Presented by MongoDB & Carahsoft
At the Google Public Sector Summit, Andrew Iskander, Regional Vice President for Federal at MongoDB, outlined how government agencies can modernize for the age of artificial intelligence by transforming both their technology stacks and their organizational culture.
“What we built mission-critical applications on 10 or 20 years ago no longer works for modern AI applications,” Iskander said. “Consumers today expect elegant, fast user experiences, and the government must meet those expectations.”
He explained that traditional relational databases—once the foundation of most government systems—are not suited for the performance, scale, or agility required by modern architectures. “Legacy databases were fine for the applications of 20 years ago,” he said. “But they’re not sustainable for the complexities of today’s AI-driven systems.”
MongoDB’s document-model, no-SQL architecture, he said, allows agencies to ingest and analyze structured and unstructured data with greater flexibility. That capability is key to supporting AI and analytics workloads across cloud environments.
Still, Iskander emphasized that modernization is not just about adopting new tools. “It’s a mindset shift,” he said. “Agencies have to move away from the idea of one vendor to rule them all. That model stifles innovation and creates lock-in that reduces resilience.”
Instead, he advocates for architectures that can run across multiple cloud service providers. “We saw earlier this year how one major CSP outage disrupted operations for many organizations,” he noted. “Having a single code base that’s interoperable across environments makes agencies more resilient.”
Achieving that flexibility, however, requires cultural change. “Transformation starts from the top,” Iskander said. “Leadership must encourage teams to experiment, fail fast, and learn. If everything is successful all the time, you’re not innovating—you’re just repeating the past.”
He also encouraged agencies to measure innovation not only by success rates but by the willingness to take informed risks. “If you have projects that fail forward, that’s a sign your organization is evolving,” he said.
For Iskander, modernization is about empowering agencies to serve citizens and warfighters with the same reliability and agility people expect from the private sector. “Government services must be as resilient and performant as the best commercial experiences,” he said. “That’s how we build trust and deliver better outcomes.”
Key Takeaways
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Legacy relational databases limit AI and modern application performance.
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Agencies should pursue interoperable architectures that work across multiple CSPs.
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Cultural change—encouraging experimentation and resilience—is as vital as technical transformation.