Defense
Making software more than ‘IT thing’
Software modernization has a branding problem, and it’s going to take more than the colloquial culture shift to speed up the Defense Department’s adoption of modern tech capabilities.
“Part of the marketing of this is to make sure that being good at software escapes the domain of IT people and really gets thought of in the context of making us more effective at warfighting,” Peter Ranks, the deputy CIO for information enterprise, told FCW.
“The real challenge for the leadership, I think, is not to just latch on to the tech piece of this, but to really be willing to dig in and have the sustained focus to kind of impact culture,” Ranks said.
But the bureaucracy isn’t built for software’s rapid development, increased demand and security needs — something that played a major role during the Defense Department’s response to tech needs spurred by the pandemic and teleworking.
“We’ve…
