America's Digital Infrastructure Is Crumbling, Too

In Jan 30's State of the Union message, President Donald Trump called on Congress to allocate at least $1.5 trillion for "the infrastructure investment we need."   Much of the conversation relates to people's most tangible perception of infrastructure: roads, rails and bridges. The media rightly give us increasingly frequent images of derailed train cars, collapsed trestles, cracked stanchions and crumbling bridges. But in the 21st century, infrastructure is more than concrete and metal. Equally important is the digital infrastructure that underlies America’s economy and governments. In an era when goods, services and ideas are increasingly transported via the internet, the strands of fiber, routers, servers and seemingly endless lines of code that compose our digital highways and hubs are quickly becoming the backbone of U.S. infrastructure -- and it too is crumbling.

Perhaps nowhere is the U.S. greater need of information technology improvements than in government. The first priority should be reversing, or at least stanching, the technological brain drain and inverted demographic model across the public sector. Culture, not technology, is the greatest barrier to modernizing the public sector’s technology.