May 23, 2018

Creating a Cloud First Organization

The Cloud Adoption CoE facilitated a workshop for USDA technical leaders. The objective was to provide background information and gain stakeholder support for the foundation of the Commercial Cloud Platform Services (CCPS) organization. CCPS is to be the USDA pathway to cloud services and is contingent on the acceptance and participation of all workshop attendees. The workshop was conducted as a collaborative two-day offsite that brought together stakeholders from across OCIO to discuss roles, responsibilities and expectations in conducting next steps. The CCPS is a logical first step for USDA to leverage and harness the commercial cloud marketplace to add value to farmers, ranchers, and producers (consumers) via three primary roles:

Aggregation: Combining and integrating multiple services
Service Intermediation: Provisioning of value-added services or improving a capability without actually providing any of the cloud services itself (identity and access management, security management and reporting)
Service Arbitrage: Enabling providers to combine various cloud services into one or more aggregated cloud services to USDA cloud consumers

Attendee feedback has painted the workshop as a productive step toward success and sustainment of the CCPS. More importantly, these OCIO stakeholders reached agreement on a plan to move forward as a team – with the purpose of creating a firm foundation of trust amongst peers. This is regarded as the definitive success of the workshop. While the cloud has potential to transform the USDA IT ecosystem, “trust as purpose” is often transformative for the team; it offers the real possibility that together we can act in service to a shared higher aspiration. “One IT” supporting “One USDA.”