How software reuse and extension can accelerate digital transformation for agencies

Software reuse is a decades-old concept that’s finding new relevance today for public sector organizations pursuing digital transformation (DX). While the notion of re-purposing existing software in use by other agencies is an enduring best practice in government, many IT teams still overlook that option even though such opportunities are becoming more plentiful and promising. Let’s examine how software reuse is increasingly valuable in building robust applications that extend new capabilities to some of the government’s most complex and mission-critical use cases.

New Relevance for a Longstanding Principle

The idea of software reuse is nothing new. The mandate to re-purpose technology solutions successfully deployed elsewhere in government is enshrined in the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996, also known as the Information Technology Management Reform Act (ITMRA). What is new, however, is a confluence of modern factors that are increasing both the pressure and the potential for agencies to reuse software.

Today’s public sector IT ecosystem is such that advanced technologies, like edge computing and new combinations of traditional and generative AI, are already being adopted at some agencies. At the same time, many legacy software systems are becoming obsolete and reaching the end of life. This means IT teams who find themselves in the latter scenario and under pressure to modernize have unprecedented options for software reuse, provided they know how and where to look for those options.

More often than not, software reuse is an alternative to reinventing the wheel and starting a software development project from scratch. By prioritizing and pursuing software reuse wherever possible, agency CIOs and their teams — and the mission owners they support — can deploy their digital transformation efforts much more rapidly. In the process, they also reap maximum ROI from taxpayer dollars by ensuring the government can fully reutilize software and intellectual property bought and paid for.

From Software Reuse to Software Extension

Across many of today’s public sector DX efforts, agencies can significantly reduce costs and deployment time while remaining compliant with regulations like the Clinger-Cohen Act by reusing existing software solutions. Application reuse is well established in Federal acquisition, particularly across branches of the military, as well as grants management and increasingly at agencies with missions focused on various case management types, including investigation, law enforcement, judicial and compliance.

The level of sophistication and value generation today is such that government transformation teams are now doing far more than just reusing software. A more accurate term today might be software extension. By creatively adapting software solutions at one agency to take on new functionality for a broader range of related use cases at other agencies, teams can extend the software’s capabilities, and therefore its value, well beyond its original intent or capability specifications.

Achieving the right mindset for software reuse requires government technologists to look beyond inter-agency variations in workforce culture or processes to uncover the underlying functionality common to what is likely a wide range of public sector service domains and use cases.  This mindset must be backed up by practical skills to successfully benchmark requirements, conduct market research and understand the scope of the existing IP available for the government to reuse.

Stronger Benefits and More Mission-Critical Use Cases

As software reuse and extension catch on and government IT teams become more adept at evaluating options and asking the right questions as they consider redeployment scenarios between agencies, they’re achieving stronger results and building more confidence around more demanding and mission-critical use cases. One technique that helps facilitate this is incorporating a data fabric architecture that accesses data where it resides and virtualizes it through an abstraction layer for an enterprise-wide view of data.

Data fabric architectures wrap what’s often termed an agility layer around perhaps dozens of previously siloed or unconnected software systems. This creates a unified software ecosystem that is more than the sum of its parts and essentially acts as a service life extension of IP investments. Such capabilities are fueling success stories like the U.S. Army’s Global Force Information Management (GFIM) program, which will use a data fabric agility layer to unify and render data from more than a dozen legacy applications into a holistic view of global force structure to equip, train, ready and resource Army forces better.  Similarly, there will be an agility layer supporting the Army’s massive Enterprise Business Systems - Convergence (EBS-C) project, which will combine enterprise business systems into a common, modernized platform that will more effectively enable multi-domain operations in large-scale combat operations by seamlessly integrating 24 major Army capabilities across the finance and logistics enterprise.

Conclusion

Software reuse may be an established concept, but it is gaining renewed significance for government agencies today. As many legacy software applications reach the end of their life cycles while other agencies embrace innovations like AI and edge computing, now is an opportune moment for government IT leaders and their teams, as well as the mission owners they support, to identify common requirements and use cases across agencies. By collaborating to repurpose and extend the software to more agencies and more complex use cases, government technologists can better serve their various agency needs and mission requirements.