SAP is reshaping how government agencies approach IT modernization. As global president of Cloud ERP and acting managing director for SAP U.S. Public Services, David Robinson is leading efforts to bring cloud-native, AI-powered innovation to the public sector.

During a recent conversation, Robinson shares his perspective about the opportunities and obstacles facing the federal government in 2025 — and beyond.

1. First things first: You've said we're past the 'lift and shift' era of cloud adoption. What does that mean for U.S. federal agencies?

Robinson: Lift and shift is a very short term strategy to take cost out of accessing IT infrastructure and compute infrastructure. Many organizations in the private sector use that as a first step towards modernization, but it's the first step of a longer process to modernize.

When we talk about the opportunity within the federal space, we have to rethink both how these enterprise states are designed, leveraging cloud service and the IT operating model, so that organizations can take full advantage of the capabilities that cloud provides beyond just a reduction in cost.

2. The strategy: What specific agility do cloud-native platforms enable?

Robinson: The true power of clouding of platforms is that they actually drive agility, they encourage experimentation and remove barriers to interoperability. Additionally, they support processes that are more efficient or more successful through collaboration, and they provide fast scaling for innovation.

3. The solution: What does the operating model of the future look like?

Robinson: An operating model of the future refactors the work that's done and how technology plays a role in the mission and business processes of government. That operating model should:

• Minimize custom applications and activate new features and functions.
• Prioritize the people that do the work, who should be spending less of their time on making the workloads available, and more of their time on curation of the innovation and extensibility.

4. An expert take: How is AI reshaping these types of operations, especially in federal agencies?

Robinson: This is one of the most interesting lessons that we've experienced here in the last 9-12 months. Generative AI is taking cost and risk out of the modernization efforts themselves. We are directing all of that Gen AI capability to much of the tedious work in understanding the current customization estate, understanding what in the estate is still required for the mission and what is actually just accumulated technical debt over years.

5. The challenge: What's keeping federal agencies from moving faster on reducing technical debt?

Robinson:

• Federal agencies have been running these large systems for years, and over the years, requirements continue to pile on and put more and more stress on the current operations on the current sustainment. What we've seen in the private sector — we're seeing a similar prevalence in the public sector.
• A large percentage of the customizations that sit in these large environments, these enterprise environments, are no longer used. They just continue to add technical debt, which is so large and daunting that most federal organizations aren't built or staffed to unwind it. The promise of AI is so strong here that it's actually changing the economics of tackling and unwinding technical debt and helping unlock systems that have been stuck in the past.

6. The solution: What's needed to make enterprise-wide strategies work across the government?

Robinson:

• I think the enterprise-wide strategy is that these organizations, whether it's an agency, a department, or the broader federal space — are looking at their collection of applications, functions and capabilities as an end-to-end cloud estate. These cloud estates are never static or at a standstill; they're dynamic and continuously allow new capabilities to be introduced, while managing existing ones securely, with scale and with persistent availability.

• That way of thinking moves away from highly compartmentalized features or vendor management. It allows agencies and departments to think about unifying the estate — with shared data, models, security, standards and user experience — which drives scale, speed, consistency and more efficient operations.
• It's why we're proud to partner with organizations such as the General Services Administration (GSA) and give federal agencies access to new tools as they accelerate technology modernization, transition away from legacy systems and unlock significant taxpayer savings.

7. The takeaway: What mindset shift must federal IT and mission leaders embrace to build a future-ready government?

Robinson: We have to become much more comfortable and proactive around the convergence of the benefits of cloud, the maturity of cloud service, maturity of delivering and consuming cloud applications but also balancing that with the realities of sovereignty, compliance, security and the uniqueness that government mission puts on technology and application providers.

My recommendation and lessons from the private sector is refactoring the IT operating model, which doesn't just get you current, it keeps you current.

It allows customers to stop thinking — and start implementing, activating and curating — and that's when I believe we're going to see the true power of cloud come to life across the U.S. government.

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