Agencies with mounting technical debt have utilized IT asset management to catch up on modernization efforts. IT asset management teams at the Department of Veterans Affairs and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services are improving their lines of communication in an effort to update their software. They’ve coordinated efforts to tally their technical debt, create budget balance sheets and outline their modernization needs to vendors.
“You’re not starting from a position of parity necessarily with the business. You’re not starting from zero,” Jim Gfrerer, former chief information officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs, said during an ACT-IAC event on IT asset management. “You’re really making the case to the business not only ‘here’s my deficit of spending in a current year of execution,’ but also ‘here’s the accumulated technical debt.’”
The department is currently juggling $2.5 billion in projects to upgrade its financial management business systems.