what we did right, and what we could have done better,” said Everett. “Because I’ll tell you, if others don’t go after that money, I will. I’ve already got my team working on our next proposal right now.”
Jessie Bur covers federal IT and management.
