Cloud deployments and infrastructures are dynamic, ever-changing and different for each federal agency—but across the board, embracing adaptability, agility and keen risk-acceptance can spur more successful implementations, two federal officials explained Thursday.
During a virtual Nextgov panel, Small Business Administration’s Bill Hunt and Government Accountability Office’s Tom Johnson reflected on agencywide cultural aspects that can be conducive to operating transformational cloud capabilities.
“I think there are a lot of components that go into it. One is just a top-cover level willingness to actually try new things, and part of that is giving your teams the permission to be able to understand that they're going to fail,” Hunt, the chief enterprise architect in SBA’s Office of the Chief Information Officer, explained. “In government, that is a terrifying thing—that this service that you're about to stand up or about to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on might not work exactly how you think it's going to.”
Agile organizations that are compelled to pursue smaller initial endeavors and make less weighty mistakes without losing entire systems, generally fare well in the long run, Hunt said, noting “doing it in smaller chunks of improvement—that's really critical.” Johnson reiterated the importance of chasing smaller pursuits and victories, at the start.
“There's a temptation to kind of ‘swing for the fences,’ potentially in some of these projects—to do the big cloud project, as opposed to maybe doing like 20 smaller cloud projects to get the organization where it needs to be,” Johnson, assistant director for information technology audits in the Office of the Inspector General at GAO, said, adding “cloud implementations will start to expose some of those gears that don't quite fit right in your organization.”
In that light, agency insiders should consider h ..
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