Technology

Lessons for federal IT from Roman architecture

Scott told the 39 participants who kicked off the IT Solutions Challenge last week to follow in the example of an ancient Roman architect.

Jason Miller@jmillerWFED

April 13, 2015 4:46 am

3 min read

Tony Scott, the federal chief information officer, is a big fan of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio.

Vitruvius lived in Rome between 80-15 BC. He was the first person to write books explaining the basic teachings of architecture.

Before Vitruvius, architects handed down their craft and expertise in the form of a mentor-apprentice relationship.

Scott told the 39 participants who kicked off the IT Solutions Challenge last week to become the Vitruvius Pollio for the federal government.

“He was thinking in the large. How do I make what I know universally known throughout what was then considered the civilized world?” he said. “So when you’re thinking about the problems you’re going to identify and work on as a team.. I’d ask you to focus on two things: What’s long term sustainable? What fundamentally has to change to make a big difference? Take on the hardest challenge and ask how do I scale across the federal government or some large part of the ecosystem? Those would be the two big challenges I lay out for you today.”

The CIO Council is leading the IT Solutions Challenge by bringing in General Schedule 9-13s from 19 agencies for six-months to work significant and broad IT challenges.

Scott said Vitruvius Pollio thought about architecture differently and helped it spread more quickly and more successfully than previous approaches. He said the goal of the Solutions challenge is not to focus on lowering costs because that rarely leads to sustainability and long-term improvements, but to figure out what can be done to improve federal services and then shared more broadly.

“I like to focus teams on what are the long-term stable things that we can do that will ultimately lead to, and sometimes even in the short run, the cost savings that we are looking for,” Scott said. “What are the things can we maintain and sometimes even improve…by making these changes. Then it’s a great approach to how we think about change, systemic, dynamic and evolving organizations and processes in government. The second thing is how to make it scalable. So it’s easy to get small organizations to agree to some change of behavior. I’m pretty sure we can bring about that change because I can eye ball each one of you and I can see if you are committed or not. But if I’m dealing with really large organization the concept of scale I’m not going to be able to eye ball to eye ball every person I want to impact. So I have to be able to influence through logic, through communication or through rulemaking or other sorts of techniques or tools that I have.”

The IT Solutions Challenge held its first meeting April 10th led by members of the Performance Improvement Council as facilitators.

Lisa Danzig, OMB’s associate director for personnel and performance, said this was one of several recent events the PIC helped lead to bring people together to solve a problem.

“The PIC talked through the objectives and facilitated the session to get to outcomes,” Danzig said. “They are our hands-on team with expertise and really enjoy that interaction whenever we have these sessions. Where there is a barrier or when a team needs to resolve an issue or it could be leadership team that needs to identify priorities, what has been happening over the last 12-to-18 months, we’ve been doing a better job leveraging that effort on cross agency issues.”

The IT Solutions Challenge’s timeline is for the teams to present their ideas in September.

This post is part of Jason Miller’s Inside the Reporter’s Notebook feature. Read more from this edition of Jason’s Notebook.