Agencies are facing increased challenges with delivering their mission: impacts to budgets, the need to streamline operations and deliver greater efficiencies across the organization while also modernizing mission delivery. Michael Cole, GDIT chief technology officer for Federal Civilian sat down with Washington Exec to talk about these challenges and the need to shorten acquisition cycles in line with the rapid evolution in technology.

“All of our customers are facing diminishing budgets, which is not new,” he says. “GDIT has always been in the business of being efficient and being an optimized, mission aligned partner for our customers and looking at ways that we can help them become more effective in delivering their mission – doing the best for what they need.”

This is important because citizens are continually becoming more digitally dependent, which creates new demands of government in how they interact with citizens.

“When we think about the use of good tech, we’re not talking about new all the time,” he continues. “We are talking about using their current investments and leveraging them smartly – because new technology or even existing technology used properly can drive efficiency too.”

He goes on to note that AI is having a major impact on efficiency and how GDIT is leaning into AI-enabled service desks where agents can solve a lot of the problems that used to require interacting with a human. Cloud and employing a FinOps model to control cloud-spend as another area where the right technology and mission partner can produce tremendous efficiency gains.