Itâs a common expression when a new boss takes: âShe has her work cut out for her.â
Often, itâs merely a rhetorical flourish.
However, in the case of recently appointed Army Chief Information Officer/G-6 Lt. Gen. Susan  Lawrence, itâs likely an apt expression.
âWeâve got to change culture, solutions and paradigm,” she said last week at an AFCEA NOVA event, according to Federal Computer Week. “We cannot deliver the network like we used to anymore. We canât build unique networks every time we deploy something else. We cannot continue to do business as usual as we did in the past, and we cannot continue to buy IT as we did in the past.â
When the Army announced her appointment, Lawrence said a key priority was network modernization.
But the Army has also undertaken ambitious IT moves, such as an enterprise email migration, which Lawrence acknowledged had had its share of âfalse starts.â
â[B]ut itâs working, and itâs working well,â she added.
In addition, efforts to modernize, operationalize and streamline the network allow for a little spring cleaning, Lawrence suggested.
There are “thousands and thousands of applications that are hanging on by a string just because 10 people are using it,” she said, according to FierceGovernmentIT. “We’ve got a lot of house cleaning.”