This article is based on a first-person account originally published on enterprisersproject.com, describing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s “Cloud Factory” initiative. The tactics described come directly from that experience.
The Problem: Disconnected Cloud Initiatives at Scale
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security had been working toward cloud adoption for several years, but progress was fragmented. Multiple operating units had each launched their own cloud initiatives, creating redundant efforts and siloed decision-making. Every individual project had to independently work through strategy, procurement, security, network architecture, tooling, and compliance — with no shared foundation to build on.
To unify these efforts, DHS began developing a shared cloud services platform called Cloud Factory. Its stated goals were to accelerate delivery velocity, drive innovation, strengthen security, and more effectively serve the department’s mission. What the team discovered along the way was that the technology challenges were only part of the problem. The harder work was cultural.
What Cloud Factory Was Built to Do
Cloud Factory is a shared services offering designed to help project teams realize the full potential of cloud infrastructure through automation and integration. Its design goals included:
- A common cloud platform capable of hosting any DHS system or application
- Flexibility to adapt to individual mission requirements
- A technology stack compliant with federal mandates
- A shared DevSecOps toolchain
The team spent months evaluating commercial and open-source tools and platforms before selecting a set of best-in-class options and engineering an integration framework to make them work together in the DHS environment. A deliberate goal was to remain as agnostic as possible toward specific cloud providers and software components, allowing individual tools to be swapped out as the landscape evolves — a pragmatic approach to avoiding vendor lock-in in a fast-moving market.
When Developer Enthusiasm Meets Operational Skepticism
Not everyone in the organization responded to Cloud Factory with equal enthusiasm. The division was predictable but important to understand.
Developers and business stakeholders were eager for the change. They had been waiting for the speed, flexibility, and self-service capabilities that cloud and DevOps practices promise, and they wanted it as fast as possible.
Operations teams — infrastructure ops, security ops, compliance teams — were more cautious. Cloud Factory fundamentally changes the major processes they own and, in many cases, directly affects their roles and responsibilities. This is where the real work of winning hearts and minds took place.
This split is a common pattern in digital transformation programs. The resistance isn’t irrational — operations teams carry accountability for system reliability and security, and a platform shift of this magnitude represents genuine risk to their work. The challenge is channeling that caution into constructive engagement rather than passive resistance or outright obstruction.
The broader picture is also worth acknowledging: digital transformation is hard not because of any single factor, but because of the simultaneous pressure of multiple challenges — technology change, shifting team dynamics, skill gaps, regulatory constraints, and an accelerating pace of change in the industry. Effective culture change has to account for all of these at once.
5 Tactics for Nurturing Cultural Change in IT
Based on the DHS Cloud Factory experience, here are five concrete approaches that supported the cultural transformation needed to make the program succeed.
1. Make It Clear That Change Is Expected — and Good
Many IT organizations have an implicit norm that stability equals competence. Long-tenured systems, familiar processes, and predictable operations feel safe. Shifting that mindset — so that change is understood as necessary, healthy, and continuous — is foundational to any transformation effort.
This isn’t about manufacturing enthusiasm. It’s about consistently communicating, from leadership down, that the organization will keep evolving, that new tools and processes will keep arriving, and that adapting quickly is now a core professional skill. Normalizing change reduces the friction every time the next change arrives.
2. Actively Encourage Calculated Risk-Taking
Fear of failure is one of the most common causes of stagnation in large IT organizations, and it’s especially pronounced in government environments where mistakes can attract scrutiny. But risk aversion produces its own failures — slow delivery, missed opportunities, and systems that lag far behind what the mission requires.
The DHS team focused on rewarding teams for trying new approaches, even when those experiments failed. The distinction worth drawing is between reckless risk — skipping controls, ignoring compliance — and calculated risk — running a controlled experiment, running a pilot, iterating on feedback. Leaders who visibly back their teams when experiments don’t go as planned build the psychological safety that innovation requires.
3. Hire and Retain People Who Fit the Culture You’re Building
Attracting the right talent is harder in the public sector than in commercial IT — compensation often can’t compete, and bureaucratic hiring processes move slowly. But mission-driven work is a genuine differentiator. People who care about national security, public infrastructure, or civic impact are motivated by different things than those chasing stock options.
The DHS approach was to lean into the mission explicitly — to make the argument that this work matters, and that joining a transformation initiative is an opportunity to do meaningful technical work with real-world consequences. Connecting talent strategy to mission impact is a recruitment and retention lever that many government IT organizations underuse.
4. Invest in the Physical and Collaborative Environment
This tactic may seem superficial alongside the others, but the DHS team took it seriously: they renovated their workspace to create a more open, modern, and collaborative environment, including standing desks and layouts that encouraged cross-team interaction.
The reasoning has two layers. First, workspace quality affects the ability to recruit and retain strong engineers — a point that any IT leader who has tried to hire in a competitive market understands. Second, physical layout genuinely influences collaboration patterns. Open spaces and fewer barriers create more spontaneous conversation, which in turn accelerates knowledge-sharing and cross-functional problem-solving. The environment is a soft signal about the culture, and signals accumulate.
5. Build a Public–Private Community Around the Work
The final tactic was deliberately outward-facing: engaging the venture capital community, technology startups, and leading technology companies. The goals were twofold — to identify technologies and approaches that could be adopted or adapted for the DHS environment, and to expose internal staff to the pace and mindset of commercial innovation.
Structured engagement with the private sector — through pilot programs, industry days, technical exchange meetings, or challenge programs — gives government IT teams access to ideas and practices that wouldn’t otherwise reach them. It also signals to internal teams that the organization is serious about staying current, rather than defaulting to established vendors and established ways of working.
The Key Lesson: Culture Change Requires a Clear “Why”
Building and launching Cloud Factory was a practical exercise in running a technology transformation and a cultural transformation simultaneously. The team’s conclusion was that the cultural half of the work required as much intentional effort as the technical half — and that the most powerful driver of engagement was helping people understand not just what was changing, but why it mattered.
Encouraging people to challenge existing processes, rewarding those who take sensible risks, and continuously connecting day-to-day work to mission impact are the mechanisms that sustain cultural change after the initial energy of a launch fades. These principles apply whether the organization is a federal agency, an enterprise IT department, or a rapidly scaling product team.
Technology alone doesn’t transform organizations. The people who build, operate, and use the technology do — and getting them genuinely on board is where the real work is.