Software Factories: A Data Enablement Accelerator

For federal agencies to reach a point where they are truly making full use of data to enable better mission outcomes, they must be able to deliver new and necessary software features—and the data to power them—quickly, efficiently, and seamlessly throughout the enterprise. Obtaining this ability will require more than IT modernization—it will take transforming the way mission is delivered across the enterprise, even as the mission stays the same. Software factories, portfolio-level product management, and change management will all be central to making this happen.

To put it simply, software factories are a game changer. By providing developers with an expertly curated set of standardized tools and services that are arranged in assembly-line fashion for the creation and maintenance of mission-specific applications, they streamline development, and radically shrink delivery times, supercharging a given agency’s ability to rapidly infuse new technologies into operations as needed to contend with changing circumstances and evolving mission priorities. Fostering a culture of shared innovation and best practices, they eliminate the resource-wasting redundancy of different teams having to solve for the same old challenges again and again. Answers to questions around hosting, provisioning, data services, and so on are built into the structure of the factory, centralizing foundational decisions to circumvent compatibility issues down the line and further speed time to value.

By standardizing and automating tedious processes, software factories improve the developer experience and make it easier and less costly to quickly test new approaches, learn, and iterate. As a framework, the software factory provides a rock-solid building block for scaling agile development across large, complex organizations, and synchronizing the efforts of a large software workforce toward well-defined, strategically prioritized mission and business goals. 

Portfolio-level software product management is key to scaling a software factory approach throughout an enterprise, as it serves to ensure seamless coordination between teams and assembly lines. By embracing portfolio-level management, federal agencies can bridge any stubborn gaps between their IT endeavors and business goals, as well as between frontend and backend workstreams, powerfully demonstrating quick wins to all stakeholders and helping to ensure that the work undertaken at a given time is focused on delivering the solutions that respond to the current, most urgent needs of the mission.

By driving backend, data engineering, and frontend teams toward an agreed-upon set of business-approved delivery priorities and modernization enablers, portfolio-level management serves to decrease turnaround times, reduce incidents, mitigate risks, and make costs more predictable.

Software factories managed at the portfolio level are the most advanced, effective approach yet to knocking down the development and delivery siloes that all too often make it unnecessarily difficult for mission operators to access the information and capabilities they need when and where they need them. By aligning IT and business and regularly delivering new functionality, the approach demonstrates to all stakeholders—leaders, mission operators, and mission beneficiaries—that modernized IT is not only beneficial; it's a necessity.

A real-world example of the transformative power of portfolio-level software factories can be found in a recent success story from a Cabinet-level agency. When the agency’s information technology office partnered with Booz Allen to stand up an enterprise-scale software factory for an entire portfolio of mission-critical software products, they began a journey that not only revamped their approach to software development but also significantly improved the agency’s ability to deliver positive mission outcomes for the communities it serves.

Prior to the effort, the agency took a project-centered approach to maintaining and operating more than 50 applications that, together, administered and delivered an array of essential services directly to citizens. The result was a fragmented experience for both employees and the beneficiaries they serve. As we helped the agency transition to a modern, product-driven approach to development, the more than 50 applications were simplified to 15 continuously delivered and deployed products across five distinct product lines.

Now, using portfolio-level management, we help the agency’s more than 200 agile development teams work in sync to deliver on a continuously updated series of strategically prioritized needs. This top-down alignment is the linchpin that today empowers the new software factory—one of the largest in government—to deliver new features and improvements in such rapid succession that change management is becoming the agency’s biggest software delivery-related challenge.

Building an enterprise-scale software factory that takes hold and succeeds requires managing change on a couple of fronts. First, those who are accustomed to helming project-level efforts in which they have carte blanche to manage every little detail will need to adjust to a new way of doing things. Giving up that full project-level control in favor of enterprise alignment can be understandably difficult, thus a transition to portfolio-level management and product-aligned assembly lines must include a well-resourced change management plan that demonstrates the ability of these new tools and approaches to ultimately get more done for the mission.

Second, the broader workforce—that is, those who use an agency’s software products to deliver on its missions—must be prepared for a substantial increase in the frequency of major improvements and new feature rollouts. A new or improved feature that is not taken up and used is a failure, regardless of how beautifully, efficiently, and securely it is designed. Thus, deployments must be paired with outreach, education, and efforts to listen to and respond to user feedback.

While establishing a software factory managed at the portfolio level is a transformative step in the journey toward modernization and data enablement for any organization, the best path for arriving at this goal largely depends on the nature of your agency's mission and the particulars of its existing IT landscape.

An enterprise-wide software factory is ideal for agencies with a monolithic mission, as they will benefit the most from a unified framework that aligns all development efforts with the overarching mission. Conversely, agencies that are responsible for a more diverse range of missions may find it more effective to establish multiple, separate software factories that can be finely tailored to the specific and sometimes incompatible needs of each mission.

Agencies that are new to the concept of software factories may need to start small, build momentum with some quick wins, and scale up as need and momentum grow. Once other parts of the agency begin to notice the success of your pilot, they are bound to want to adopt the approach for themselves.