The answer is both, according to several agency CIOs, who said the trick is finding the right balance.
During an Oct. 15 panel discussion hosted by the Association for Federal Information Resource Management (AFFIRM), agency CIOs were asked whether they thought their IT departments should be focused on producing new applications and capabilities or merely consultants to the acquisition officers procuring commercial solutions.
Diaz said he doesn’t want to own IT hardware like data centers, which are often cheaper and more secure when purchased as-a-service rather than built in-house.
“The other side is I need to have my legacy system. That stable legacy environment is not going to go away overnight and it’s going to take a while for me to transition that into the new environment,” he said. “As I’m building this environment, I have to maintain two different operations, so I need two different skillsets,” including people who understand how to integrate cloud systems and those who have the technical knowledge to manage existing environments.
“Infrastructure is being commoditized, so we’ll be building less of that and buying more of that,” he said. “Whereas buying software off the shelf is changing somewhat with new development approaches — continuous integration, DevOps, agile and so forth — we’re becoming increasingly inclined to build software.”
“That’s exactly where we want to be,” he added. “In many cases we’re empowering our customers to make some technology decisions on their own and what we’d like them to do is come to us and ask” for advice.
“That’s a case where we want to be a consultant: Use this, don’t use that,” he said. “And where we’re doing consulting — where we’re building and where we’re buying — will shift as technology shifts over time.”
But the overall trend is moving away from producing and more toward operating, as USDA CIO Jonathan Alboum put it.
However, Alboum said his shop still produces a lot of code and probably will for the foreseeable future.
“That’s not something we can do away with,” he said. “But we can look at commercial cloud options as a way to enhance that.”
