Federal agencies may allocate only 21% of their FY’20 IT budgets to IT modernization, according to a recent forecast from Bloomberg Government.  That’s down slightly from this year’s 23% and, while not a significant decrease, comes at a time when most believed that modernization spending would accelerate.  The total dollar drop would be about $1 billion, down to $14.5 billion.  Modernizing IT systems has been both an administration and CIO community priority.  GSA manages a small, revolving IT modernization fund to spark innovative solutions.  Considerable ink has been dedicated to modernization efforts.  Yet, as the tension over whether and how to update agency telecommunications solutions shows, there can be significant internal obstacles to truly modernizing.  In telecomm this has manifested itself in the form of agency concerns about workload, functionality, and cost.   Several agencies want nothing more than to “lift and shift” their existing telecomm infrastructure because that seems to be the easiest thing to do.   The downturn in overall modernization spending may be a result of the same line of thinking.  If so, industry has considerable work to do to show that new systems are not only safe, but easy to deliver and full of new, easier to use features that customers may not know exist.  It is apparently not enough that they are light years ahead in terms of security.  If a new solution is perceived as difficult to buy, install, and manage the customer may just keep their Model T solution.  It may be time to adapt marketing and sales messages accordingly