There’s a technological knack in the United States that’s only mirrored in a handful of other nations, making it a beacon of innovation. Businesses that grew to be formidable tech giants like Microsoft and Apple were spun out of their founders’ garages, growing from fledgling ideas into industry behemoths. But despite the U.S. tech sector being at the forefront of global innovation, federal government systems are running on outdated systems that rely on antiquated code and have lagged behind for a number of reasons – red tape, regulation, and lack of consistency have created holes that need to be patched.
It isn’t a secret that the federal government acknowledges these challenges and desperately wants to modernize. For example, the Jedi cloud project, one of its largest such initiatives, was seeking to bring some of the first-class technologies and approaches from the commercial space into the public sector. However, due to a lengthy procurement process and unclear objectives, it fell flat and was replaced by a new initiative dubbed Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, which is still in the middle of its own procurement cycle.
It’s Broken, but How Do We Fix It?
Part of the problem is that old systems, primarily running on outdated COBOL software, were truly innovative for their time. Ever since COBOL was deployed widely across state, federal, and banking systems, it has remained a mainstay for how government systems operate. The International Revenue Service, Department of Labor, and Department of Education are just a few examples of agencies that run on the 60-year-old coding language. As time goes on, technology gets more advanced and people aren’t learning how to maintain software built on COBOL. This has led to heightened recruitment efforts by states like Connecticut and New Jersey to bring in retired COBOL programmers who can update the software. The systems themselves being outdated, along with a support staff that is aging out of the industry, makes a powerful case for why the federal government needs to focus on modernizing their IT systems.
One of the reasons COBOL is on its way out is because it was built on closed systems. It came before the advent of microservices, robust APIs, discoverability, and more features of a modern technology architecture. Because of this, getting them connected to modern systems is a challenge, but it is nevertheless essential.
Taking a Page Out of the Private Sector’s Playbook
Modernizing government IT can help reduce some of the challenges we’re seeing now such as air gaps between systems and duplicate information, as well as fragmented views of data. In the current IT landscape, developers can benefit when the platforms take on the virtues of being faster to change, scale, and integrate.
A proven strategy for successful government IT modernization and digital transformation is introducing technologies to build new applications that execute on top of legacy systems, such as low-code. This approach allows IT to be more agile and reduce technical debt while accelerating application delivery, new services, and cost savings.
When government IT is outdated, it not only keeps employees from succeeding in a rapidly evolving legislative, regulatory, and policy environment, but it also trickles down to private citizens who are depending on government services for their livelihoods. By leveraging low-code, agencies can gradually decouple their legacy and core systems while migrating mission-critical functionality and data on a sustainable schedule to get Americans the services they crucially need.