Frictionless transactions in federal IT

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This week on Federal Tech Talk, Kyle Tuberson, chief technology officer at ICF, shared with the audience some lessons learned for smoothing out transitions in several agencies. Federal information technology leaders certainly have had to make some transitions here in 2020.

During the interview, Tuberson talked about looking at objectives, understanding the functions of technologies, and selecting the correct partners.

He gave a great example of an agency that was backed up with phone calls from citizens requesting information. ICF implemented what Tuberson called “conversational AI” to get information faster to callers.

When it comes to migrating from a legacy system to the cloud, federal technical folks have many options. Because of Tuberson’s vast experience, he explained why there is a lot of confusion about “as a service.”  The interview gave a cogent breakdown of when to use Platform-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, and the well-known Software-as-a-Service.

If you want to accomplish the goals of your agency, you should become familiar with the technology that is available, but also know what is being required of you.  One way to see the big goals is to understand the president’s management agenda. Tuberson indicated that decision makers in the federal government should not adopt technology for the sake of technology.

The key to a successful transition is to have a completed project that moves the ball along for agency leadership rather than having bragging rights to the latest shiny object.