Technology Assessments Can Keep Projects to a Manageable Scale
A technology assessment provides a baseline against which an agency can decide how to proceed with a project. It’s something that an agency can do itself — the Government Accountability Office has even created a technology assessment design handbook to help with the process.
But DIY assessments aren’t always the most efficient or least expensive. When an agency is in the market for, say, a standard cloud migration project, staffers usually begin with a request for information which brings in suggestions from integrators, vendors and others on how the project could be done.
Then they’ll have to assess, gathering information in-house from analysts, security experts, IT administrators, project managers and more. Turnover within an agency can hinder this process because newer employees may not have the information necessary to provide background quickly.
This multilayered process can take as long as 12 to 18 months and cost as much as $1 million to $2 million to put together. At the same time, the typical government IT employee must continue to keep the lights on and systems running. Few have the time to keep up with the kind of information needed to conduct forward-thinking assessments.
Outside services such as CDW•G’s Amplified™ Infrastructure, however, allow agencies to scale projects more quickly and more cost-effectively. The key to delivering efficient and detailed technology assessments is in leveraging some level of automation. This enables delivery in a matter of weeks or a couple of months, at a cost of only tens of thousands of dollars instead of millions.
The automation and algorithmic tools that we use to evaluate the IT assets, applications, servers, storage and cloud resources that are being leveraged deliver the same value of insight as the in-house assessment. The agency reviews the results of an automated assessment and provides feedback on priorities, ensuring the human touch remains.
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Assessments Provide a Baseline for an Individual Project
Technology assessments aren’t a continuing process; they’re very project-specific. Say an agency is running 10 applications in its on-premises data center and wants to know if it would be cheaper to run them in the cloud instead.
The assessment would evaluate questions such as: What are the requirements for servers, databases and development management? How many developers are responsible for managing this and supporting it on-premises? How does that picture change if the apps are just lifted and shifted to the cloud?
But you’re asking these questions of developers who are most likely more skilled in on-premises tools development. To answer those questions, they’d also have to be savvy in cloud performance as well. When you’re aligning a whole new skill set with older technology, enlisting an outside vendor that already has those abilities can save time and money.
A third-party assessment can also talk down an agency from a project that is too big. You don’t necessarily want to migrate all of your HR functions to the cloud at once; maybe you should just start with onboarding.
This gives you a defined target and a controlled population of possible outcomes. In this deliberately limited space, an automated assessment can easily determine which applications can be moved, and move them.
And from that experience, you can see more easily what works and what doesn’t, and know what to do differently for the next migration — or use that entire process again, once more saving time and money.
This article is part of FedTech’s CapITal blog series.
