Three pillars of government IT

Aligning three critical components that make up a solid government IT foundation can improve efficiency, increase processing capacity and save agencies time and money.

Those three components — data governance, compliance and security – can also enable agencies to connect information across databases or across agencies, according to Jason Wilson, senior product manager at Insight Enterprises, which provides IT management and data governance solutions to industry and the public sector.

A new FedScoop special report, “Three Pillars of Government IT: Getting data governance, compliance and security into alignment,” provides agency IT executives with recommendations for aligning these three elements to mutually reinforce each other.

“One challenge is how to build a governance strategy around your data management,” says Wilson. “[W]hen you understand how data sits inside your datasets, the value of it becomes clear.”

Between budgeting constraints, manpower limitations, pressures to modernize IT infrastructure and heightened emphasis on cybersecurity, federal IT managers have a challenging time keeping data governance, compliance and security in alignment.

Every program manager wrestles with the problem of data inconsistency — simple things like empty fields or fields in different orders — that make it difficult to connect records, even within a single database, let alone across multiple datasets.

A headache faced by government IT systems administrators stems from ensuring their systems comply with the thicket of statutory and regulatory requirements laid out by an alphabet soup of agencies. The job of demonstrating compliance can often be seen as taking valuable time away from other work. But compliance standards are intended to further transparency, system standardization and risk management, all of which help IT systems operate more effectively.

For more, download the special report, “Three Pillars of Government IT: Getting data governance, compliance and security into alignment.”

This article was produced by FedScoop for, and sponsored by, Insight Enterprises.