Jane Edwards
Bob Ritchie, chief technology officer at SAIC, said during a Federal News Network podcast that achieving digital maturity depends on getting platforms produced.
“We’re really focused on the concept of ‘prod or it didn’t happen,'” Ritchie said.
In an interview for the FNN series Delivering the tech that delivers for government, Ritchie noted that production means that the technology produced impacts the mission of a user inside an agency or a company.
“Production might be an R&D ecosystem where someone can try it out in an exercise. It doesn’t have to necessarily mean it’s part of a weapon system … that’s being used,” he said. “But you’ve got to get it in end users’ hands to get the real feedback on it.”
The CTO said security and continuous value are critical to achieving digital maturity.
According to Ritchie, secure by design and secure by default help ensure the foundation of security for any technology or platform being developed.
He also stated that continuous delivery of value should align with mission goals while making iterative improvements as necessary.
“System integrators, and IT professionals in general, have an initial dopamine hit when they know something passes its unit test — the pipeline goes green. I’m like, ‘I’m done.’… But until it actually gets to production and until it’s actually impacting the mission, it’s not actually valuable,” he said.
Being Pragmatic About Meeting Enterprise Tech Requirements
In the interview, Ritchie told FNN host Vanessa Robots that delivering mission value hinges on keeping pace with the latest technology capabilities while being pragmatic enough to determine when to adopt commercial off-the-shelf technologies over custom development.
The SAIC executive noted that using commercial tech offerings could become an “OpEx unlock,” or freeing up money that could be spent on innovation and delivering technology that enables a company to meet a unique mission need of a federal agency customer.
“It might have nine out of 10 capabilities, but they’re the nine most-used capabilities. It’s going to save me 90% of the cost that I can then free up to add that 10th as a custom integration or change the paradigm completely,” Ritchie said. “So many of our user experiences are just digital versions of an old paper process because the technology wasn’t there to free us up to get back to what problem were we trying to solve in the beginning.”
