FCC to Move Ahead With IT Transformation
Acknowledging the inherent “risks” in transforming the FCC's IT system, the agency is planning multiphased changes, said Chief Information Officer David Bray in a blog post. The agency will first stabilize its “aging IT infrastructure,” Bray said in the post…
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Monday. It will identify in what order to shift applications to cloud-based platforms “to support more efficient work processes,” he wrote. The agency then plans to “rewrite IT systems to employ a reusable 'service catalog' of modular components across the entire FCC, with open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and built upon a common data platform. ... All too often it is easier for folks to say the status quo is good enough, the challenges are too high to overcome, or there's no way to complete a project in time.” While multiple perspectives should be considered, Bray wrote, the agency has “a diverse team with backgrounds spanning former military veterans, former Silicon Valley startup entrepreneurs, PhD candidates at prestigious universities” able to see the blind spots in the changes. There's also “the risk of doing nothing. At a certain point, the status quo no longer will be good enough. Technology becomes obsolete, further patches on discontinued software will be unavailable, and the total cost of maintaining outdated systems will far exceed moving to something new.” The agency had told us it's working on changes to the Electronic Comments Filing System's search function separate from the rest of the system so it doesn't slow down the rest of ECFS (see 1410310028).