Less than a decade ago Gartner reported that 75 percent of large-scale government IT projects resulted in failure. In 2014, government software project failures such as Healthcare.gov again called national attention to this continuing problem in the public sector. To become more responsive, many federal, state, and local agencies began using agile software delivery methods. Yet, public service leaders still struggle to embrace new ways of thought or challenging long-term processes to instill agility into the public sector culture. Todd Holden examines what he sees as a fundamental thought-...
Todd Holden
Tennessee Department of Transportation
Todd Holden is the director of IT product development and a key player in the agile transformation of the Tennessee Department of Transportation. He helped bring attention to the idea of agile software delivery to the state as a whole. Todd firmly believes that, moving forward, software delivery inside public service can learn from past mistakes and produce a better model—with transparency, inspection, and adaptation within reasonable risk horizons to produce amazing software products for both employees and citizens. In the software industry for twenty-five years, Todd has been involved in all aspects of the product development lifecycle and has worked in finance, biomedical research, and several public sector domains.