Tight budgets can fuel innovation, say top IT leaders

The notion that efficiency can fuel innovation is one of the key premises of the movement inside the Obama administration to put IT procurement, design and development on a more agile, responsive footing. CIOs past and present have promised rank-and-file IT personnel that savings achieved from smarter contracting, data center consolidation, reducing operations and maintenance spending, and other cost-saving measures can be applied to more innovative projects that tap more modern technology to improve citizen services or core agency mission performance.

But can innovation be done on the cheap? At the annual CIO Council symposium, government IT workers asked federal CTO Megan Smith and deputy federal CIO Lisa Schlosser how innovation is possible given the government culture focused on strict budgeting and appropriations rules, and how to demonstrate savings with new ideas that might not be measurable, or might not pay off at all.

Schlosser acknowledged that there is frustration with the budgeting process. The key to securing funds for innovative projects is to start with small pilots that can prove themselves out.

"When an agency has come up with an innovative plan, as part of their budget, where they can show that with very specific milestones and very specific deliverables and a very strategic approach to transforming their organization from a business and mission standpoint using technology, they have been supported by [the Office of Management and Budget] and I've seen them supported throughout the process," Schlosser said.

But, she noted, some proof of concept has to precede a dedicated funding stream for a new project.

"A lot of the key is really... looking at your mission, looking at your agency, and coming up with that plan that shows how you're going to move forward and then embed in that plan clear-cut examples where you've run small pilots, where you've made even a small difference to demonstrate that you really do get it, that you have a vision, that you do have a plan to show the success of your broader plan," Schlosser said.

With the technology at hand today, pilots can be done on the cheap, Smith said. "The amount of stuff that is available to us to prototype on is extraordinary," she said. Now developers can rip out quick pilots with "almost no money," which gives rise to the possibility of a more agile approach.

Smith quoted her former colleague, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who in a 2008 letter to investors, written against the backdrop of the financial crisis, that "scarcity brings clarity." What is clear to Smith in her short time as federal CTO is that government culture inhibits collaboration.

"I think the most important thing is that we don't cross-functionally collaborate. We don't sit together when we're planning things as well as we could, and break down projects into [minimum viable products] and iterations," she said. "We have to get technical folks into the planning ... rather than at the implementation stage only. It's crushing us that we don't do that, we have to change that, and you have to help us," she said.