Federal, state, and local government IT leaders are preparing to share their own hard-won experiences about planning for and executing broad IT modernization and cloud adoption strategies at the Infor Government Forum in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 25.
Based on a friendly sneak-peek at the planned remarks of several speakers scheduled for the event, IT modernization via cloud service adoption will be top of mind.
Mason McDaniel, chief technology officer at the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, will discuss his extensive practical experience in pushing modernization initiatives, including emphasizing processes that can adapt and solve technical problems rather than adhere to an unnecessarily tight project schedule. “It’s better to succeed a month late than to make decisions that push for a schedule but leave an architecture that causes total failure of the effort,” he told MeriTalk.
He also plans to discuss the virtues of cloud adoption, but notes that saving money may not be the main reason to undertake the effort. Rather, “cloud is about improving quality and improving your ability to work off technical debt and keep up with future technical evolutions,” he said. He also plans to offer practical experience on how to pitch modernization efforts to agency decisionmakers.
In a separate panel discussion on state and local government IT modernization, Colin Keeler, director of financial systems at the South Dakota Bureau of Finance and Management, plans to discuss the broader–and perhaps improving–climate in state government to ramp up investment geared to replacing legacy systems.
The South Dakota state government, he told MeriTalk, has been in something of a “holding pattern” on IT modernization since the Great Recession, but “with the tremendous growth of the cloud, and vendors shifting from perpetual on-premise licensing models to SaaS and the cloud, it’s time for governments to start investing in and replacing or updating many of these legacy systems.”
On the same panel, Melissa Stover, ELMS Team Lead for the city of Minneapolis, said she plans to discuss the need for cloud migration, accuracy and real-time availability of data, and the importance of online privacy and security.
Click here for more information and to register for the event.
