The Department of Housing and Urban Development and the General Services Administration are moving into phase two of their IT modernization Centers of Excellence. The six requests for information released on Monday cover fields like customer experience, cloud adoption, and data analytics. Ralph Gaines, chief operations officer at HUD, says that they’ve learned a lot from phase one of the program.
“The biggest thing you learn is that you have a lot of work to do. There’s a lot of legacy systems, legacy processes, and if you think about people, process, and technology. How do we get the best people working with the best products and empower them to do good work with the appropriate system?” Gaines said. “That was a deep dive, a really strong collaboration with the General Services Administration along with HUD. Employees working together and going into program offices, asking questions, doing surveys, immersing ourselves getting that information and then saying ‘Here’s the state of the state. Here’s the opportunity to improve, and we want to get better.’”