And it wasn’t what anyone expected.
When The Avery Group began its assessment of CDC laboratory operations, one pattern emerged immediately. Scientists working inside some of the most consequential research facilities in the country were dealing with IT issues that had gone unresolved for nearly two decades.
These were not junior staffers on low-stakes projects. These were researchers generating data used to inform national public health decisions. And when something broke, the response they received was fragmented help desk support, no clear escalation path, and no resolution.
Before anyone could modernize a single system, that had to be understood.
The first assumption was wrong.
The natural instinct in a modernization effort covering 200+ laboratories is to lead with technology. Audit. Identify legacy systems. Deploy upgrades. Close tickets.
That’s the playbook. It’s also often the reason modernization efforts stall.
What TAG found was that each lab had evolved independently over decades. In one case, a laboratory’s performance issues were traced not to its research systems but to network bandwidth being consumed by unrelated security camera traffic. Researchers had blamed the modernization effort. The real cause had existed for years.
If the team had deployed a solution before understanding the environment, they would have fixed something that wasn’t broken while the actual problem continued unchecked.
Listen before you deploy.
The biggest win wasn’t technical.
Scientists working in biosafety environments were physically entering labs in full protective equipment just to check on an experiment. When TAG introduced secure remote access, researchers called it a “game changer.” Adoption accelerated immediately, not because the technology was impressive, but because it protected how they already worked rather than disrupting it.
Meanwhile, when researchers needed support, they now had direct access to knowledgeable personnel through Teams, email, and ServiceNow. Not a queue. A person who understood their environment and could act. Permissions that typically took months were granted faster than historical norms. Teams integrated into CDC operations in weeks instead of a year.
Responsiveness built more trust than technical capability did.
Two near misses worth knowing.
TAG evaluated a temperature monitoring system that labs were spending significant funding to maintain despite poor performance. The assumed fix was new equipment. The actual problem was configuration. TAG’s independent assessment saved the government an estimated millions of dollars.
Separately, a promising innovation pilot stalled when its single internal champion moved to a different role. One person’s transition ended a viable program. Innovation that depends on one advocate is not institutionalized. It is borrowed time.
What the data confirmed.
Support demand peaked not at system failures but at learning curves. MFA resets, new security tools, updated workflows. The modernization challenges were human adoption challenges, not infrastructure failures.
Issues that had gone unresolved through multiple support tiers were diagnosed in minutes once engineers stopped waiting for the right technical description and started asking what the researcher was actually trying to do.
Understanding the problem matters more than understanding the ticket.
The greatest achievement was not deploying infrastructure. It was restoring confidence. Modernization succeeded because TAG approached it as a partnership with researchers, not a technology installation.
That distinction applies to every agency, every initiative, and every team wondering why a technically sound program is still struggling to gain traction.
The technology is rarely the problem.
The Avery Group is a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business delivering IT modernization, program management, financial management, and workforce development services to federal agencies. Learn more at theaverygroupllc.com.
