Two Federal IT experts had a message on March 21 for agencies trying to achieve digital transformation: don’t hesitate to drive cultural change even if it means upsetting some of your colleagues.
At the ServiceNow Federal Forum in National Harbor, Md., Reshea Deloatch, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official, said the agency’s more than decade-long digital modernization effort has revealed that “especially in the solutions space, you have to not be afraid to break things.”
“It’s part of the process,” said Deloatch, who is executive director for the Solutions Development Division in DHS’s Office of the Chief Information Officer. “Sometimes we’re taking very calculated risks with deploying very large systems that serve the public.”
Deloatch cited the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate’s (S&T) recent unveiling of a prototype self-service airport screening system. The system uses technology that allows passengers to complete screening at their own pace.
“Those are the types of things that we’re doing at DHS,” Deloatch said. “We’re making sure that folks are not afraid to deploy solutions, and then taking a step back to see if they are working, and then enhancing the process.”
Commander Jonathan White, a Coast Guard IT official who joined Deloatch for a panel discussion on “Seamless Innovation at Scale,” echoed a similar theme.
“I’m the bull in the china shop,” White said, describing his role in the agency’s transition to a multi-cloud environment. “My job is to establish the framework and the foundation for the future so that we can do the rip and replace or do the transformation of our existing systems into the modernized applications that we really crave.”
“It’s a huge challenge,” White said.
Asked if the transformation has been seamless – reflecting the name of the conference session – White said to laughter from the audience: “Seamless is definitely not the word I would use.”
He said cloud migration and automation is “a mental and cultural shift for 99 percent of the organization. Most people are used to using the applications they’ve used for the last 10 years. Putting something new in front of them is very disruptive and uncomfortable.”
The Coast Guard, White added, has helped ease the transition through employee training but “it certainly is not going to be seamless.”
White has spoken at length in recent years about what he calls the Coast Guard’s “transformative” cloud journey, saying the data-driven transition involves a rapid and challenging shift from a predominantly on-premises enterprise.
Also speaking at the session was Jesse White, chief executive officer (CEO) of Intact Technology, who said the private sector sees this moment of widespread cybersecurity threats and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) as a generational opportunity to work with government.
“We as a community actually have the power fundamentally to transform these agencies so that they can move faster,” the Intact CEO said. “We have a lot of pressure on us in a lot of ways, but … the cool thing is that we now have the technology to move extremely fast.”