Seeking Frugality in Bureaucracy

The magnitude of technological change that has happened in the past ten years is easily seen in our daily lives.  It’s no surprise that McKinsey Global Institute listed “Accelerating technological change” as one of four global forces breaking trends.  The McKinsey report notes that 150,000 applications were created two years after the initial launch of the iPhone.  Five years after that the number of apps developed had reached 1.2 million.  It makes sense that innovations advance when technology does and the two heavily compliment each other.

I am particularly interested in how government and bureaucratic organizations have and have not kept up with these changing times.  About a year ago the Pentagon launched the Defense Digital Service, modeled off of the White House’s U.S. Digital Service.  Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced the team saying “DOD doesn’t have many effective ways to harness promising technologies they come up with… We need to fix that. I don’t want us to lose out on an innovative idea or capability we need because the Pentagon bureaucracy was too slow to fund something, or we weren’t amenable to working with as many startups as we could be.”

This announcement indicates efforts to introduce new approaches to program design at the Pentagon, and showcases top-down support that Vikas Sehgal, Kevin Dehoff, and Ganesh Panneer discuss in “The Importance of Frugal Engineering” as imperative for companies be open to organizational innovation.  I wonder how this will reflect on modernizing existing programs.  One of the oldest computer programs that remains active today is the Department of Defense’s contract-management system, Mechanization of Contract Administration Services, commonly abbreviated to MOCAS.  It was launched in 1958 and has remained in use since then. 

The DoD has built newer interfaces and integrated software packages into MOCAS so it has continued to be functional, but it has never been fully replaced.  It is estimated to be managing around $1.3 trillion in obligations and 340,000 contracts.  Due to the sensitivity of the programs managed in MOCAS, a new system will have to overlap perfectly with everything that is currently underway before it can be implemented.  

I wonder how organizations in the process of creating more innovation friendly programs can approach their legacy programs as well.  How can design methods be applied to a program that is as large and complex as MOCAS and what does that process look like?   Is it possible to find frugality in bureaucracy?  Is it necessary?