Innovations24 for Government
How we work

One accountable architect, from business case to managed run.

Your budget follows the evidence: in an Innovation or an Infrastructure engagement, each milestone is priced before it starts, staffed with the specialists it needs and closed with your decision on the next one.

Book a Discovery SessionSee the offers
Engagement type

Innovation engagement

Does the AI investment pay off in the budget and in the mission result? From a business case to a measured result and a managed run, with specialists chosen for each milestone. Each milestone below is mapped to the budget or acquisition event it serves.

  1. Milestone 1: Case

    Budget formulation and market research

    A business case in OMB terms: net present value under Circular A-94, the costs, benefits and risks A-11 Section 55 asks agencies to document, and the benefit and cost evidence an AI impact assessment asks for. Before we help write a requirement, we ask your contracting team to decide any conflict-of-interest restraint and state it in the contract.

    New
    A business case your finance team can rerun, with the consumption forecast for every call to the AI.
    Optimized
    The use-case list, ranked by value and payback.
    Replaced
    Slide-deck estimates, replaced by a workbook with sensitivity ranges.

  2. Milestone 2: Prove

    Pre-deployment testing

    A controlled pilot with a pre-registered KPI and baseline, whose readout your agency can use as pre-deployment testing evidence and a performance-based contract can carry as its measure.

    New
    A pilot designed as a controlled experiment, with a pre-registered KPI and a baseline.
    Optimized
    The pilot scope, cut to the one effect worth paying for.
    Replaced
    Demo-day impressions, replaced by an effect size measured against a control.

    Roles

    • Accountable architect
    • Data scientist
    • Platform engineer
    • Domain expert from your team

    Rules

  3. Milestone 3: Build

    Delivery inside the authorized boundary

    Production on FedRAMP-authorized cloud services in your agency's tenant, with the security evidence for what we build, ready for your authorization package.

    New
    A production system in your tenant, with roles and incentives redesigned around it.
    Optimized
    The data model and the workflow it serves.
    Replaced
    Manual steps and satellite tools, replaced inside your tenant.

    Roles

    • Accountable architect
    • Solution and data engineers
    • Security engineer
    • Change lead

    Rules

  4. Milestone 4: Run

    Operations and ongoing monitoring

    Monitoring of performance and of changes after deployment, built for the periodic human review federal AI policy asks of high-impact uses, with a value and consumption review against the business case.

    New
    A value and consumption review against the business case.
    Optimized
    Model, prompts and capacity, tuned on measured use.
    Replaced
    Open-ended support, replaced by a managed run priced per period against the business case.

    Roles

    • Accountable architect
    • Operations and FinOps engineer
    • Your process owner

    Rules

  5. Milestone 5: Expand

    The next funding decision

    The next use case, ranked on measured value and bought the way your contracting team chooses: an option, a new order or a new competition.

    New
    The next use case, bought the way your contracting team chooses.
    Optimized
    The roadmap, re-ranked on measured value.
    Replaced
    A roadmap ranked on assumptions, replaced by one ranked on measured results.

    Roles

    • Accountable architect
    • The specialists the next milestone needs
Engagement type

Infrastructure engagement

Does the platform carry the next five years of AI at an operations and maintenance cost your budget office can see? We work on security, cost, scaling, elasticity and technical debt, milestone by milestone, on the cloud and data platform you run today or the one you are moving to.

  1. Milestone 1: Assess

    A consumption baseline by budget account and IT investment, starting from the software and hardware inventory your agency keeps.

    New
    A current-state picture of the landing zone, identity, data boundaries, capacity and spend.
    Optimized
    The list of technical debt, ranked by risk and run cost.
    Replaced
    Guesswork about what the estate costs to run, replaced by a consumption baseline.

    Roles

    • Accountable architect
    • Cloud architect
    • FinOps analyst

    Rules

  2. Milestone 2: Secure

    Controls mapped to the NIST SP 800-53 controls your agency selects, zero trust principles and logging that covers operational technology.

    New
    Identity, network and data-boundary controls for agents, pipelines and OT connections.
    Optimized
    Access paths and tenant isolation, mapped to the NIST AI RMF.
    Replaced
    Standing broad access, replaced by least privilege and managed identities.

    Roles

    • Accountable architect
    • Security engineer
    • OT security specialist where plants are involved

    Rules

  3. Milestone 3: Right-size

    Capacity, licenses and model consumption matched to measured use, with vendor utilization and prices made visible.

    New
    A consumption model: Fabric capacity, Databricks compute, model tokens and Copilot credits against actual use.
    Optimized
    Capacity, model routing, caching and reserved versus pay-as-you-go commitments.
    Replaced
    Idle capacity and duplicate licenses, retired against a cost ceiling.

    Roles

    • Accountable architect
    • FinOps engineer
    • Data platform engineer

    Rules

  4. Milestone 4: Scale

    Migrations planned with post-quantum readiness, and savings shaped for an IT working capital fund.

    New
    Elastic capacity and automation for the workloads that grow.
    Optimized
    Pipelines and environments, with the technical debt that blocks scaling paid down first.
    Replaced
    Hand-built environments, replaced by infrastructure as code.

    Roles

    • Accountable architect
    • Platform engineers
    • Site reliability engineer

    Rules

  5. Milestone 5: Sustain

    Security posture, consumption and logging reviewed against the plan.

    New
    A review of security posture, consumption and debt against the plan.
    Optimized
    The run itself: alerts, budgets and ownership per workload.
    Replaced
    Firefighting, replaced by a managed run priced per period.

    Roles

    • Accountable architect
    • Operations and FinOps engineer
    • Your platform owner

    Rules

Delivery assurance

What every engagement carries

Every Innovation and Infrastructure engagement carries these commitments, so your agency stays in charge of its budget, its systems and the work it has paid for.

Accountable architect

The assigned accountable architect works with your agency from business case to managed run.

Governance

Stage gates at the business case, design review, pilot acceptance and production readiness, with code-review thresholds, a RAID log and a steering meeting.

Infrastructure, security and consumption review

In every engagement the accountable architect reviews the infrastructure, the security posture and the consumption cost — model tokens, Copilot credits, Fabric capacity and Databricks compute — before the design is approved and again at each value review.

  • Landing zone, compute and capacity sized to the use case
  • Identity, data boundary and tenant isolation
  • Security of OT, edge and agent connections
  • Prompt-injection and data-leak controls for agents
  • Token and consumption forecast: model choice, context length, caching, provisioned versus pay-as-you-go
  • Fabric capacity and Databricks compute plan
  • Copilot and agent licenses against actual use
  • A cost ceiling in the business case and a consumption review in the run

Specialists per milestone

The accountable architect vets each specialist for the milestone that needs their skill, interviews them personally, contracts them under a statement of work, and onboards and offboards them as the milestones change.

Continuity

Your repositories and tenants stay yours, and knowledge is handed over at set milestones.

Change course without lock-in

At every milestone you can change course, pause or bring the work in-house. You pay for the milestones you have taken and keep everything they produced.

Step in, take over, hand off

We can step into an AI engagement at any milestone, take over a milestone from another team or provider, and hand off at any milestone, so the engagement reaches its result. Taking over work in progress is a specialty, and we are flexible and quick to react.

U.S.-based delivery

Government engagements are delivered by U.S.-based specialists where the contract or the regulation requires it, and agency data stays in the agency tenant.

What the price pays for

Senior people do the work, and the price covers exactly the skills the milestone needs.

The rules every engagement is mapped to

Authorization, security and AI governance

The federal frames that apply to the systems we build or run for a federal agency, whichever engagement type they belong to. State and local frames: state and local government.

U.S. federal (executive agencies)Key date: April 3, 2025

OMB M-25-21: Accelerating Federal Use of AI through Innovation, Governance, and Public Trust

In force; rescinds and replaces M-24-10. Minimum practices for high-impact AI were due within 365 days (April 3, 2026).

“the intended purpose for the AI and its expected benefit, supported by specific metrics or qualitative analysis”

What we do: We produce the evidence an AI impact assessment asks for: the expected benefit against the current process, the costs and expected savings, the pre-deployment test results and the monitoring plan, and your agency's reviewers make the determinations.

Source: OMB M-25-21 (whitehouse.gov, PDF) (opens in a new tab) · Checked November 10, 2026

U.S. federal budgetKey date: November 6, 2026

OMB Circular A-11 (2026), Section 55: Information Technology Investments

Current edition: OMB Circular A-11 (2026), Transmittal Memorandum No. 100 of November 6, 2026, which supersedes all previous versions.

“Agencies should regularly review their Major IT Investments to ensure that they continue to add the expected value to the agency's stated business goals or mission outcomes.”

What we do: We write investment business cases that carry the planned and actual costs, the anticipated and achieved benefits and the cost, schedule and performance risks that Section 55 asks agencies to document for Major IT Investments.

Accounting treatment is determined by your auditors; we provide evidence and documentation.

Source: OMB Circular A-11 (2026), Section 55 (whitehouse.gov, PDF) (opens in a new tab) · Checked November 10, 2026

U.S. federal (statute)Key date: December 23, 2022

FedRAMP Authorization Act: presumption of adequacy (44 U.S.C. 3613(e)(1))

In force since December 23, 2022; the Act's sunset (Pub. L. 117-263, section 5921(d)) strikes 44 U.S.C. 3607 through 3616, including this section, on December 23, 2027 unless Congress extends it.

“shall be presumed adequate for use in an agency authorization to operate cloud computing products and services.”

What we do: We build production on cloud services that hold FedRAMP authorization in the cloud your agency uses and record each one's status in the blueprint, so your agency's own authorization starts from the provider's assessed package.

Source: FedRAMP Authorization Act (law.cornell.edu) (opens in a new tab) · Checked November 10, 2026

U.S. federal (statute)Key date: December 18, 2014

FISMA: agency information security responsibilities (44 U.S.C. 3554)

In force.

“providing information security protections commensurate with the risk and magnitude of the harm”

What we do: With every system we build or run for your agency, we hand over the security evidence for our part of it: configuration as code, control implementation notes mapped to the NIST SP 800-53 controls your agency selects, test results and logging settings.

Source: FISMA (law.cornell.edu) (opens in a new tab) · Checked November 10, 2026

Talk through your first milestone.

In a 45-minute Discovery Session we identify the first milestone your business case needs, so it can be quoted in writing before your agency commits budget.

Book a Discovery SessionContact us