FCC pulls IT upgrade from jaws of defeat

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The government gets a bad rap for failing to meet deadlines and messing up major system overhauls. The history of federal IT is littered with these examples. But it’s rare we get insight into how one agency pulls a potential major blunder from the jaws of failure. But that’s what happened to the Federal Communications Commission recently during a major systems upgrade.

The FCC kicked-off its modernization effort Sept. 2, shifting more than 200 servers and transferring more 400 applications associated with those servers to a commercial cloud. But the effort took two more days than planned to get the systems back online, causing delays for FCC customers in filing reports and other documents. Instead of the IT problems just becoming another example of government and contractor ineptitude, an e-mail shows the effort to rescue the project. “We could have always asked for more time up front, possibly padded our schedules; instead we chose to be ambitious in our timelines because that’s what a startup-mentality culture does,” wrote David Bray, the FCC chief information officer in the e-mail. “We aimed high, adjusted, pivoted, and succeeded in our outcomes. If those in public service take from what we did as a ‘Team’ this summer -- and from it and see that it is okay to take risks as long as you are fully committed to seeing them through and getting it done -- then we will have helped ‘hack the bureaucracy’ for the better.” Digging a bit deeper into the efforts, the FCC and contractor team, led by IBM, worked for 55 hours straight to straighten out the problems.


FCC pulls IT upgrade from jaws of defeat