{"id":21365,"date":"2018-07-12T20:03:48","date_gmt":"2018-07-12T20:03:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/federaltimes\/uncategorized\/2018\/07\/12\/the-technology-modernization-fund-a-primer-for-the-perplexed\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T04:56:01","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T04:56:01","slug":"the-technology-modernization-fund-a-primer-for-the-perplexed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/federaltimes\/opinions\/2018\/07\/12\/the-technology-modernization-fund-a-primer-for-the-perplexed\/","title":{"rendered":"The technology modernization fund: A primer for the perplexed"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One of the most impactful days in federal IT during the past 12 months has to be Dec. 12, 2017 \u2014 the day President Trump signed the Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act into law as an amendment to the wider 2018 National Defense Authorization Act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The President\u2019s signature marked the culmination of a process to revitalize aging IT systems in federal agencies that began in 2016 with the compromise amalgamation of two previous bills: Republican Will Hurd\u2019s Modernizing Outdated and Vulnerable Equipment and Information Technology (MOVE IT) Act and Democrat Steny Hoyer\u2019s Information Technology Modernization Act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under MGT, Congress has authorized $100 million for fiscal year 2018 to both modernize existing IT systems and undertake new initiatives. An additional $150 million in funding may be earmarked next year for the same purpose. On Feb. 27, 2018 Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Mark Mulvaney issued a memorandum<\/a> providing guidance to agency leaders regarding the criteria by which funds would be issued and marking the beginning of the process by which funding requests would be reviewed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019re considering applying, there are a few things to keep in mind:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Proposals for MGT funds are reviewed by a seven-person board led by current US CIO Suzette Kent and are currently being accepted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those interested should use Appendix A of the guidelines here<\/a> to submit a proposal of no more than two pages in 10-point font as a .docx file to ofcio@omb.eop.gov<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fund director Liz Cain has stated that \u201cproposals requesting $2 million to $10 million hit \u2018the sweet spot\u2019 for approval, and the board is particularly interested in projects that show results within the first year.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On June 8 it was reported that three of the first grants were awarded, two of which dealt with workload migration. Specifically, $20 million went to the Department of Housing and Urban Development to assist with mainframe application migration and $15 million went to the Department of Energy for the purpose of enterprise cloud email migration acceleration. These awards are not surprising as cloud adoption has been a priority for the office of US CIO for many years, yet agencies still lag behind their private sector counterparts in moving workloads to the cloud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s worth asking whether your agency is maintaining extensive workloads on premise. While there may be legal or regulatory reasons for doing so in cases of personally identifiable information, that isn\u2019t likely to describe the vast majority of your data. If you think it would be of value, agency leaders should seriously consider submitting a proposal to support the migration of at least some of your workloads to a public cloud provider like Microsoft Azure, AWS or Google. Doing so is likely to substantially reduce costs in the long term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n