“The Department of Veterans Affairs and the Social Security Administration are improving data governance as the agencies look to increase digital awareness and reduce technical debt.”
“’It is our responsibility to identify, in practical terms, the potential business risk of that antiquated or legacy technology. Technical debt is often invisible even though it can be monetized, even though it can be reported recurringly,’ SSA CIO Sean Brune said during an ATARC webinar. ‘It has to be visible and explicit for the business leaders to come in and invest the resources to address it.'”
“At VA, CIO Kurt DelBene is honing in on ‘engineering excellence.’ Kevin Marlowe, VA’s director of IT service delivery management, said that this model focuses on improving the IT environment for end users.”
“Over the past few years, VA has been building out a standard configuration management database (CMDB), VA’s authoritative database used to manage changes to the agency’s IT technologies that require configuration management control like hardware, software, applications and underlying network infrastructure.”
“‘We’ve spent a lot of time and effort over the last couple of years into developing a CMDB,’ Marlowe said. ‘We’ve got to be thinking about what we’re going to do with this next and how we’re going to fit all that into it. It’s astounding to me every day to find a new nuance, something we didn’t know about a stovepipe, a problem that we didn’t anticipate in gaining a better view of what our situation looks like.'”
“Data governance is playing a critical role in this process. Marlowe said that the lack of data governance has historically presented a challenge at VA…” Read the full article here.
Source: Data Governance is Key to Improving ‘Digital Awareness’ – By Sarah Sybert, June 2, 2022. GovCIO.
