Eric Hysen, chief information officer of the Department of Homeland Security, and two other DHS officials said the department is now advancing information technology modernization by shifting from a “big bang” approach to a “more incremental, iterative, and measured strategy” that would enable DHS to retire legacy platforms and modernize key services using best practices adopted in the private sector.
“Our newly-initiated modernization programs focus on defining a Minimum Viable Product—initial functionality that can launch within months, not years,” the three DHS officials said in a joint testimony delivered Wednesday before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s emerging threats and spending oversight subcommittee.
“From there, the Department follows an agile software development methodology that gathers requirements, builds, tests, and launches software in rapid, iterative cycles rather than waiting to gather all requirements up front,” they added.
Hysen testified alongside Federal Emergency Management Agency CIO Charles Armstrong and Yemi Oshinnaiye, assistant administrator for IT at the Transportation Security Administration, during the Senate subpanel hearing.
The DHS IT leaders said the department’s approach could be broken down into two strategies: adopting a technical approach to IT modernization and cultivating tools and resourcing.
Hysen said DHS is outlining its “overall modernization priorities” in a new IT strategic document that could be issued before the existing four-year plan expires at the end of fiscal year 2023, according to a report by Federal News Network.
“One of the results of that ‘big bang’ approach with single system integrators was that every IT system would build everything from the ground up,” Hysen told lawmakers.
“They would have their own infrastructure, their own support teams, their own login systems, for example. And as we’ve moved to modernize, we’re looking to break that down and offer up common enterprise services for common pieces of functionality,” he continued.
