[Music] good afternoon thank you for joining us for the congressional commitment to modernization session we hope you're enjoying your lunch my name is nicole francis reynolds and i am servicenow's vice president and head of global government relations i am thrilled to lead today's very important discussion with some amazing members of congress we will talk about modernizing government technology improving citizen experiences and outlining congress's plans to establish a secure and resilient federal government please join me in welcoming my amazing panelists our amazing panelists congressman jerry connolly chairman of the subcommittee on government operations and serving virginia's 11th district congressman derek kilmer serving washington's 6th district and congressman jim langevin who serves rhode island's second district welcome congressman to kick things off we'll start with a question for congressman kilmer for more than two years you have chaired the house select committee on the modernization of congress among the recommendations made by the select committee are 10 focuses on modernizing and revitalizing technology in the house of representatives this includes the re-establishment of the office of technology assessment improving i.t systems and reforming the approval process for outside technology vendors congressman why is modernizing technology in the house of representatives such an important part of making congress more effective efficient and transparent and what lessons for other federal agencies can we draw from my colleague kathy mcmorris rogers i think had a very apt description for congress she said congress is an 18th century institution using 20th century technology to respond to 21st century problems i think that's a pretty catchy way of describing what's actually a huge problem and i'll give you an exam a few examples you know prior to the pandemic bills had to be introduced in paper form we actually had to carry a signed hard copy of the bill down to the house floor and drop it in a big wooden box called the hopper and once kovid sent us all back to our district it wasn't possible to introduce bills that traditional way so that house had to develop an e-hopper system that allowed members to introduce bills electronically you know we also had to submit committee reports in paper form prior to the pandemic those can now be submitted electronically too you know so i think necessity kind of can be the mother of invention as a child of the 70s and early 80s i um remember the beginning of the tv show the six million dollar man where they said we have the technology we know how to fix him you know but the reality is that you know there are great innovations that just smooth the process and help us do our jobs more efficiently for the american people but it it shouldn't take an emergency for us to innovate innovation should be built into our systems and processes so we're not caught unprepared the next time we're faced with an emergency and in drafting our tech recommendations we considered what successful corporations and organizations do just as a matter of course they stay on top of the trends and update technology and i.t systems regularly they you know allows them to better serve their customers and remain competitive and stay secure and so a lot of our recommendations have been focused on having congress do the same thing and i think the lesson that federal agencies can draw from our work is just to stay focused on the american people they deserve an effective and efficient government and modern technology is one key way to make that happen my next question is for all three of you esteemed members of congress just seven percent of federal employees are under the age of 30 like me okay i'm just joking and potentially one-third of all federal employees are eligible to retire in the next several years unlike me based on your experience attracting and retaining talent what do you think prospective and current federal employees expect of the technology systems they use do you see modernizing federal systems as key to attracting and retaining the workforce of the future you know the demographics of the federal workforce are concerning because we're not recruiting the next generation of federal employees seven less than seven percent of the federal workforces under the age of 30 in the private sector it's many multiples of that and and uh more than uh 30 percent of all federal employees are over the age of 55 meaning they're getting ready for retirement that that demographic is uh really uh of great concern and and as i said it almost flips the reality in the private sector so we've got to we've got to address that problem because we're talking about hundreds of thousands of positions coming open because of retirement uh in the next few years so that gives us an opportunity but if you're going to recruit the next generation you've got to improve um a number of things one one thing i've got an internship bill that would make it easier and more systematic to have a good experience as an intern with the federal government and use that as a recruiting tool again right now we're in the single digits where where federal interns end up being offered and accepting a federal job uh in the private sector you know it's in the 70 to 85 percentile so we're you know by by factor of i don't know eight or nine we're way behind the private sector and that what what a missed opportunity right so we gotta we gotta show up internship programs to use them uh to have a good experience and to recruit the next generation we need to be more flexible in the workplace um and that that also has an i.t component you know telework uh that we've shown in the pandemic telework works but the next you know younger generation of workers expect that kind of i.t flexibility in their workplace and so a rigid rules-based-based environment is not going to work for younger generations if we want to recruit them to federal employment and so making it a more flexible workplace and then finally make it easier to be hired by the federal government i mean it's really a complex you know a process uh i i would argue that frankly when you look at how you apply for a federal job it's discouraging and it ought to be simplified and it ought to be expedited and there ought to be feedback right away and uh and i think those are those three things could make a huge difference in our ability to recruit uh but we're not there yet and and you know we're still in a very very critical mindset about um becoming a federal employee and then once you do the terms of reference within the workplace itself and we just that's not going to work with younger generations yeah so uh re recruiting and retaining talent uh is really essential to the the future of strengthening the workforce judging our you know our network strengthening our cyber defenses and a whole new level of things we need that type of expertise uh you know just recruiting and retaining dedicated and capable employees is because a multifaceted effort right and and um you know i think uh part of that effort needs to be you know meeting the employees basic expectations of having uh technical tools uh work environment and resources that uh showing that they need to succeed um you know this is of course an ongoing effort and certainly we've made uh considerable progress but i have to say uh you know considerable work needs to you know it still needs to happen we have we're not there yet i will say that ensuring that agencies uh employ uh disciplined and uh and uh effective management of course will be the key to continuing progress going forward and that of course you know is a it's a best practice of workforce development generally but it's particularly important uh ensuring effective planning uh oversight and uh and governance of i.t modernization projects in particular it really is the the you know let me just set the stage a little for what recruitment and retention look like in in congress you know outside research has shown that as of 2019 about 40 of congressional staff are under the age of 30. uh according to a recent house compensation and diversity study the average tenure for staff and member offices is two and a half years in their current position and just a little bit over four years in the house of representatives at large so one of the biggest reasons that staff cite for their desire to leave the hill is office culture and while that can mean a lot of different things there's no doubt that technology plays an essential role in congress's ability to recruit the next generation of workers young workers today expect technology to just work they've been raised in a high-tech environment and are used to it working seamlessly government technology needs to be able to meet that standard if we're going to retain those workers if if the pandemic i think has taught us anything it's that workers of all ages are coming to appreciate the flexibility that telework has given them i don't see that trend reversing and government technology needs to be able to support a workforce that works remotely from time to time that means ensuring that the files and software and communication devices that staffers use work seamlessly whether they're in the office or working from home the reason this ought to matter to the american people too is when we see that level of turnover within congress it erodes the ability of congress to solve big problems and right now i think the american people rightfully expect congress to be able to solve big problems we also see um challenges nature of of vacuum and when we see that level of turnover too often what fills that void is the voices of paid lobbyists and that i would argue doesn't reflect the needs of the american people either and so it is important that and part of the focus of our committee has been the recruitment retention and diversity of staff and i think you know certainly compensation is one piece of that but so is technology congressman connolly one of the challenges in upgrading federal i t systems is the budgeting and appropriations process beyond the disruption caused by short term continuing resolutions the use it or lose it nature of most agency funding this means that there is little incentive to make one-time investments in upgrading legacy systems that will result in long-term savings and improvements in agency operations the modernizing government technology also known as the mgt act and the technology modernization fund also known as tmf are important steps in the right direction but congress has not yet unfortunately provided funding levels that meet the scope of these challenges my question to you is how can we work together to support funding streams and mechanisms that break the cycle of throwing money at legacy systems that don't provide the customer experience that the american people deserve so you know the federal government is kind of a hodgepodge when it comes to i.t right so uh we had a thousands of sort of siloed data centers and we needed to consolidate them and achieve real savings which would were doing uh we had all kinds of email systems uh some of which weren't compatible and couldn't talk one to the other some agencies had you know dozens uh within the same agency and so trying to modernize upgrade and make ourselves more efficient is kind of the goal legacy systems are a problem because they're big they're expensive they consume a lot of energy and and the number of people who know even how to write the i run them or write the language for them is dwindling you know i don't know how many people are left to know cobalt but there are systems at some very large agencies that uh are legacy run systems like say at the irs for example and they are also not cyber secure and so replacing them is the name of the game but you put your finger on it in the question how do we incentivize people to do that so well if if you're the head of an agency and you honestly want to retire those legacy systems and have a whole new upgraded system put in place that's a multi-year multi-billion dollar effort and that means you've got to commit that in your budget and you also probably have to commit toward this effort knowing you're not going to be there when it's completed because you know the average lifespan of a political uh appointee in senior management in a federal agency you know is about 18 months so you might start out saying no i want to do that and then along comes some emergency or some unforeseen event or someone cuts your budget and all of a sudden that priority of retiring those legacy systems falls and you even though you wanted to do the right thing and so uh you know making sure we've got the management team in place that understands how critical this is to the future of the agency and its mission uh and making sure the resources at the end of incentivize you to do it you know although we spend about a hundred billion dollars a year at the federal level on i.t much of that is already spoken for in maintaining existing systems including legacy systems so getting some some catalyst some some investment capital if you will to incentivize you to go ahead with that reform is really critical and that's where the technology management fund comes into play and um in the past to your question about appropriations it was zero and we we finally got the house appropriations subcommittee to give it 25 million dollars well that's not going to incentivize anybody and in the last uh iteration of legislation we were able to get a billion dollars restored to the technology management fund now that's considerably below what president biden originally wanted which was eight billion but it's a good start we already have proposals into omb that exceed two billion dollars so we know the demand is there and i think going forward we're going to be able to persuade members of congress that this is an investment we have to make uh but you've got to have some seed capital you've got to have some incentive financially for managers to take that plunge and replace those legacy systems my next question is for congressman langevin congressman langevin what do you see as some of the biggest challenges agencies face today in terms of procuring technology and staying on top of the innovation curve yeah but budgets are always a big thing uh of course local state and federal government face you know fiscal constraints all the time and you're always competing for dollars but you know i think we yeah we still have a lot of work to do in the the modernization of critical uh legacy i.t systems which are you know are still too prevalent among government agencies again that goes to local state and federal uh some of these systems are are dozens of years old uh and uh you no longer supported with uh with software updates uh and uh are written in older programming languages that really aren't widely used anymore uh all of the this makes you know maintaining those systems uh more costly and defending them next to next to impossible in a lot of ways um so upgrading from these legacy systems is is fundamentally you know a resource problem as we talked about uh you know it's the technology uh modernization fund of course helps agencies to obtain uh those resources um the the one billion dollars uh to the uh the tmf in uh the american rescue plan uh act last year was a much needed investment that's a real shot in the arm toward to meeting those resource needs and i'd have to say that as you know as agencies do move to procure new uh technologies uh supply chain risk and and management is uh you know also a uh a a key a key challenge so um we've seen numerous cyber attacks that leverage software supply chains uh for access something really to be to be mindful of uh and no you know where the bad guys are looking so we need to make sure they're closing off that average vulnerability and you know the supply chain risk management is therefore you know critical for uh reinforcing federal cyber security as uh it modernization progress so i guess i'll just wind up by saying i also think that the widespread shift to remote uh work you know caused by covert 19 pandemic has complicated modernization efforts for sure and cios have had you know to think about uh technology uh procurement and security considerations in the context of certainly of rapidly uh changing requirements for proper network management so no shortage of challenges uh but at least you know we could identify the scope of the problem now we're going to get to work on solving it resources will help go a long way to fixing things i'd like to ask this one to congressman kilmer and congressman connolly on december 13 2021 president biden signed an executive order designed to improve customer experience and service delivery for the american people and reduce the time tax that many americans encounter when claiming federal benefits financing a business or filing their taxes key to that effort is modernizing i.t systems and piloting new online tools and technologies what customer experiences would you most like to see improved for the people you represent and what are key considerations to ensure that technology helps us deliver those services efficiently effectively and securely there's a few things that come to mind i think for members of congress quality customer service often means quality case work on behalf of our constituents literally half of my district staff does case work just trying to help constituents that are navigating a problem with the federal government whether that be social security or the va issue or an immigration issue or irs problem or lately it's been a lot of folks who are traveling for the first time in a long time and didn't realize their passport was expired and so the select committee recently held a hearing on modernizing district offices and improving the systems we use for doing case work um you know we're also planning another hearing on how to create a more customer friendly congress and technology will be a big part of that discussion too i think there are several ways to improve the customer experience for constituents when they interact with the federal government for example one recurring frustration that i hear from constituents is that they never know where their queries to a federal agency stands why is it possible for me to track the status of my pizza order in real time but not my service request with the federal agency you know another example the cases act of 2019 mandated agencies to allow the use of e-signatures on various casework forms and that act unfortunately has faced some resistance from some agencies and is yet to be fully implemented in 2022 we shouldn't be asking people to print out hard copies and fax documents on a regular basis so those are a couple things that come immediately to mind now congressman connolly the same question to you what customer experiences would you like to see improved for the people you represent and what are the key considerations to ensure that technology helps us deliver those services efficiently and effectively from my point of view the weakness in a lot of government portals websites uh and the like is they're complex you have to do multiple clicks to try to find where you're supposed to go they're not user-friendly and we need to change that and the pandemic kind of proved that right so in addition to the services you listed um you know during the pandemic people needed to be able to get on the sba website and try to access loans and grants to keep their small businesses open uh especially people who weren't used to going to sba for that kind of assistance but remember we increased the sba portfolio by 30-fold in one month we went from 20 billion to 600 billion supplemental nutrition assistance programs especially with schools closed a lot of families found that their kids weren't getting that daily school lunch you know that they were getting at school they needed supplemental uh assistance uh unemployment insurance i mean the the system was just overwhelmed at the beginning of the pandemic unemployment you know shot up you know to the double digits millions of people were flooding uh you know various portals both at the state and federal level we changed eligibility to make it easier for more people to participate we increased the benefits at the federal level um but all of that overwhelmed you know 50 state unemployment insurance i.t systems so we need to we need to improve that the president's executive order is a very important first step uh i've introduced legislation known as the face act to make it easier for agencies to collect voluntary feedback on customers experience because right now current law actually makes it very difficult to collect that kind of basic feedback and if we're going to improve we've got to have feedback from the customer right any retail any private sector entity would do that so we've got a ways to go uh the pandemic i think really showed strengths and weaknesses we want to enhance those strengths and address those weaknesses to make it easier for american the american people to access their government at any level congressman langevin how do you think federal agencies should be leveraging automation to improve fitara and fisma compliance as well as other audit requirements yeah so great question thanks for for raising it are you i think automation has significant uh potential in so many ways to improve agency reporting uh for these these regimes um you know manual data collection can result in agencies developing uh complicated internal processes and a lot of ways to store information in spreadsheets or even uh or even word processors uh you know that data is is not always uh you know stored in um in common uh format uh which which means that you know once it's once it's shared uh it takes additional work you buy it in order in order to format uh before it you know actually uh before actually analyzing it so moving uh to a standard framework um that that uses the same machine readable data formats across different different agencies would make it easier i i believe it faster for those agencies to you know document the the state and um and and um and uh security of their i.t systems it would also uh make it easier to share the data uh in other ways for for evaluation and uh and reused across the the interagency uh i would say that omb appears to recognize this uh its new uh fisma guidance from december uh 2021 uh actually directed the uh the development of the strategy uh to enable uh automation of fisma reporting which makes a lot of sense which to me is really it's an encouraging sign of progress this question is for congressman connolly often across the federal enterprise i.t funds are managed more by program offices and not by the cio as federal i.t funding has grown cio authority for oversight and governance in some cases has not kept up do you think that this lack of authority holds cio's back from fulfilling their missions and do you think that cios should be empowered to manage and track hardware and software assets at an enterprise level across their agencies so if you ask almost any private entity any corporation how many cios do you have in the company their answer is almost always going to be well what do you mean we have one um and in the federal agency when we wrote the fatah bill there were 240 people with the title cio spread across 24 agencies and that meant a management system of this right that's not me that's him or her and nobody was in charge and nobody was accountable so one of the goals uh we have and and that's reflected in the fatah scorecard that i created is to have a primary cio for every agency who reports to the boss because the other thing we know about how you know entities work is if your title is you know deputy assistant director for widgets and your office is in the bowels of the basement and nobody ever sees you and you you absolutely don't have the year of the boss anything you tell me with respect to i.t is odd referendum right it's fascinating that you think that and uh certainly we'll get around to looking at that whereas if if i know that no you you report directly to the boss you're talking to him or her every day and when you say something to me on your portfolio i better listen i you know i i better act on that i can't afford to ignore that and so making sure that we have direct reporting uh for the cia a cio is really critical so the org chart is actually meaningful but also to your other point empowering that cio to have decision making over everything from software to intellectual property to making investments to retire those legacy systems we talked about all of that is critical to the mission and let that person take responsibility and be accountable but have responsibility have that power to make those decisions um that's how we effectuate change that's how we make a modern i.t based federal uh government and that's how we serve our constituents so i think that's really a critical matter it looks like a personnel management issue in some in some respects it is but it is also critical as an ingredient to reforming how we manage and procure i.t in the federal government congressman i have one final question for all three of you if you are able to share a sneak peek with us tell us what are you working on legislatively in congress that focuses on i.t modernization and will possibly help the federal government modernize its i.t congressman connolly we'll start with you well there are two major pieces of legislation coming down the pike that our committee has reported out multiple times one is my fedramp legislation which as you know is the entity at usa that certifies private companies that want to provide cloud computing services to the federal government and we want to streamline that process we want to make it a lot less cumbersome and less expensive as it was originally designed to do we also want to codify it in law and we want to create a presumption of adequacy so that if you go to one federal agency and you get certified you don't have to go to 23 others and start all over again and so we think that can save a lot of money and create a lot of competition and opportunity for new entry uh in serving the federal government with that set of services and we think that's critical and moving federal agencies to the cloud working with private partners private sector partners really important the cia's done that so if the cia thinks it's pretty secure to do that so should civilian agencies as well the other legislation that's coming down the pipe that's just kind of started is fisma reauthorization and that really goes to cyber how is the federal government organized and how well are we in terms of resilience in fending off cyber attacks and protecting the assets and um that's just you know really an ongoing critical effort i mean if you look at the number of cyber attacks on federal agencies you know it's just grown exponentially it's hundreds of thousands a year um and and sometimes you know yes we get it about a cyber attack on the pentagon or the homeland security or cia but there are cyber attacks on cdc and fda uh trying to get at intellectual property you know as we're developing vaccines or strategies for disease management and those are expensive research efforts that the u.s taxpayer funds and there's a lot of proprietary information and there are all kinds of outside actors probing our systems to try to get at it so that it's free to them um and you know we have to do a much better job of protecting uh federal assets intellectual property especially in research and development efforts so those two bills are are still very much alive and uh i would expect action on both of them in the in this second session of 117th congress sure i'll give you a couple uh clues and a little bit of insight uh to what we're working on um so i think one uh process to watch for is uh frederick fedramp um uh authorization so um fedramp is as many of your viewers probably know is uh is the program within the uh the general services administration that standardizes uh security assessments and and authorizations for cloud products that are used by uh the federal government and in this case you know the house passed the the fed ramp authorization act which would enshrine the program uh in statute in early uh 2021 uh the senate right now uh uh has now passed fedramp back to the house as uh as part of the uh the strengthening american uh cyber security act which also includes language to to modernize fisma which is which is encouraging um so through fisma reform i believe that you know we have uh we have an opportunity to uh improve security elements um of i.t modernization shifting away uh from uh from a compliance-based uh system to one predicated on risk management so we're not just kind of checking the box if you will and uh you know we also have the opportunity to better define the roles that cisa and the the office of the national cyber director play in the fisma regime uh you know neither existed during the the last fisma update and on the on the house side uh fisma is the uh you know the purview of the committee on oversight and uh and and reform um and which has also been uh closely examining uh this issue i think it's important that we shouldn't get this right and i do know that uh the chairwoman maloney and chairman peters are are jointly committed to to ensuring that that our uh uh our federal uh information security is uh in a in a strong position as it as it can be and i have to say i'm at this point you know seeing the progress that the the bill is making the provisions making i'm confident that we'll see a final bill on on its way to the president that's very soon fingers crossed i i hope i'm not being overly optimistic but um you know i i tend to be conservative in these assessments i you know i know it's you know how challenging it can be to get important even even important legislation through the congress and sometimes things move at a snail's pace but i think we have we have momentum here and i'm optimistic that we'll see a bill to the president soon you know one thing i'm interested in is ensuring that the agencies continue to implement the evidence act of 2018 the evidence act was the most expansive effort undertaken by the federal government to change policies and increase the country's data infrastructure so that we're increasing the capability of lawmakers to actually engage in evidence-based policy making and the bill included some provisions that i drafted to ensure that public data is made more available in in in in in a machine-readable format that so that people and organizations public or private and other government offices can search easily the bill also required federal agencies to hire chief data officers and evaluation officers and statistical officers to coordinate and oversee and advise different elements of evaluation and data and statistical policy issues so i actually think implementation of that evidence act is is really important you know it is requiring agencies to rethink and modernize their systems for collecting data and making it available in user-friendly ways and we're seeing tremendous opportunities for partnership between the public sector and the private sector you know if you if you're from you know i represent a coastal district you know the the coolest app that you can get to look at waves um you know for folks who want to go surfing off of our coast you know come from noaa uh noaa database right the national oceanic and atmospheric administration right every time you check the weather app on your phone that's access to government data and so you're seeing real opportunities for a partnership between the public and private sector both in ways that can drive innovation that can create new jobs create new innovations but also in a way where where we where government can get better at adopting new innovations uh that's also providing an opportunity to better serve our constituents and better serve the american people congressman thank you so much for joining us today and for all of your invaluable insights on behalf of our ceo bill mcdermott and over 17 000 employees around the world we really do look forward to continuing our effort to work with you to modernize congress and to figure out how to best deliver these citizen services in a streamlined secure and efficient way thanks for all that you are doing in congress and we look forward to seeing future legislative efforts to support establishing a resilient federal government thank you so much again we look forward to seeing you around the hill uh again soon steve back to 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