The Foreign Service Journal, September 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2018 41 systems that actually hamper these needed collaborative efforts. Indeed, bureaus and posts have created thousands of sys- tems—some from scratch and others using commercial software modified to meet “unique” requirements (perceived or legiti- mate). The result is a technical Tower of Babel that the depart- ment’s limited technical workforce cannot properly understand, manage or even catalog. Contractor personnel created and still manage most major systems. State never invested in or retained the technical staff needed to properly document and apply the knowledge associ- ated with both the administrative policies and technical details of these systems. The recent hiring freeze exacerbated the problem, as bureaus watched critical personnel—both technical and sub- ject matter experts—retire, transfer or take lucrative private-sector positions. This lack of staffing continuity makes it impossible for State to effectively manage its IT systems. Further, bureaus struggling with staff and budget shortages are understandably hesitant to make major changes given the risks of “breaking” increasingly obsolete systems or, worse, opening up new cyber vulnerabilities and exposing themselves to public criti- cism fromCongress and the media. Some bureaus have literally dozens of interrelated applications, built using different tools over many years. This is a root cause of the frustrations employees feel when trying to accomplish seemingly routine activities, especially when the tasks cut across bureaucratic lines. An obvious example is the difficulty of the Foreign Service transfer process, which requires human resources, finance and logistics personnel and systems to work together. Instead, many IT systems reinforce bureaucratic lines and impede productivity. A Positive IRM Initiative, But… While IRM’s consolidation of productivity tools on the Micro- soft Office 365 platform should prove a highly positive initiative, individual bureaus continue to create systems based on other commercial products from competing companies. In many cases, customizations over time make it difficult to upgrade these systems or migrate and/or share the data in a manner compat- ible with department-wide objectives. Bureaus have the money to maintain current systems, but neither the resources nor the direction to develop and implement strategies to modernize them to make customers’ jobs easier. The good news is that modern IT application development tools permit greater flexibility to configure systems without customizing underlying applications. This permits managers to plan for the inevitable “like it or not” technical upgrades required by commercial vendors without upsetting integration with other applications. The bad news is that by permitting bureaus to choose from a smorgasbord of competing products, with little encouragement or incentive to consolidate systems, the department continues to increase IT complexity. Bureaus develop systems using different tools, in some cases migrating from State-managed data centers to competing commercial cloud-based platforms, such as those managed by Amazon and Microsoft. Worse, some bureaus operate software so altered to meet State’s needs that it cannot be updated away from obsolete technology, exposing data to cyber-intrusion and the more mundane risks associated with software no employee understands how to manage. Attempting to track, control and set realistic configuration standards for so many systems (including data-center platforms) and manage the interconnections between them is a Sisyphean task, as critical OIG reports document. For example: so-called customer relationship management (CRM) software underlies many modern applications. There are several excellent options, including Remedy, ServiceNow, SalesForce and Dynamics. But lacking an enterprise IT architecture, the department is choosing all of them, “hosting” some applications on department-managed infrastructure while outsourcing others to competing commercial “cloud” data centers. This exponentially multiplies complexity and perpetuates the past mistake of institutionalizing “fragmented decentralization.” The Data Management Spider Web Some State Department IT leaders now tout a data-centric approach to systems. This is long overdue, because information— data—is the asset at the heart of the department’s programmatic and administrative missions. Data—not IT systems—should be the starting point. System “owners” must understand and demonstrate a commitment to properly integrating data to ensure efficient, State-wide operations. Maintaining overlapping data sources with disparate underlying systems is wasteful, hurts data quality and increases the risk of data loss. Yet, with individual bureaus “owning” these systems, there has never been an effective scheme to share data among them. Bureaus and posts, both internally and among themselves, implement “point-to-point” connections to share (or worse, not to share) data, creating hundreds of unique connections using multiple tools—a spider web of uncontrollable complexity. The department can neither track nor manage these data flows, which increases costs (it takes highly paid people to manage these systems), decreases efficiency (customers must work through