Executive Summary
The IBM Center for The Business of Government and the Foundation for American Innovation co-hosted a 2026 roundtable on “The Innovation Adoption Kit: A Data-Driven Playbook for Enterprise IT Modernization in Government.” The roundtable brought together leaders from government, Congress, civil society, and industry. Participants examined how federal agencies can adopt new technologies at scale and drew on lessons from the Innovation Adoption Kit, the Department of the Navy’s framework for technology acquisition.
The discussion focused on a central tension in current federal information technology (IT) modernization initiatives: to modernize quickly and reduce duplication. Agencies have difficulty pursuing these goals simultaneously, because moving quickly can produce a more complicated technology estate as agencies stand up new applications faster than they retire existing ones. Conversely, attempting to reduce duplication can lead agencies to centralize approval in ways that slow modernization down.
This session discussed how agencies can adopt innovation at scale by managing their technology as part of a unified portfolio, one that enables leaders to adopt new technology in a way that displaces legacy systems rather than allowing old and new systems to operate side by side indefinitely. The discussion highlighted three practices for applying this portfolio logic.
- First, agencies need to make the enterprise visible: they need to know what systems they have and how those systems fit together before they can identify technical debt and set modernization priorities. Approaches to accomplish this include process discovery, data discovery, and financial discovery.
- Second, agencies need to measure pilots against existing systems: they need standardized outcome measures for comparing pilots with the legacy systems they are meant to improve or replace. Participants discussed measures such as cost per user, adaptability, user experience, and operational resilience.
- Third, agencies need to acquire while divesting: they need a lifecycle view of their full technology estate, so new systems are adopted with a clear plan for what they will replace or simplify. Participants proposed building retirement planning into solicitations, internal modernization plans, funding milestones, and oversight agreements.
These three practices would enable executives to apply portfolio logic to government acquisition and treat modernization as a set of investment choices rather than a series of disconnected projects. This approach gives leaders an empirical basis for comparing investments while leaving room for strategic judgment about the future of their technology assets. The practices also give agencies a common language for modernization, making it easier to explain problems and share successful approaches.
