| | November 20179CIOReviewthat would occur, nor the need (and benefit) to enforce some consistency across federal agencies and their IT environments.The question is "Where do we go from here?"The first, and most important step in my view, is to remove the influence of politics and those that live and play in that arena. From the exposure I've had, the political world has a very poor understanding of these issues, other than knowing that there are problems. Congressional interns and aides will not solve this problem, nor will any amount of regulations they may promulgate.Forming a commission or other entity of tech company leaders is not the answer either. There are too many vested interests at play in that scenario, and those interests will inevitably get in the way of arriving at the correct path.I also suspect that change from within is likely to be difficult, not due to political influences alone, but simply because of the nature of such large organizations.What is needed are practitioners; CIO's, CSO's, Project Managers from outside the current federal IT infrastructure. Those that live and breathe in the use of technology to support for profit organizations on a day to day basis, with no vested interest in any one technical solution.Such people could assess the top line state of the various organizations, scoring them from the standpoint of risk, accessibility and data governance, and from this ranking begin to establish the priority of each organization.Having consistency in the underlying infrastructure is key, and brings savings and efficiencies that are impossible to contemplate in the current state.What we should all contemplate is the irony; we lead in industry technology in so many ways, we have, as a nation, been the birthplace of so many disruptive and forward thinking tech companies, yet we have a federal technology infrastructure that is far from being a representative of this.We can let things continue as they are, or we can confront the issues and do something about it.This problem will take more than one administration to resolve, and the need to fix it should be apolitical. Unfortunately it will take a politician who really "gets it" to make this happen, and when it relates to technology, I haven't yet become aware of such a person. What is needed are practitioners; CIO's, CSO's, Project Managers from outside the current federal IT infrastructure. Those that live and breathe in the use of technology
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