Accenture’s Dominic Delmolino Discusses IT Modernization Challenges Following Report

Accenture reported on Monday that the IT modernization of U.S. federal agencies has accelerated in 2018, but still faces significant challenges. The State of Federal IT 2018 report revealed that only 47 percent of IT decisionmakers believe their efforts contributed to mission agility. In addition, only 39 percent transform mission and business requirements into compelling business cases of IT investments.

Dominic Delmolino, CTO of Accenture, spoke with GovConWire about how federal agencies struggle to modernize their IT systems and how the government can benefit from cloud migration. 

“Many feel constrained by the need to maintain operations. I’d say they feel like they’re enablers instead of change agents. They would love to be more effective in responding to the needs on the business side,” said Delmolino. “IT would love to make dramatic changes in workload or business profits. However, they’re still constrained today and not as effective as change agents.”

Delmolino discussed how federal cloud adoption is limited despite the fact that government agencies have all the necessary tools. He opined that government agencies don’t have enough experience with the cloud and leave themselves open to security issues. As a result, agencies are still learning how to understand the changes in technology, migrate to the cloud and implement IT systems effectively.

Heading into 2019, Delmolino believes most remaining government systems should be cloud-based to give agencies more flexibility, security and guidance. Delmolino recommends that his clients give multiple vendors copies of their data to have more control if they need to make changes.  As federal cloud use grows, Delmolino adds, artificial intelligence and machine learning will continue to play a larger role. 

“The clients I work with whom are effectively deploying artificial intelligence already have their data in the cloud because it allows them to experiment with different forms of AI against data in a flexible way,” Delmolino said. “AI often has a big computing requirement for training. Cloud is really effective at training the AI and deploying the results. Since the cloud provides so many AI-based tools, I believe that my data should be there utilizing those tools.”