When it comes to IT shared services, Tony Arcadi likes to use a familiar analogy. The former Treasury Department chief information officer, who recently retired from federal service after 28 years, likes to compare centralized IT services to a value meal at a fast food restaurant where you get your sandwich, fries and drink for one price.
“I’ll have a number one or I’ll have a number two or I’ll have a number three. Let’s take the guesswork out of it. Let’s reduce the time to market so that we’re able to get out there with the information technology. Our goal was to reduce time to market, become more cost efficient and make sure all the security is integrated in the meal deal, if you will, so you don’t add it in later. It’s baked in,” Arcadi said during an “exit” interview on Ask the CIO. “I think the major driver for me was cost efficiency. Having a cost effective platform, reducing our attack surface so that we’ve got less border to protect and deploying common parts that can be assembled to deliver both commodity IT and mission specific IT.”
Tony Arcadi recently left federal service after 28 years, including the last four as the Treasury Department’s chief information officer.
The T-Cloud program, which Treasury awarded to SAIC in June 2023 under a seven-year, $1.3 billion deal, is a major driver of that shared services effort.
Through the contract, SAIC acts as a cloud broker and integrator that gives Treasury and its bureaus access to the major cloud providers like AWS, IBM, Microsoft, Google and Oracle.
Arcadi said T-Cloud was one of his team’s major accomplishments during his tenure.
“It’s fully integrated with the enterprise network. It’s fully integrated with enterprise identity system and is fully integrated with the enterprise security operations center (SOC), so T-Cloud allows rapid, cost effective, resilience and secure cloud deployments,” he said. “What we wanted to do there was allow the bureaus, the mind space and the organizational dedication to their mission-specific IT, whether it’s the collection of taxes, minting of coins, printing of money, payment of bills or whatever their very mission specific is, and not have that bureau’s mind space occupied by questions like how do I get to a cloud provider? How do I manage my network? Where do I get my phone service from? Who’s my email provider? These are not really substantive mission differentiators. We tried to handle those in a centralized, consolidated way, while giving that access to the bureaus to run their mission specific IT.”
Arcadi took a similar approach to create an enterprise SOC for those agency bureaus that needed help with cybersecurity.
The Treasury shared services operations center now offers enterprise-level protection as a shared service deployment for the smaller bureaus. Arcadi said these bureaus now have a 24/7 SOC operation.
“A lot of smaller bureaus at Treasury were able to benefit from the T-SOC shared service, and we had a number of bureaus migrated over when I left, and we’re continuing that migration,” he said.
Getting a little ‘New York’ on you
Deploying shared IT services is never a smooth process. Arcadi said there was a mix of reactions over the last several years that he received with some bureaus more excited than others.
“There’s two ways to deploy shared services, and I’m going to get a little ‘New York’ on you. I can come up to you and put a bag over your head, shove you in the back of the van and drive away, or I can pull up on a limo or a black car or taxi and you can sit in a back seat and we can have a conversation. You can see out the windows. So the analogy that we’re trying to bring in there is the ability to see out the windows. What we found in deploying shared services, both at Justice and here at Treasury, is we can really gain the confidence of the IT practitioners by giving them full visibility,” he said with a laugh. “They don’t have to be driving the car. They have to be able to see out the windows. They have to be able to have a conversation with the driver about where the driver is going. So going back to the analogy, with a bag over your head, where are you going? You can’t see. We’re not having a conversation. You’re uncomfortable, to say the least. This is not a pleasant experience. Or I pick you up and you sit in the back seat. We have a nice conversation. You can see where we are going and we talk about it. We arrive at the same place, but they are remarkably different experiences.”
Arcadi added his team set up governance structures for the bureaus to participate in and that helped convince them to eventually give up some of the control.
He said one of the best ways he convinced bureau CIOs to give up some control was to help them understand the benefits of the shared services, especially those capabilities the bureau didn’t have and couldn’t afford anytime soon.
Real cost savings
“We built our shared services to afford some flexibility, while at the same time ensuring they have all the appropriate cybersecurity accouterments,” he said. “We deployed shared services into every bureau of the department. Every bureau is a user of the network; every bureau is a user of the SOC; every bureau is a user of the identity management tools. The scale of that utilization varies by bureau, and I think that continuing that commodity IT consolidation under the current administration is going to be critical to their efforts to further introduce cost efficiency into government.”
The shared services approach led to real savings for the department. Arcadi said the move to an enterprise network, for example, saw a 46% cost reduction in per unit of service, which is basically a unit of throughput just from aggregating and consolidating the agency’s needs.
“We saw reduction in time to market, measured in months to years for the cloud. They were between 6 and 18 months off of the timeline to bring a product to market or put it into production,” he said. “We have the cost savings. We have the reduction in time to market, which means that we’re driving mission value more quickly. Then we’ve got security, which is just unachievable unless we band together.”
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