Robert Osmond, chief information officer (CIO) at the Virginia Information Technologies Agency (VITA), outlined this week how “agile everything” is the direction he wants the state tech agency to take with digital workflows.
At the SAIC OutFront event on Jan. 25, Osmond explained how getting quicker and more efficient is a key for the agency’s success, and adopting an agile solutions mindset is the way to reach that goal.
“It’s really agile, everything,” Osmond said. “I know that sounds a little crazy, but it’s how do you buy good services faster? How do we regulate faster? How do we look at infrastructure like network faster? How do we look at server storage faster? How do we look an end-user devices faster?”
“It’s looking at how do you respond to those real time needs that people have,” the VITA CIO said.
Osmond talked about how to implement a more agile approach.
“It really is around teamwork,” he said. “It’s getting smart people together. It’s understanding that the dimensions of the problem are not just a technical problem. It’s recognizing what’s in scope, what’s out of scope, and how do we adapt to the things that are out of scope, and modify our offerings to accommodate those.”
During the same panel discussion, Francesca Keating, vice president of state and local at SAIC, added how this experience must be smooth and consistent with what customers want.
“The experience needs to be seamless, so it doesn’t feel like I’m being handed to the next, to the next, to the next,” she said. Instead, she said, the experience should track with, “I have a request, and now I have an answer.”
