Let me tell you a story, stop me if you’ve heard it before: A large Cabinet agency wants to modernize its financial management system by going to a shared service provider. After spending tens of millions of dollars over the last few years, they realize the effort will not work and terminates the initiative. Then, within a few months of ending that approach, they go out to industry seeking their help.

So how does this story end? Is there a punchline?

Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), the chairman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight and Management Efficiency, may get the answer on Sept. 26, when he holds a hearing looking at this exact story for the Homeland Security Department.

“DHS was told to go to a shared services provider and implement those systems and change through that, and even when the Government Accountability Office predicted it wasn’t going to go well, they continued, only for that prediction to come true,” Perry said in an interview with Federal News Radio. “After spending something like 60 percent more than originally estimated, DHS has zero to show for it, and no one is accountable.”

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The 27th annual survey of federal chief information officers by Grant Thornton and the Professional Services Council should serve as a warning to Congress and the Trump administration.

Throughout each of the sections on IT modernization, cybersecurity and innovation, the one most common theme wasn’t the need for more policy and legislation. But time and again, CIOs and other IT executives said having the right people would make or break their efforts.

No real surprise here, I know. We’ve heard this concern before. But what’s different this time is the building crescendo of IT modernization. Between Congress likely passing its second IT-focused bill within the last three years, to the Trump administration’s 36-point draft modernization strategy, to the maturation of many of the Obama administration’s priorities like cloud, digital services and agile, the time to address the workforce challenges is now.

When Congress wonders why agencies aren’t moving to the cloud more quickly, or keep getting hacked, or continue to hang on to the waterfall approach for IT development, it all comes back to people and training. And that’s two areas where there is little-to-no talk about in Congress or the Trump administration.

Every public and private sector manager says they need more people, and most boards of directors —whether it’s the 535 lawmakers on Capitol Hill or some investment management group putting millions into a startup — know people tend to be the biggest cost they can control to an organization.

The difference for agencies, however, is they aren’t playing on the same field as the private sector, so a good year doesn’t portend more resources. And with agency reform plans focusing on shifting workloads, shared services and consolidations, the money to train or bring in employees with the necessary skillsets is hardly mentioned.

Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) is trying to address this challenge through his Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act, which the Senate included in the Defense authorization bill last week, giving it a clearer path to becoming law. The bill would let agencies retain savings by moving off legacy IT systems for up to three years.

Here’s the catch, and the PSC and Grant Thornton survey highlights this really well, the skillsets needed to successfully move off old technology and into the cloud, for instance, and shut down that old system just doesn’t exist broadly across the government.

“The CIOs are not the only ones feeling the impact of an under-resourced and skilled staff. One in four online respondents believe the lack of resources has a significant negative impact on staff morale and leads to staff burnout,” the survey states. “Shifting resources to tasks they are not qualified to do may result in significant rework and missed targets on CIO initiatives.”

Respondents say the hiring freeze and budget uncertainty also hampered the IT modernization initiatives.

When CIOs talk about agile and dev/ops, the people piece again is among the biggest roadblocks.

“Our survey saw responses related to not having enough skilled agile practitioners and trouble getting some groups on board with Agile, with a drop in responses related to procurement related issues,” the survey states. “This reinforces the point that, as more agencies adopt agile as the default, challenges begin to occur in other areas of the organization that are not used to the new speed of development.”

The survey found good news around the adoption of the agile methodology: 82 percent of all respondents say they are using this approach for almost half of their IT projects.

“Some CIOs continue to note a few of the same challenges implementing agile for large IT development projects from last year, but overall, there was a notable shift to CIOs reporting issues indicative of their agencies’ increasingly mature agile processes,” the survey states. “The agencies that are over the hurdle of initial agile adoption are reporting issues with non-development related activities. For example, one respondent said, ‘[One] challenge, not limited to agile, [is that] development [and] test environments do not allow for full-scale testing.’ Another respondent noted other challenges to adopting agile practices include difficulty with customer buy-in during development the process and weak points in load testing and performance.”

CIO respondents also say they are struggling with how to measure the effectiveness of agile delivery. It’s having the right metrics, but it’s also having the people who understand how to develop those metrics.

Again, the key word here is people.

Dev/ops also is gaining a stronger foothold in government. The survey found 75 percent of CIOs say they are adopting this approach to continuous improvement.

But the workforce challenges come out there, too.

“Some organizations have reported having trouble adapting to the DevOps culture, which may have been affecting its adoption rate,” the survey states. “The two most common issues contributing to the slow adoption of DevOps include a widespread lack of understanding what DevOps is and the difficulty of the cultural shift within existing organizations.”

The survey also pointed to the need for better training current staff on how dev/ops works.

“Part of DevOps is also failing quickly and recovering quickly to avoid large system downtimes. A big challenge, according to one CIO, will be getting agency staff to make the mental shift that ‘it is okay to fail and to fail rapidly… and letting people become comfortable with [that concept].’”

Without a doubt, the most discussed workforce challenge over the last decade has been in the cybersecurity realm.

The survey reinforces the need for more training, higher pay, and maybe for the first time, it shows agencies, such as the Homeland Security Department, that have tried to be more like the private sector by giving salary increases just aren’t working well enough.

“CIOs also expressed the continuing challenge of trying to recruit and retain qualified cybersecurity personnel. One CIO referred to ‘a very slow hiring process, and a security budget that was too small to attract and retain qualified cyber staff,’” the survey states. “Another CIO cited that even though they had a special hiring authority that allowed them to ‘pay a 25 percent pay bump for cyber staff, it isn’t high enough — it only gets 2nd and 3rd tier cyber talent, not the A team.’ Another stated, ‘we lack the cyber workforce because pay isn’t equitable with the private sector,’ and suggested they develop a cyber pay scale between GS-15 and SES rates to attract top cyber talent.”

What drives this point home even further is when PSC and Grant Thornton asked respondents what the biggest threats to their environment are, legacy IT, human error, malware, phishing campaigns were the top answers. All of which come back to training both IT workers and employees more generally.

There is light at the end of this workforce tunnel. The CIO Council recognizes the need to improve the hiring process to bring in needed skillsets more quickly. The council is holding a hiring fair on Nov. 6-7 in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Hurd has been talking about creating a cyber national guard of sorts, and once the MGT Act is on the books, he plans to turn his full attention to that effort.

But the Trump administration has a prime opportunity in 2018 — the 40th anniversary of the Civil Service Reform Act — to once and for all fix the General Schedule for many critical positions across government, and do it not based on studies by federal unions or conservative think tanks, but by listening to the people who do the hiring and are being hired.

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If the departments of State, Agriculture and Housing and Urban Development are any indication, federal technology offices are in store for major shakeups over the next year.

And for many, that may not be such as bad thing.

Details of all three agencies’ Trump administration-mandated reform plans began to come out over the last few weeks, and while the planned changes are broad in scope, the trend is clear: reduce the back-office duplication in terms of both people and services, and centralize the oversight.

Let’s start with USDA, whose Secretary Sonny Perdue has been in front of the message by offering details before they leak out — of course, the same can’t be said for the other two agencies, but we will get to them in a minute.

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Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) proudly announced on Sept. 13 at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit in Washington that his baby was on the fast track to graduation. Of course, the chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on IT was talking about the Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act and its inclusion in the Senate’s version of the National Defense Authorization bill.

In a few short days, the MGT Act went from being a shoe-in for the NDAA to some giving it less than a 20 percent chance of making it in the final bill.

Multiple sources said Sept. 18 is D-Day for version two of MGT and the NDAA.

Industry and congressional observers said Senate leadership will decide on Monday whether to add another set of amendments to the NDAA. If they do, sources said the MGT Act likely would be included.

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More than 84,000 federal employees are in the 2210 job series for information technology. The number of employees who work as IT specialists, IT project managers or in the areas of applications software, network services and systems administration has been fairly flat over the last five years. From September 2012 to September 2016, agencies have increased by just over 1,400 employees.

This slow growth comes as the dependence on and spending for technology has increased rapidly.
It’s easy to see, the supply is far from keeping up with demand.

This is why the CIO Council, the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget are hosting a hiring fair Nov. 6-7 in Silver Spring, Maryland to make it easier to hire IT professionals in the GS-7-to-15 grade levels.

A senior administration official said agencies have repeatedly criticized the federal hiring process for taking too long. The official, who briefed the press ahead of the announcement and requested anonymity, said having an enterprisewide approach to hiring these important and hard-to-find positions just made sense.

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The thaw in industry-government collaboration for acquisitions has yet to fully materialize. Even after more than six years since the first mythbusters memo from the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, the freeze at many agencies remains deep into the permafrost.

OFPP is planning a third mythbusters memo as part of its continuing effort to improve communication around acquisition.

But there are signs that the sheet of ice is starting to crack.

In 2017 alone, four agencies held reverse industry days — the IRS, the General Services Administration, the Homeland Security Department and the Defense Department — where they bring in contracting officers and other acquisition professionals to learn from industry.

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This is the 14th year of the Office of Management and Budget sending to Congress the annual e-government report. Despite the fact the Obama administration tried to convince lawmakers the report, required by the E-Government Act of 2002, was no longer necessary, House and Senate overseers still want the shelfware.

The report remains chock-full of fun facts about e-government — a once-popular term that has been transformed into digital services and digital transformation by the federal community.

OMB released the 2016 e-gov report to Congress in late August.

OMB used to issue two reports on e-government — this one on implementation and another on the benefits of e-government. Unfortunately for us, OMB hasn’t issued an e-government benefits report since 2014, which offered more details on where money is spent.

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On Halloween, the Homeland Security Department’s Automated Indicator Sharing (AIS) program will turn two years old.

Back in 2015, then-Secretary Jeh Johnson celebrated the successful launch of the program to create a two-way secure sharing of cyber threats between government and industry.

Once the cake was cut and the confetti on the watch floor at the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) was swept up, the hard work really began to get industry to take part in the two-way sharing approach.

As DHS hits the two-year anniversary of AIS, the program continues to crawl forward.

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Call it a 36-point plan or a modernized IT modernization strategy, but no matter what moniker you use, the American Technology Council in the White House is trying to put its stamp on federal efforts to move off of legacy technology systems.

ATC released for public comment on Aug. 30 its draft IT modernization strategy with a definite cybersecurity flavor.

The council, led by Chris Liddell, President Donald Trump’s director of strategic initiatives in the White House and director of the ATC, set out 36 deadlines for agencies over the next year, including 24 in the next 90 days.

The draft plan cuts across two broad cybersecurity focused areas: Network modernization and consolidation and shared services to enable the network of the future.

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The long-wait is over. The Trump administration has revealed the names of the four people who could, possibly, maybe hold key federal management positions. It was like someone poured an entire bottle of Drano to move the clog that has backed up White House personnel.

On Sept. 2 at around 7:49 p.m., the White House announced President Donald Trump intends to nominate 42 people to fill senior roles in his administration.

The most important of which—at least for the federal technology and acquisition communities—are the long-waited, much anticipated nomination of Emily Murphy to be the administrator of the General Services Administration.

Murphy has been a senior adviser at GSA since January when she went there from the House Armed Services Committee.

While just as important, the White House finally revealed the names for two of five management positions at the Office of Management and Budget–Frederick Nutt for controller and Margaret Weichert for deputy director of management.

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