Technology advances allow agencies to innovate, but they still need to tend to the systems running their missions.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) raised $44.9 billion for the federal government last month, with the auction of wireless spectrum. An auction to sell off UHF television spectrum is planned for the near future.
These auctions have become big business for the FCC and the federal government, because the money raised goes directly into the federal treasury. For the agency’s IT leaders, the goal was simply to ensure that the technology used to run the auction worked without a hitch, a task that has gotten more difficult in the emerging world of bimodal IT.
“We always ask, ‘How do we get to the future?’ But at the same time, we must take care of our current infrastructure,” said John Skudlarek, FCC’s Deputy CIO. “We can see 24 months ahead and how, on our current path, we can do things completely different, but we also must get to that point juggling many balls at the same time without dropping one.”
Skudlarek spoke Thursday at FedInsider’s event “New Paradigms in Application Development: Carving Government’s Place in the Cloud.” He spoke alongside Commerce Department CIO Steve Cooper, GSA CIO Sonny Hashmi, Air Force CTO Frank Konieczny, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Deputy CIO Shishu Gupta and Booz Allen Lead Technologist Nirmal Mehta.
