The Non-Technical Solution For Government IT Projects That Fail

“FEDERAL NEWS NETWORK” By Mark Mitchell

“We often blame technology when government IT projects fail to meet their goals. By prioritizing planning and enterprise architectures, government agencies can ensure they employ the latest technology in ways that align with and serve the mission.”

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“The hype surrounding the rise of generative AI illustrates a core reason why federal IT initiatives often fail: Driven by a “fear of missing out,” many adopters rush in without necessary preparation.

This failure rate is not limited to the government. In a recent report, MIT found that 95% of organizations are getting zero return on their investments in generative AI. This holds true for the government largely because federal mandates and compliance drivers push agencies to adopt technologies before establishing strategic architecture ahead of deployment — a “ready, fire, aim” mentality.

To reverse this trend, agency leaders should adopt new cultures and methods to ensure IT projects are more tightly aligned with mission goals. The solution is not one based predominantly on technology. Leaders should take a “non-technical moment” to adopt frameworks that ensure their agencies are measuring not just the effectiveness of the technologies they deploy, but also the returns on investment in terms of meeting mission goals.

This requires a deliberate pause in the implementation process to evaluate existing governance processes and identify gaps. This pause ensures future flexibility, allowing agencies to ensure the appropriate architecture is in place to update or replace technology later without disruption.

This process relies on a top-down, federated enterprise architecture model led by a central enterprise architecture function. It ensures new technologies are selected and implemented based on strategic alignment, defined architectural requirements and enterprise-wide collaboration, minimizing the risk of choosing suboptimal products by ensuring capabilities are selected based on three strategic phases.

1. Strategic alignment and definition (the “why”): This phase defines the problem and validates the initiative’s necessity. Teams must define the required business capability — focusing on business value rather than technology features — and link it to enterprise goals, such as reducing costs or increasing market share. For example, a team might articulate a need for real-time inventory tracking rather than a specific software package.

   
   

The final step is to define use cases. Teams should document specific user requirements that the capability must satisfy based on business needs to justify the investment.

2. Architectural requirements (the “how”): This phase establishes technical guardrails and requirements, deliberately avoiding product names. Teams identify the necessary technology capabilities and platform components (e.g., data ingestion or workflow orchestration) required to support the business capability. The team then establishes the non-functional requirements (e.g., security, scalability, latency) to serve as definitive pass/fail criteria.

   
   

Finally, teams then specify and document mandatory architectural constraints and principles, such as the mandatory use of an approved cloud provider or a requirement to integrate with the organization’s existing enterprise identity system, for example.

3. Solution evaluation and roadmap (the “what” and “execution”): In this final phase, the organization uses the defined architecture to objectively select and implement a solution. Decisions are based strictly on how well the solution meets the established capability requirements and strategic goals.

   
   

We often blame technology when government IT projects fail to meet their goals. However, by shifting focus to the non-technical planning outlined above, agencies can tackle the root of the problem. By prioritizing planning and enterprise architectures, government agencies can ensure they employ the latest technology in ways that align with and serve the mission.”

The non-technical solution for government IT projects that fail

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Mark Mitchell is the enterprise security architect for Netskope.