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There’s a new Federal CTO in town and early looks at his agenda are filled with words like innovation and transformation. Aneesh Chopra was previously the Secretary of Technology for the state of Virginia and will now be working alongside the new federal CIO Vivek Kundra. According to a recent article in Federal Computer Week, Mr. Chopra outlined four themes that will guide his work in this newly created role:
1. Bring as much policy rigor as possible to transforming the country’s economy through technology-based innovation. “It will be important to think about how we introduce policy to foster innovation” nationally, as well as across state and jurisdictional boundaries.
2. Look for game-changing ways to address the president’s priorities through so-called innovation platforms, or new approaches using technology. Three areas of focus will be:
- Open standards. “We need the private sector to lead, but we need a culture of open standards,” he said. That doesn’t preclude proprietary standards, he added. But open standards and applications that could be shared and replicated easily would remain at the center of efforts to drive innovation.
- Government research and development. Chopra also envisioned redirecting where the government might focus its research and development commitment. “There’s an emerging debate of how far up the [R&D] food chain we should go” and whether the government should target resources closer to the application stage, he said, adding that he would examine opportunities “in the middle ground, south of procurement and north of R&D.”
- Crowd sourcing. Chopra said the government would continue to tap the potential of crowd sourcing, or the use of networks of contributors, to gather new ideas and fuel public-sector innovation.
3. Deliver on the president’s commitment to ensure that the country has a reliable and trustworthy digital infrastructure.
4. Commitment to greater transparency, citizen participation and collaboration.
An interesting quote from the article was directed at software developers: “We’re going to have start a dialogue to develop bug-free software or bug-free software development.”
In addition to focusing on policy recommendations and technology innovations that support the president’s priorities for the economy, health care costs and education, Chopra said he would also look for tools that could help spur innovation. One possibility is working with the General Services Administration to develop an “innovation sandbox” where project ideas could be tested and shared across the government. He also said the government would use new interactive technologies to seek broad public input and then begin to craft policy recommendations.
Sounds like visualization might be a good vehicle for this kind of collaborative input?
At iRise we applaud the focus on improving federal IT and applying best practices learned from the commercial world to the public sector. As taxpayers we should all be concerned about cutting wasteful government spending; failure is simply no longer an option. There is a huge opportunity to modernize and innovate along the themes outlined by Mr. Chopra and we support the effort.
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The Standish Group and others have reported over the past decade that more than 30% of all software made for users was, in hindsight, never needed or used to accomplish their mission. The project stakeholders discovered this only after the solutions were delivered at more than several thousand projects surveyed to date. Also reported widely, more than 20% of the code related to functionality and/or usability was found to be “missing” or “wrong” after the users had a chance to interact with the software in real-world mission scenarios. In the survey responses, the terms requirements “reworked” and “moved to the next release” are used interchangeable with the terms “missed”, “misunderstood”, and “changed.”
The Federal IT Budget – With the Standish statistics in mind, more than $10 billion dollars of the $70 billion dollar federal IT budget this year is earmarked for software modernization efforts. Most American citizens and government employees know these efforts are long overdue. The opportunity exists to reduce this expenditure by more than 10% or alternatively to get more for the taxpayer dollars invested on projects already in flight. There is a rapidly increasing “expectations gap” by users and acquirers alike as to what “good software” means for individuals and organizations to take care of business and fulfill assigned missions, tasks and goals.
The Government Needs To Innovate – Michael Schrage, a senior adviser to MIT’s Security Studies Programwrites, “Innovation’ isn’t what innovators do….it’s what customers and clients adopt. His research and advisory work explores the role of models, prototypes and simulations as collaborative media for managing innovation and risk. His ongoing work on strategic and “just-in-time” experimentation is at the core of several corporate transformation efforts. His insights into the economics of “hyperinnovation,” “‘iterative capital” and “innovation cross-subsidies” are redefining executive investment criteria for supply chain and customer relationship initiatives.” He is the author of Serious Play: How the World’s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate. In the forward provided by Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence; Tom writes, “this is simply the best book written on innovation I’ve ever read.” …. “Read! Act! Now!”, he concludes.
Robert Austin, Harvard Chair of the CIO Executive Program focuses on management of innovative and knowledge intensive activities, especially as applied in creative industries and information technology management. He has written on these issues in Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work (co-authored with Lee Devin) and The Role of IT in Innovation-Based Value Creation; where Rob writes, “it will soon be all too apparent. IT, finally mature enough to think of itself as an old dog, very badly needs a new trick.”
Partnering With The Government – Richard Frost is a Global Director at General Motors where he has responsibility for driving systems development, software engineering, and program management globally, including agile development, streamlined development processes, and requirements visualization. As a senior advisor to the SEI CMMI for Acquisition (CMMI-ACQ), a collaborative effort of GM, DoD and NASA, Rich has helped identify best practices for systems acquisition at GM and is helping incorporate these into a CMMI framework for the customers of technology.
Through innovation and partnerships like GM’s collaboration with SEI, iRise’s expansion into the Federal Market announced last month is tasked with saving the Federal Government a “fistful of cash” and helping accelerate the software modernization efforts over the next several years.
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