Unisys’ Casey Coleman: Agencies Should Pursue IT Modernization Amid Federal Hiring Freeze

Casey Coleman, vice president of the federal civilian business group at Unisys, has said the White House’s implementation of a federal hiring freeze may provide government agencies an opportunity to reassess priorities and advance information technology modernization efforts.

She wrote in a Federal Times article published Monday that agencies should work to “take legacy systems and hollow them out little by little, pulling out pieces of functionality and reworking business processes.”

Agencies should look at budget constraints and the hiring freeze under the new administration as an opportunity to pursue modernization work in the field of cloud, user-centric digital services and enterprise-class agile development, among other areas, according to Coleman.

She added that agencies should “rethink” their IT approach in order to identify areas that are “in most need of modernization” and do not “require large, upfront expenditures.”