Jane Edwards
Matt Beran, industry lead for global defense and intelligence at Appian, said government agencies looking to speed up their digital transformation initiatives and ensure compliance with the Clinger-Cohen Act and other regulations should consider reusing existing software platforms.
“By prioritizing and pursuing software reuse wherever possible, agency CIOs and their teams — and the mission owners they support — can deploy their digital transformation efforts much more rapidly,” Beran wrote in a Nov. 27 article published on Nextgov/FCW.
“In the process, they also reap maximum ROI from taxpayer dollars by ensuring the government can fully reutilize software and intellectual property bought and paid for,” he added.
Software Extension
In this piece, Beran described the concept of software extension and how it could help extend an application’s capabilities to more complex, mission-critical use cases within the government.
“By creatively adapting software solutions at one agency to take on new functionality for a broader range of related use cases at other agencies, teams can extend the software’s capabilities, and therefore its value, well beyond its original intent or capability specifications,” he noted.
According to the Appian executive, government IT teams that intend to achieve the right mindset for software reuse should “look beyond inter-agency variations in workforce culture or processes to uncover the underlying functionality common to what is likely a wide range of public sector service domains and use cases” and cultivate practical skills to perform market research, benchmark requirements and “understand the scope of the existing IP available for the government to reuse.”
