The Innovation Adoption Kit - A Data-Driven Playbook for Enterprise IT Modernization in Government
How agencies can modernize faster without adding more sprawl.
Federal technology leaders face a familiar tension: move fast enough to adopt new tools, while avoiding the duplication and sprawl that make legacy systems costly and brittle to change. In this new report — drawing on a roundtable co-hosted by FAI and the IBM Center for the Business of Government, featuring Department of the Navy CTO Justin Fanelli — Kevin Hawickhorst argues these aren’t competing priorities, and offers three concrete practices for treating modernization as portfolio management rather than a series of one-off projects:
Make the enterprise visible — agencies can’t set sound modernization priorities without first understanding what systems they run and how they connect.
Measure pilots against existing systems — standardized outcome measures let leaders compare new tools directly against the legacy systems they might replace.
Acquire while divesting — build retirement planning into solicitations and funding milestones from the start, so every new capability comes with a plan for what it replaces.
Read the full report here: https://www.ibm.com/businessofgovernment/reports/innovation-adoption-kit