Red Hat’s David Egts: Agile Principles Could Help Agencies Improve FITARA Scores

David Egts, chief technologist at Red Hat’s North American public sector business, wrote in an article published Friday on FedScoop about how federal agencies can develop and implement Agile principles to improve their ratings on the Federal Information Security Modernization Act scorecard.

One of the things agencies should do is to initially focus on the most important things. “For example, perhaps datacenter optimization is not as critical right now to an agency in dire need of improving cybersecurity,” Egts wrote. “That agency should prioritize shoring up its approach to risk management.”

Egts said agencies should foster open communication and collaboration to ensure that the applications they are working on are aligned with their organizational requirements.

“Successful agencies tend to have FITARA coordinators within the CIO shop. These coordinators work closely with IT teams to help them follow FITARA maturity model guidance,” he added.

Agencies should advance continuous improvement and automate the software development process to allow personnel to focus on more important tasks, Egts wrote.