The Innovation Adoption Kit - A Data-Driven Playbook for Enterprise IT Modernization in Government
Few challenges in government technology persist more than the following: how can agencies move faster to adopt new tools, while also reducing the duplication and sprawl that make technology costly to maintain and difficult to change? This report shows that agencies can address both mandates in tandem, rather than treat them as competing priorities.
Author: Kevin Hawickhorst, Research Fellow, Foundation for American Innovation
Federal technology leaders face three related demands: retiring decades-old systems, reducing technical debt, and meeting rising expectations from Congress, oversight bodies, the workforce, and the public. They must modernize at the pace of emerging technologies while continuing to meet mission needs.
Kevin Hawickhorst brings rigor and practicality to the subject. He draws on a roundtable that the IBM Center co-hosted with the Foundation for American Innovation. The event included keynote remarks from Justin Fanelli, chief technology officer of the Department of the Navy. Hawickhorst frames modernization as a challenge in portfolio management rather than as a series of disconnected acquisitions. Many modernization efforts have focused on successfully delivering individual projects; this report focuses on turning pilots into operational capabilities within an agency’s overall technology portfolio.
The author distills the roundtable discussion into three practices that agencies can use to guide the decisions they currently face.
First, the report argues that agencies must make the enterprise visible. Agencies cannot set sound modernization priorities until they understand
which systems they operate and how those systems fit together. Examples of agencies using process, data, and financial discovery to rationalize their technology portfolios give agency leaders a starting point.
Second, the report calls on agencies to measure pilots against existing systems. Standardized outcome measures, such as those the Department of the Navy uses across its technology portfolio, let leaders compare promising new tools with the legacy systems those tools could replace.
Third, the report calls on agencies to acquire while divesting, building system retirement planning directly into solicitations, project plans, and funding milestones—so that agencies identify what each new capability will replace. Drawing on the Navy’s Investment Horizons model, this lifecycle view treats technology retirement as a standard part of modernization.
This report represents a timely contribution to the IBM Center’s continuing work on government technology modernization. It complements the Center’s reports on digital modernization, IT roadmaps, and balancing transformation with legacy operations, including Digital Modernization for Government: An Implementation Framework and A Roadmap for IT Modernization in Government.
We hope this report will offer value to senior technology executives balancing speed against sprawl, program and contracting officials designing new IT solicitations, and congressional and oversight staff looking for a results-based review process. The report brings clarity and practical grounding around a topic central to the future effectiveness of government.