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For our second workshop of the IT Solutions Challenge (ITSC), we met at the Department of Justice (Justice Management Division). All team members came prepared with the information, insight and advice we received from subject matter experts (SMEs) and stakeholders relevant to our mission statement, “Create a cloud shared services sandbox for all federal agencies to pilot technologies, develop applications, and model enterprise architecture.”

By the end of the first IT Solutions Challenge (ITSC) workshop on April 9th, six teams set out on a journey to try and fix some of the government’s largest IT problems. I tethered myself to the group dedicated to impacting the ways the government hires, motivates, and retains skilled IT personnel.

The goal of our team is to solve inefficiency in government due to a lack of standardization across IT policies and infrastructure. Even though our group is made up of six different government agencies across both IT and acquisition, the problems encountered in both sectors prove to be very similar and important.

In the Federal IT landscape, new buzzwords are constantly identified and implemented in the workforce. Terms like ‘agile’ and ‘better buying power’ are used so often that sometimes their true value is lost. Despite the unintentional dilution of these terms, on Thursday April 9, 2015, in the Indian Treaty Room within the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, synergy occurred.