Improving Mission Velocity Through Data-Driven Infrastructure

Kevin Hansen, CTO of MFGS, Inc., on what federal IT leaders need to get right — from WEST 2026.

At WEST 2026 in San Diego, the message from naval leaders was direct: sustaining maritime dominance now depends on data as much as platforms. In the conversation below, Kevin Hansen sharpens that point for federal IT decision makers across agencies — sea services and civilian alike.

Watch the interview

The short version

Hansen's insights come down to three priorities federal leaders can address and no amount of tooling will fix later:

• Embrace a reference architecture. Open standards like the IT4IT Reference Architecture from The Open Group gives teams a shared blueprint that drives compliance, velocity, and software quality across traditional IT, operational technology (OT), and cybersecurity. Without one, every program reinvents the wheel, and the seams between domains become the failure modes.
• Be ambitious with your data. Data silos remain the dominant blocker inside the DoD and most civilian agencies. High-fidelity information has to reach the person closest to the mission — the sailor on a ship's console, the analyst in a tactical SOC — at the moment of decision.
• Bridge legacy and modern with AI. Legacy weapon systems, navigational tools, and decades-old applications aren't going anywhere. AI-driven normalization translates their disparate data formats into something the warfighter can act on, without waiting on a full modernization cycle.

Mission velocity isn't a tooling problem. It's an architecture problem and a data problem — and the agencies moving fastest in 2026 are treating it that way.

How MFGS, Inc. helps federal agencies move faster

This is the work MFGS, Inc. does every day. Our team partners with agencies across the federal government — including the Navy and Marine Corps — to design and operationalize reference architectures, break down data silos across IT, OT, and cybersecurity, and apply AI where it has the highest mission impact. From software delivery to enterprise data platforms to the tactical edge, our focus is the same: getting the right information to the right person at the moment the mission demands it.

If your modernization roadmap is hitting the wall Hansen describes, we can help. Reach out to MFGS, Inc. to start the conversation.

Kevin Hansen is Chief Technology Officer at MFGS, Inc., where he works with federal customers on IT, OT, and cybersecurity modernization.