In reading the “tea leaves” of what to expect from the new presidential administration, we obviously anticipate a greater emphasis on cost-cutting. This will include funding for federal IT systems, which are dominated by outdated legacies that somehow continue to chug along – to the point where agencies spend three-quarters of their total tech budget on operating and maintaining these systems.

A proposed $9 billion Modernizing Government Technology Act inspired hope that agencies would replace a decent share of their legacies with more effective, cloud-based solutions. However, the bill appears stalled in Congress. It remains uncertain as to how the new administration will perceive of such a proposal.

So it’s safe to say that agencies will depend upon legacies for the indefinite future. Yet, there is still significant demand for cloud-driven innovation, due to the resulting advantages of boosted productivity, lower capital expenses and greater flexibility. Given this, we can expect federal IT decision-makers to invest in cloud solutions as their budgets allow.

In the process, they’ll discover that interoperability will emerge as a “make or break” success factor here. The introduction of a cloud presence within legacy-dominated enterprises will create an increasingly complex environment in which a vast range of machines, apps and databases need to co-exist as a functional unit. The unit must integrate seamlessly in a manner that’s “invisible” to users, who are under immense pressure now to “do more with less.” They cannot run the risk of operations disruptions because of systems failures.

At Acendre, we have worked with government customers for years to ensure our cloud-based talent management analytics tools are completely interoperable with their existing technologies. We are committed to the tight integration of internal and external solutions to architect a consolidated talent management environment. We take pride in delivering a “single source of truth” throughout all HR areas, with integrated platforms kept up-to-date automatically and in real-time.

With this, talent management professionals easily connect to and analyze recruitment, onboarding, training and performance data to assess how improvements in all three areas can lead to better time-to-hire, quality-of-hire, retention and career growth. We helped the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) accomplish this through the “One USDA” HR enterprise solutions project, which transformed a fragmented collection of disparate, siloed and often manual processes into a fully automated, cohesive whole. Among the many benefits: The elimination of an abundance of duplicated efforts – such as data entry – that amounted to a time-consuming waste of money and resources.

Download the case study — How the USDA Saved Millions of Dollars and Drastically Cut Time-To-Hire 

The new administration, of course, is all about the elimination of wasted money and resources. We have no idea whether we’ll get our new cloud solutions through the modernization bill. But we do know that — whatever we introduce into our talent management IT ecosystem — it has to “talk to” and otherwise “play nicely” with what’s already there. That’s what interoperability enables, and we’ve firmly established ourselves as leading experts on this subject.

If you’d like to find out more about what we can do for your organization or for a demonstration of our solutions, please contact us.