Among the Federal government data center communities, the threat of incurable technical debt (TD) is pervasive - where short term planning and siloed IT design leads to procurement of IT COTS software, hardware and services that quickly become obsolescent and continually increase maintenance costs. This leads to the inability of Agencies to find and use new revenues or cost savings to deal with unexpected mission demands or to use new industry technologies. Modeling, monitoring and treating TD as a virus is an appropriate response - though requires as much continual input from the operators as from the architects, i.e. a “whole-of-enterprise” approach. There’s no herd-immunity to this disease, this rapidly multiplying and spreading pandemic. There is, however, expert commercial experience already fighting this contagion and its attack vectors, that public-sector IT programs should be leveraging. Read more at " The Technical Debt Virus: Attacking an IT Contagion Across Federal, DoD...

More and more often, governments (local, state, Federal) are finding the most current, useful and high-performing solutions (particularly in the IT space) are created through very collaborative engagement of the commercial ecosystem.  Bringing " commercial insights for government solutions " to bear, is actually essential at this time, for example in designing, building and improving Smart City initiatives. Read more about how commercial insights for government solutions is practiced in the use case of the Las Vegas Smart City, a collaboration between NTT DATA, the citizens and government of this American city.