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With technology changes occurring rapidly, many agencies have begun seeking out ways to modernize their IT organizations to better prepare for the future. To help you along this journey, we have pulled together the top 10 tactics for modernization.

1. Identify Functional Needs of Constituents and Supporting Departments

This first tactic to modernize your agency’s information technology (IT) infrastructure is to identify the functional needs and business requirements of the users and departments you support. Begin by assembling a group of key stakeholders, including internal departments and constituents, to gain a better understanding of the functional needs of your internal and external users. Develop a persona for each of your stakeholders that includes their role, high-level needs, daily behavior and basic technology demographics (i.e. types of devices used).

2. Assess Your Current Environment

Once you have a better understanding of your users' underlying business requirements, you must inventory and assess your existing infrastructure and supporting applications. This inventory process should provide a base level of knowledge to understand the current capacity and capabilities of your existing infrastructure, and can also serve as a benchmark for comparison in the future.

3. Define Your Vision and Goals

To establish your agency’s strategic vision and goals, map your previously developed user personas to the capabilities of your existing infrastructure. This also will identify potential gaps within your agency. It’s also important to factor in the strategic priorities of other senior leadership within your agency, including elected officials, which may impact your department's priorities and direction in the future.

4. Establish an Information Technology (IT) Governance Structure

IT governance is a key functional aspect to modernizing and sustaining your agency’s infrastructure and business processes. Start by assembling a board of governance composed of internal and external stakeholders. Use this board to create and establish a sustainable framework of rules and evaluation criteria to evaluate and execute new programs. As a best practice, it is important to educate your stakeholders and internal department employees on the value and purpose of the vision, goals and governance structures you establish during this process.

5. Assess the Government Technology Landscape

As you look forward, it is important to analyze key trends and shifts in consumer behavior that may impact the future needs of the users your agency supports. Create a regular conversation regarding emerging trends and technologies with your key stakeholders and embed this as an aspect of evaluation within your agency’s IT governance structure.

6. Optimize Existing Infrastructure and Applications

With a thorough assessment of the current and future IT landscape and a new IT governance structure in place, it is time to begin the process of executing your agency’s IT modernization strategy. It is important to begin this process by identifying ways to optimize or repurpose existing infrastructure and applications to meet any of the functional business requirements you uncovered at the beginning of the process.

7. Educate Employees To Increase Awareness of and Familiarity With New Technologies

A major accelerator of government modernization efforts is accomplished by educating and exposing agency employees to new technologies and architectures. For IT employees, education provides invaluable external stimuli that can accelerate the adoption of new tactics and best practices within your IT organization. For non-IT employees, education provides a catalyst to embracing new systems and processes that may be consolidated or changed within your agency’s modernization efforts.

8. Experiment and Pilot Emerging Technologies

The best way to keep your agency’s IT organization on a continuous path of modernization is by conducting regular experiments or pilots with new and emerging technologies. Using agile project management and development processes, your agency can continuously create a series of small-scale minimum viable products (MPVs) that will help you anticipate and prepare for the future needs of the users you support. Start this process inside of a sandbox development environment to provide the most adaptable platform for testing that mitigates any risks involved with testing live data.

9. Partner To Fill Gaps (Sponsored)

As you lead your agency through an IT modernization effort, you will uncover gaps in expertise or technical capacity throughout the process. When this occurs, look for organizations, companies or other government agencies you can partner with to provide additional expertise, technical capacity or support. Many government agencies, such as Oakland County, Michigan [PDF], have successfully implemented IT modernization efforts that can be used as a reference and validation for your journey. HP provides a variety of tools and expertise that you can use to guide your agency through the IT modernization process.

10. Measure and Validate Success

After the IT modernization process begins, continuous reporting and measurement are critical components to validate the effectiveness and impact of your agency’s efforts. Use the benchmarks established through the previous assessments of your infrastructure and applications to track and adapt your modernization program over time. It is also important to leverage your governance structure and board as mechanisms to review and respond to any data accordingly.

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Autor(en)/Author(s): Dustin Haisler

Quelle/Source: Government Technology, 27.04.2015

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