AWS’ Dave Levy: Procurement Reform Could Help Accelerate Federal IT Modernization

Dave Levy, vice president of federal government at Amazon Web Services, told theCUBE in an interview posted Thursday that the federal government needs to reform the procurement process to speed up the adoption of cloud and other technology platforms to advance information technology modernization efforts.

“So I think what I’d say is it’s really collective approach,” Levy, a 2019 Wash100 winner, said of procurement reform.

“It’s an industry approach that’s going to be taken to change a procurement, to help them adapt to modern laws. Do we need changes in the far perhaps, yes, but I think we need fundamental policy changes, a legislative approach to change procurement for technology,” he added.

Levy stressed that digital transformation helps modernize the workforce by allowing employees to focus more on critical tasks and noted how a data strategy could help agencies facilitate the adoption of analytics, artificial intelligence and other technologies.

“So there’s a lot of ways to characterize it but once you have the opportunity to get your data both unstructured and structured, in a place, in a cloud, in an environment where you can start to do things with it, create data lakes, you can start to apply analytics to it, build machine learning models in AI,” he added.