Federal agencies now have an opportunity to rethink their digital transformation and resiliency strategies. More than two years ago, I presented the concept of the New O&M^TM – harnessing Operations and Maintenance (O&M) budgets to deliver Optimization and Modernization outcomes (the New O&M) for government organizations.  

This approach is more relevant today than ever before. The New O&M can assist federal government agencies in accelerating their digital transformation by continuously deliver innovative capabilities and services that can enhance mission optimization and resiliency.  Leveraging the New O&M approach in our new software-defined infrastructure world can yield game-changing resiliency and transformational outcomes for government organizations.

Traditional Modernization

The traditional approach for modernizing government IT systems and infrastructure is to allocate funding for Development, Modernization, and Enhancement (DME) within the federal agency budget cycle. The Office of Management and Budget, within the Executive Office of the President, directs agencies to break down IT investment costs into two categories: O&M and DME. O&M costs (also known as steady-state) refer to the expenses required to operate and maintain an IT asset in a production environment. DME costs refer to project and activity expenses that lead to new IT assets or systems or modify existing IT assets to substantively improve capability or performance. DME spending has been the customary measure of Agency efforts to modernize legacy technology (usually via Capital Expenditures (CapEx).  Since 2010, Federal government DME IT spending has steadily declined from 32% of total federal IT spending down to 22%, while spending on IT O&M has increased to almost 80% of IT spend.  

Unfortunately, trying to modernize and reduce technical debt by using only the small DME portion of the IT budget artificially constrains governments’ ability to digitally transform and deliver the significant return on investment (ROI) that modernization investments can deliver. Just as we have seen with cloud services use of OpEx funding, harnessing O&M budgets to deliver Optimization and Modernization (the New O&M) of IT infrastructure offers an incredibly efficient way to address this daunting challenge.

A New Approach is Needed

It is now crucial that IT infrastructure modernization efforts be considered across an organization’s entire multi-domain environment in order to deliver enhanced enterprise resiliency. Gone are the days of modernizing individual silos without regard to cross-architecture impacts, interdependencies and results. A great example is the impact that intelligent switches are having in achieving governmental zero trust mandates to make access control enforcement as granular as possible. Smart network switches can provide the most granular and dynamic microsegmentation access possible by serving as zero trust Policy Enforcement Points, thereby protecting each resource at the OSI Model Layer 2 point of access. By evolving “Operations and Maintenance” into “Optimize and Modernize” we can quicken the needed pace of digital transformation of our government’s IT systems and infrastructures.

The New O&M in a software-defined world

Like the evolution in software development facilitated by the arrival of Agile methodologies, DevOps, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines and software factories, IT modernization must become continuous and embedded across the entire IT ecosystem to optimize experiences and mission outcomes in our digitally transformed world. This AI-enabled, software-defined IT infrastructure evolution leverages the proactive and predictive capabilities and functionality that advanced AI/ML algorithms can deliver to the benefit of the entire enterprise IT and OT supporting infrastructure.

Modernized, intelligent IT and OT infrastructure can provide the visibility and supporting analytics that are so essential to enabling dynamic and effective networking and infrastructure automation and orchestration. This dynamic infrastructure, enabled by advanced AI/ML algorithms (trained on massive, relevant data sets), is critical to delivering optimal customer experience, enhancing employee productivity, and ensuring enterprise resiliency and security.

How NWN’s Federal Team Can Help Agencies Resolve their Transformation Challenges

NWN’s Federal Team, formed after recently acquiring Leverage Information Systems, brings their combined expertise and scale to address these challenges.  Our teams excel in upgrading operations and infrastructure for government organizations by offering tailored solutions to meet the unique needs of the public sector. By leveraging NWN’s AI-enabled managed services expertise in the following areas, government agencies can efficiently accelerate their New O&M resiliency journey:

• Unified Communications & Visual Collaboration: NWN’s tools improve communication and collaboration, ensuring seamless interaction between government employees and the public. These solutions are essential for driving operational efficiency and ensuring mission continuity in a hybrid or in office environment.
• Device Management: Effective management of devices is critical to maintaining compliance and security. NWN’s device management solutions ensure that all devices are up-to-date, secure, and compliant with regulatory standards, reducing the technical debt that often hinders modernization efforts.
• Contact Center Solutions: NWN modernizes contact center operations, optimizing customer service and enhancing user experience. These solutions streamline agency operations, improve service delivery, and support overall mission effectiveness.
• Network Modernization: NWN helps upgrade network infrastructure to support the cloud-based services necessary for today’s digital-first government. This modernization improves connectivity, reduces latency, and ensures that agencies can scale efficiently as they adopt new technologies.
• Data Center Modernization: NWN is positioned to help government agencies cost-effectively upgrade their on-premise data center compute infrastructure and private clouds to enhance their mission success. 
• Security Solutions: As cybersecurity remains a top priority for government agencies, NWN implements robust security measures to protect sensitive data and maintain compliance with federal regulations. These solutions ensure that cybersecurity is seamlessly integrated into all aspects of infrastructure modernization. AI-powered Managed Services: Provide comprehensive observability, automated monitoring, analysis, prediction, proactive problem-solving, and data-driven optimization.

By evaluating current IT infrastructure and aligning modernization efforts with agency-specific goals, Leverage and NWN can help government agencies ensure a smooth transition to modernized systems that maximize efficiency, security, and resiliency.

Using the New O&M to Deliver Enterprise Resiliency and Security

Viewing modernization efforts through an enterprise-wide, holistic architectural perspective is vital in reducing critical technical debt, delivering integrated cybersecurity, and dynamically optimizing infrastructure and mission and business outcomes.  To achieve these advances, we must perfect a new style of business case and Return-on-Investment (ROI) analyses to promote, prioritize and accelerate enterprise modernization efforts.  Taking a cue from the government’s mandated use of Technology Business Management (TBM) principles for agency budget development, this approach leverages TBM constructs to factor in “change the business” impacts on traditional “run the business” operations and expenses, including reduced operational and maintenance labor costs and more efficient delivery of infrastructure capability upgrades to optimize transformation-enabling modernization.  And much of what you need to execute this approach you likely already own.

The New O&M – Bottom line impact

Software-defined infrastructure is at the heart of the New O&M, delivering never before seen agility and continuous evolution of intent-based networking and infrastructure capabilities so crucial to enhancing mission success and business outcomes. It is also key to delivering full-stack observability and optimization to ensure that the infrastructure delivers the client and employee experiences that enable these outcomes. Most significantly, this new optimized and modernized (New O&M) approach can become a catalyst for innovation by using technology to shape, deliver, and continuously enhance existing infrastructure to enable future governmental agency capabilities, services, and mission success.