Federal IT leaders paying off ‘technical debt’ to meet Trump’s data goals
As the Trump administration pushes agencies to break down data silos, the IT officials leading the charge are grappling with a problem that has occasionally complicated matters: figuring out how to deal with loads of “technical debt.”
A March executive order from President Donald Trump sought to spur inter-agency data sharing, a move the White House said was aimed at “eliminating bureaucratic duplication and inefficiency while enhancing the Government’s ability to detect overpayments and fraud.”
Those bureaucratic inefficiencies are myriad, several IT leaders said during a FedInsider virtual event Wednesday, particularly when it comes to addressing any technical shortcuts or quick fixes that now have to be addressed.
Carter Farmer, who took over as chief information officer at the Environmental Protection Agency in May, said there’s a “need to eliminate a lot of technical debt” so that the EPA can modernize to account for everything from “today’s cybersecurity threats” to the “data needs of AI.”
“Systems don’t talk to each other. They weren’t designed with that goal in mind, so it creates a big, big gap in what’s needed right now versus what’s available,” Farmer said. Having a “very siloed mentality” can lead to “data that isn’t normalized … which creates even more work down the road when you’re going to actually use AI or things of that nature.”
Legacy systems present a notable barrier for Oak Ridge National Laboratory, too, according to Jay Eckles, division director for application development at the Department of Energy-run lab. But legacy data, he said, is “equally important in terms of contributing to technical debt.”
“I’ve been in places where we don’t have a data lake, we don’t have a data warehouse. We’ve got a data landfill,” Eckles said. “And to the degree that data is the rocket fuel that drives artificial intelligence, we’ve got to get that house in order first.”
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is attempting to do just that via a handful of initiatives to reduce its technical debt, said Mark Pettit, the lab’s principal deputy CIO. The first step is to make sure the lab doesn’t create any new technical debt, allowing it to stay focused on AI and various data initiatives.
“We have a lot of data, and that data comes in all different forms,” Pettit said. “Some is very structured and well managed and curated, others is very unstructured because it predates the time before data was really a thing that you managed. And so we are working on building strategic data stores.
“I think an old adage is ‘data is the new oil,’” he added. “I don’t know what the latest adage would be for that, but that’s really what we’re focused on right now, so we can maximize our returns on investment, like leveraging the artificial intelligence capabilities that now are really accelerating everything that we do.”
Dealing with technical debt and simultaneously knocking down data silos is “an ongoing challenge” for Lawrence Livermore, Pettit noted, but the lab is actually “seeing a lot of success” in reducing some of those silos amid an overarching “sense of urgency” throughout the administration. The lab is also focused on building digital twins to accelerate work involving data sharing and AI.
Farmer said the EPA is also in the throes of its campaign to break down data silos, viewing the task “through a lens where data is always involved, and it’s involved in the very beginning of the design process.” That approach creates more flexible architectures and more cross-agency collaboration, he said, ensuring that “data can be used in more parts of the organization.”
Beyond aligning with Trump’s data EO, Farmer believes these data-first strategies will ultimately lead to the EPA more effectively paying down its technical debt, and positioning the agency to have “better tools, faster service [and] stronger security.”
“It’s a big cultural change for how you look at things in government. So it takes good leadership for the culture change, policy alignment and relentless focus to bring everyone along for the ride,” he said. “We’re empowering our team to see this change as opportunity.”
