“The National Cancer Institute’s Digital Services Center lacks an overarching system architecture because experienced federal staff has been hard to come by, according to Chief Information Officer Jeff Shilling.”
“NCI needs a synchronized plan for modernizing IT and integrating systems with the broader National Institutes of Health and Department of Health and Human Services, but none of the developers on staff have created one for an agency of its size.”
“Shilling began standing up the DSC four years ago to minimize NCI’s administrative burden by authorizing digital services, measuring their performance and improving business processes. But absent the right talent, gaps in the system architecture have to be addressed on the fly.”
“’We’re building this as we go, which is really not ideal,’ Shilling said during an ATARC event in late November. ‘I would love to have somebody who really knows how to do all this and did it already, but I don’t.'”
“Absent an implementation plan, DSC can’t include language in IT contracts requiring vendors to align to its architecture or have its developers use it as a guide for storing data or building application programming interfaces. Auditing components to see if they’re adhering to the architecture or scoring them with a scorecard is obviously impossible, Shilling said…” Read the full article here.
Source: NCI’s Digital Services Center building system architecture as it goes – By Dave Nyczepir, December 14, 2021. FedScoop.
