[Music] foreign so next up we're going to be diving into Federal digital transformation and what's next on the horizon please welcome Lauren Hayes senior advisor for technology and Innovation at the cyber security and infrastructure Security Agency Chris Brazier acting Deputy I.T director at the defense threat reduction agency Sean broon Chief Information officer and Deputy Commissioner for systems at the Social Security Administration Kevin Corcoran principal at Deloitte and Dan Wallace area vice president of the federal civilian business at servicenow [Music] thank you great well hey everyone welcome to Fed Forum sight to see so many people here today before we jump into the questions I'd like to ask each of the panelists to introduce themselves Lauren let's start with you my name is Lauren Bose Hayes and I'm with the cyber security and infrastructure Security Agency or sisa as we call it prior to joining the federal government I led cyber security for the Biden Harris transition team which was a fantastic opportunity to get to learn about all of the incoming Administration appointees and nominees and then prior to that I was in the private sector where I focused on counter disinformation and counter Espionage excited to be here with everyone today good morning everybody Sean broon I'm the CIO at the Social Security Administration in that role I've served there for the last three years as CIO but majority of my career at Social Security has been in field operations I see my function as trying to build Synergy across the c-suite so that we can actually accelerate our transformation of service hey good morning everybody Chris Brazier I am the acting Deputy I.T director for defense threat reduction agency also known as ditra and I promise I'm not trying to do job you know I got the most jobs in the house I'm also the chief technology officer and I'm also the mission I.T infrastructure and Services Department chief so it gives me a great opportunity to take a look at across the agency from an operational perspective so happy to be here this morning with you thank you great good morning my name is Jerry nobotny I'm at the Central Intelligence Agency helping to implement servicenow uh there before that I was at the odni officer Director of National Intelligence where I was doing something very similar there must have done something right or something wrong I don't know so I came over to CIA then and uh so I got to see two different agencies uh implementing uh this platform good morning everyone Kevin Corcoran principal for Deloitte lead Alliance partner for the Americas so I'm responsible for both our commercial and public sector work Across the Western Hemisphere great thank you all for uh joining us this morning so open with the question for everyone under the 2021 presidential management agenda the Biden Administration backed Federal digit acceleration and improved Citizen Services with a focus on both customer experience and Service delivery how far along are federal agencies in implementing these specific requirements yeah happy to start us off so I can speak for how we're thinking about this at sisa so if you are not familiar with cisa that would be reasonable because we are the youngest agency in government we were just created about four years ago we celebrated our fourth birthday in November and so one of the benefits that we have at sisa as a very young agency is we don't have an inherited quite the same level of tech debt that some other agencies have experienced and so that's a tremendous benefit to us as we get to operate in a slightly different way we also know that our mission being the nation's cyber Defense Agency requires us to take an incredibly technology-centric approach as an agency and so when we think about some of the areas in which Service delivery service delivery and really putting customer voice at the center and holding government accountable to doing that well are critical to our mission I think about an area I focus on a lot in my day-to-day job which is cyber incident reporting we know that understanding the Cyber threat landscape is critical to our understanding of National Security but to do that it means that we need presently to get voluntary incident reporting to our agency and then in the future under the new Cyber uh the the cersea bill the instant reporting Bill we will have some element of regulatory required reporting assist us so we know that to do that well we need to make it easy for individuals and organizations to report incidents to us and we need to do that in keeping in mind that individuals and organizations who are reporting to us are operating under duress because they've just experienced a major cyber incident and so that's one of the areas where we're thinking a lot about how we make engagement with sisa Easy from a technology perspective from a process perspective and then we've got to make sure that we use those cyber incident reports to also inform the nation and make sure that we're making better National Security decisions appreciate that I would just add that at Social Security we're a high-touch public agency nearly everybody in the country is going to interact with Social Security at some point whether to get a Social Security number card report wages file for benefits or or receive benefits and as such you know I would say we've always been customer experience focused but the recent executive order and the other Administration guidance Lauren mentioned security there's been an executive order on that as well diversity Equity access and inclusion those are part of things that we're doing at Social Security to make our programs meet better meet the needs of the public we serve some of the specific things we're doing is focusing on our journey mapping to make sure that we're touching seeing where the customer pain points are and addressing them and then as was heard on the last panel similar to VA we have an always-on survey to hear the voice of the customer and actually take action based on their comments yeah so defense threat reduction agency is a little bit different right so we're not public facing so our customers are really let me see my customers and my perspective is the entire agency and then all the combatant commands that we actually service and help out with counter weapons of mass destruction nuclear proliferation really I can say it um and it's it's different so our thing is really how do we help them transform to getting information and data that's going to be helpful to them how do we increase that exchange of data and information between either combatant commands our five Eye Partners or within our own directors within our own agency today so that's primarily our big focus on doing that kind of transformation within our agency yeah very similar our customers are internal uh you know that's where our citizens are are internal so uh we have a little bit of tech deck I'm very jealous that you don't have a lot like that no you know we're a little bit older agencies so um but we've been on this journey a lot you know sooner than you know the the 21 memorandum so we've been much like Sue Gordon said I mean we were out in front of this digitizing things sure you know prior to this so it's just trying to take a look at that technical debt and cleaning that up I think Gary's being very humble you know his organization is really on the Vanguard of digital transformation and I think there's a lot of lessons learned there but in contrast I think there it's A Tale of Two Cities you have some organizations that you know still have not adopted a transformation agenda uh but I think all the leaders on this panel are really you know in the Vanguard of really driving digital transformation accelerating you know speed scale and insight and I think that's that's really remarkable considering you know the the resource constraints they may have uh some of the uh you know authoritative uh constraints that they have regulatory constraints that they have and they've done an absolute wonderful job navigating through that to drive results that's a good point Kevin and I wonder from your perspective you know as a system integrator that goes out to support the federal agencies how do you look at some of these presidential management agenda topics that come out specific to this one maybe so we view it as table Stakes it's it's a requirement for each of our customers that we partner with uh we we drive towards meeting the agenda requirements but then we also challenge where we can because you know as Sue mentioned you know we have to we have to challenge Norms we have to we have to drive transformation and with that is going to come some challenges and we we have to have the fortitude and the partnership to really drive that transformation and change right let's continue on the digital acceleration journey and John asks you a question and we'll talk about no code low code it's a topic and I think you may be able to help us understand the differences the benefits of the no code low code applications development tools that are out there and the platforms how does SSA look at that sure well I'm sure many are in the in the audience are familiar with the use of such platforms and it really uh is a possibility for the platform to reduce the amount of application programming instead of relying on complex programming languages both low code and no code platforms offer visual interfaces allow drag and drop capability building and then link those capabilities together you have applications that can be deployed to meet customer needs from the Social Security point of view we look at this as providing a couple opportunities but also some challenges that have to be balanced some of the opportunities include perhaps we have a lot of code in production already perhaps reducing the amount of code we have to maintain by relying on maintenance and upgrade of the platform perhaps low code no code can help us get to enablement with proper training and looking at good use cases enabling of business developers who are closer to the problems that are you know causing our customers pain and that those folks who are actually doing the interface with the customer day to day interviewing the public in our case they might have more uh insight into how to streamline the workflow and if we give them tools to automate that streamlined workflow could be a big Advantage for both our customer and our agency one other Advantage I would mention uh is that by enabling the citizen developer as I just described we can then focus our software Engineers on other maybe more complex or different challenges than the customer interface automated workflow some of the things we try to balance it's really important from our perspective to have good governance in place so that as we deploy these tools we're doing them with creativity and Innovation but also in a standards-based methodology particularly when it comes to prioritization what use cases get attention first and then a ladder so we've focused our initial work on low code no code really in building the uh the guidance and governance to to really use the platforms wisely you learn something in governance I spent a lot of time talking with cios and when you talk about no code low code development tools and platforms they talk about the idea of creating Shadow I.T that these applications are going to create sprawl on the back end of the organization how do you work through some of those concerns that SSA might have is you give the ability for other folks within the organization to develop applications sure one of our primary strategies that Social Security is focused on the I.T Park first there's plenty of I.T uh administrative functions I.T operations management Etc uh that we can improve using automated processes that gives us an advantage of uh learning the platforms well and deeply uh you know before it broadens across the Enterprise it also gives us the advantage of buying some time to work with our business colleagues to socialize and train uh how the platforms may be used and then finally they can see the platform in use before they try to make advantage of it I appreciate that you know one of the things I'm happy that he said was you know configuration management which is governance right you say governance so configuration management so if I look at what we're doing like infrastructure as a service so or infrastructure as code right we're sending that out and it's great because now you have a predictable set that's going out there building your servers and services that we don't have to worry about then you can Focus those teams on more important tier three tier four type problems so yeah I agree with you I'm with you on that you know the thoughts from the panel before jumping on the next question it just did oh I'm sorry no I think it's spot out I you know when we think about you know configuration management it's absolutely critical that you you have a solid foundation as Gary and others know if if you if you do not establish that that cmdb you do not rationalize your environment you now have the right governance in place you are going to start experience that technical sprawl but I think all of these organizations that you represent really have wrestled the governance to the ground and and driven a clear consistent Vision in your organizations and that's that's one of the key stones to success thanks Kevin Chris I'll bring it back to you how vital is digital transformation to deter wmd and other tax and what are some of the Next Generation measures that you're taking in the digital Arena so it's huge for us right so right now we're kind of on the Forefront of what's going on in Europe but you know for us digital transformation is I'd say it's a holistic change across the board um right now everything is day-to-day to data so you know it's like what does that data look like how we're going to ingest that data how we're going to transform that data how we're going to make sure that data the Providence of the data is true and correct so that way we're giving all of our Command commands and our customers the right information at the right time across the board so it's also you know bi dashboards and everything else that we're looking at as well so uh for us it's it's huge and I think you know as we kind of explore AI mlds right how can we help transform this agency from internal and align with our director's planning guidance which is really she wants to share the data with all of our partners in our combat commands and our five Eye Partners it's how do we help her get to that Arena and it's really one understanding our data understanding what the data means understanding you know the taxonomy of that data and then coming up with a higher level of like what makes sense to us as an agency and then what also makes sense for us to send out to our customers and what makes sense with them we have a lot of engagements with all the 11 or 12 command commands in our 5i partners to ensure that we're we're going down that right path there is you know also internally right we're trying to break down those silos of Excellence um you know there's multiple people doing multiple different projects so how do we pick best of breed to put that out there for everybody and I think we're making great strides in that to ensure that we are picking the best so that way our digital transformation is just not another Silo of Excellence it's actually that is cross-cutting across our agency cool anybody want to pick up piggyback off of uh Chris's feedback on that question Gary see you ready to go breaking down those silos I mean yeah the silos of Excellence I mean we all see it and you know it's it's hard when you have a large organization to to try to break those down and uh but I think we need to be on on the Leading Edge of breaking those down using platforms like this and I think you know one of the things that is hugely important when you're doing any kind of transformation is everybody kind of focuses on the tech I'm going to focus more on leadership leadership meaning that as a leader I need to give my teams permission to fail uh and I was just I'm part of the the federal CIO Innovation committee and one of the things that I had heard from Claire the the federal CIO which was you know a no-blame post-mortem so if you fail right it's done let's just talk about what failed and how we're going to correct it to go forward but those failures are the only way that we're actually going to learn to know what not to do in the future so I think that's usually important as well as a leader to allow our teams to fail and allow our teams to succeed and ensure that we give them the appropriate backing as a leader and you bring up a really important point about enabling Mission critical outcomes you know it's it's not it's not just about the the architecture and the technology it's really driving your outcomes that's why this is such a good partnership and fit and you touched on data sharing and I and the enormous challenge of managing all the data that we have today in our modern environments and at cisa we work with all of the federal cisos and cios who are responsible for their agencies cyber security but then we also have a challenge of needing to try to bring some of that data together to understand threats that are happening to each agency but also across the federal civilian executive branch and some of the things that we really think of as bringing sort of forward leaning in this space is thinking about how do we actually provide the services that other agencies need especially smaller agencies who may not have the same depth of security staff or I.T support how do we assist actually take some of that burden off of those agencies to provide those Services directly so that it's not just data sharing it's a mutual accountability for that data and for the security of those systems and I I would just add that whether we're talking about protecting a country from external threat or gathering intelligence or protecting our cyber assets or in our case serving the public data is I think you heard from all of us the the lifeblood or the fuel that keeps that transformation uh gone a good data governance clear data access uh the importance of the data infrastructure can't be oversold in my estimation I appreciate that Lauren cisa digital Transformations at the Forefront of what you're doing to safeguard the American public our infrastructure our institutes you recently announced your organization recently announced a support services contract for five years 200 million uh dollars what are some of the other measures that you're taking today are along this digital transformation Journey security Community is focused on and certainly that's a top priority for cisa that requires enormous transformation of how we think about security is zero trust so historically with traditional networks we had this trust but verify model where a user was inside the network and you were a trusted entity one of the challenges enormous challenges here is that it really put a lot of the onus on the end user and candidly when things went wrong this could lead to situations where actually the end user was blamed for actions that were taken when we think about a lot of the guidance around what happens when you click on a phishing link or what happens if your credentials should be exposed and no longer in your control and so this focus on moving towards zero trust is really an enormous transformation for organizations to undertake but it's also an enormous transformation of how we think about the responsibility for security of an organization and so shifting that from the trust but verify approach to instead thinking about continuous authentication really making sure that we have segmentation inside organizations that can really contain the impacts of an incident when they occur and really shifting that and transforming both our technical implementations but also how we think about the responsibility of security and where we think about the end user's role in that great any other thoughts yeah I was just going to say you know within DOD right it's not just zero trust it's it's lining up all those different ideas and architecture so it's not only zero trust is join all domain control to Jad C2 right so we have that with our software factories as well so it's lining up all that so that way we ensure that we are you know in alignment with zero trust and we're providing you know Great Value to the Jazz C2 concept from an Enterprise architecture standpoint and then again giving our our citizens which is for us right those in uniform and DOD civilians exactly what they need at the right time and securely servicenow is really great in helping you with the provenance of your data within your Enterprise so that coupled with governance and zero trust is a real winning combination that's a great Point Kevin I'm going to stick with you let's jump into the employee experience how can the employee experience empower the government Workforce as part of the federal digital transformation agenda what impact might have on attracting talent and a competitive labor market sure I mean if we look at you know the digital native economy now the expectations for the consumer grade experience at the Enterprise is absolutely critical everyone here knows they have challenges hiring you know into the workforce so we got to take public service and service now and give them a rich user experience it's like Bill said we got to make work easier we got to give them Rich digital experiences so that they can serve their constituents their citizens you know you know the citizen provider the citizen developer component as well it has to be an engaging impactful experience for the user for the provider if we don't do that we lose in the attention economy if we're losing in the attention economy you're going to get that drift away from your mission impact everyone in this panel is tasked with accomplishing critical Mission activities everyone is committed to the mission we have to help them accomplish that mission in the most seamless way and and really drive impact within their organizations because if there's too much friction we know it's it's gonna it's gonna be too hard it's going to impact adoption it's going to slow down transformation and it's going to slow down scaling in your organization so those Rich seamless experiences are absolutely critical to success which and then in turn talks to the last Point around retention if if you're if you're fulfilled in your mission impact and how you're delivering Services you're going to have a higher level of job satisfaction and that's going to positively impact retention enormous labor need in the cyber security Community right every organization is experiencing this to include cisa and the entire federal government and so when we think about also this unfortunate experience that many Tech workers are having as the recent layoffs have occurred we at sister are trying to think how do we make government the right and most desirable place for those employees to want to go next with their career we know that there are enormous number of people right now with skills that are valuable and could contribute to defending our nation how do we make it such that the federal government is an attractive place for those people to come and support our cyber security Mission and that comes down to a lot of what you were just speaking about not only having good employee experience but really having those modern tools access to data and flexible environments so that people who are self-starters and have tremendously valuable skills view the government as a place where those skills can Thrive and really be put to best effect yeah I was going to add to that you know I think you know if I'll do like the old uh College thing or basic training thing look to your left look to your right we're in competition with each other across the board for the exact same talent pool right so I mean I've been ghosted you know a multitude of times on hiring or somebody gets hired I think last final offer letter like yeah I found something a little bit better I think the key thing again is I'll go back to leadership and it's up to us as leaders and supervisors to ensure that we're providing that experience and understanding that each employee is unique and different in that we need to provide you know that unique and different experience for each of those employees and it could be telework right everybody's like oh I can tell we're 100 of the time I'm like yeah I can because we work across multiple different enclaves so it's impossible but how do we get to that point of them saying yes instead of the old way of you know supervision and management which was just do it my way and that's the way it's going to be done because that's the way we've always done it we need to change our Mantra again it to me it's up to the leadership to change that experience within that organization and within their specific work unit good leadership focus on Mission customer satisfaction right I mean and you get to customer satisfaction through employee experience there no doubt I agree with you uh Gary we're going to close it out with you we're going to talk about a topic I don't think you can pick up a technical article today without hearing about hyper automation um it's vital to the next phase of digital transformation and it's the idea of automating as many it and business processes as possible why is hyper automation increasingly a strategic imperative for organizations and where does the federal government stand in an effort to incorporate hyper automation into its Innovation agenda at the agency it's all about getting the officer back to Mission so and and I'm sure you can all agree at Social Security Administration Etc it's about getting the officer back to Mission and what what that means is you don't want the officer searching around for answers to commonly asked questions you don't want an officer looking for you know where's that portal how do I request this widget or this service and you know it's it's you know it also not being on on the telephone with the tier one help desk on hold you know only to be transferred somewhere else to try to get an answer to your questions so hyper automation is automating a lot of these processes whether it's using a knowledge base whether it's using an AIML it's it's automating those processes to get the officer back to Mission and and the second thing is is we've all seen there's budget cuts we've been talking about resource issues and again when you automate processes and get the officer to the mission whether it's a support Mission or actually on the front lines automating these processes helps the customer experience gets that person back to Mission so a couple examples at the agency of where we've been using hyper automation is our human resources department so they were one of the the Trailblazers with servicenow at the agency they were an early adopter and they set out a strategic road map of about 90 whether they were manual processes or processes that were done with Legacy I.T and and created a strategic roadmap and over the years they have automated or hyper automated about 40 to 50 of those processes using service now so what may have taken a few days or even a week of manual processes and emails and telephone calls is down to just a few clicks of the button realistically a few clicks of the button and uh in hyper automation is here to stay and you know when you keep saying hyper automation it's like a drinking game every time you say it take a drink but you know with artificial intelligence machine learning I've heard my seniors say it that you know you shouldn't be afraid rate of machine learning taking taking your job you know whether it may take a task or something that you're doing I've heard it a million times there are plenty of jobs and plenty of tasks and initiatives to go around as long as the officer is willing to broaden their base and do something different we shouldn't be afraid of Automation and artificial intelligence and machine learning because um what you know you could just broaden your base do something there's plenty of work to go around it for that many times because it's here to stay it's going to continue to increase across the government and I I think though in general it it it helps it helps that end user as you're going through your technical journey and identifying those 90 different tasks that could be automated how did you prioritize and which ones did you did you focus on first uh I think so we're going to talk about quick wins before so you want you want some quick wins up front right you get that buy-in because people are resistant to change you know so you get those quick wins you automate things you get that satisfaction you know and it's just like a snowball and then um you know you you maybe take on some hard ones those critical ones that you know are going to make a huge impact but maybe a little harder and just really think about it strategically you don't want to jump in too fast you want to really take a look and make sure you have that o m Tail as well uh because you know these have a tail on it so quick wins take you know some high impact and just continue that journey I appreciate that I'm just I'm just shocked at the resistance of the change you know my 20 years of government like yeah I've never seen that before right I would just add on hyper automation uh like uh Gary mentioned at the agency social security has accumulated uh missions over time and that has added technical debt and added Legacy I.T that has to be carried and maintained and secured and Hyper automation sometimes gives the opportunity to connect some of those value points in new ways that provide a better customer experience and allows us to execute core Mission responsibility better than in the past it's building upon what I mentioned earlier you've got to have good governance and good data in the in the pipeline but if you can connect those value points maybe you can change the customer experience for the better appreciate that any other thoughts before we close out I was just going to say in a resource constrained employee constrained environment AI ml driven workflows levers up those key employees those those key team members those key case officers so the the greater efficiency you can drive through those those automations will will have tremendous dividends in your organization that's a great Point folks back on a mission so appreciate that I want to thank all of you for joining us today I want to thank everybody that's out in the audience today for attending this this event hopefully you enjoy the rest of the day and appreciate it all right thanks everyone thank you so much