As government officials are whipping up their digital transformation recipes, some Federal technology experts – or should we say chefs – shared their secret ingredients at the Digital Transformation Summit hosted by ACT-IAC and Carahsoft on Feb. 22.
As the panel moderator Tim Gilday – emerging technology senior director at General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) – pointed out, there are a few cooking methods that can get you to a successful digital transformation.
For instance, he asked the panelists, “Do you tend to sauté on a high heat to bring out flavors quickly? Or do you stew slowly at a reasonable 200 degrees to gradually tenderize your people?”
Jill Marlowe, the digital transformation officer at NASA, said that she first tried to approach digital transformation from a “sauté on high heat” method, meaning that it was “splashy” and directed from the top down. However, she said her team quickly found that this method doesn’t work in the long run.
“What we found was, ‘Hey, if you’re not willing to maintain that high heat, that alone is not going to get it done.’ You have to build the trust,” Marlowe said. “So, we kind of entered a phase where we’re more stewing on low heat. We’re starting to get all the spices and the ingredients in the pot. The smell is wafting through the air, and now people are coming because they smell something good. Not because somebody told you, ‘You better show up.’”
“Can you afford to stew indefinitely? Probably not,” she continued, adding, “Now we’re in the space where we’re actually starting to have some very exciting conversations in NASA.”
One of those conversations, she said, is planning the NASA 2040 initiative, which is a leadership conversation to help drive meaningful changes and help the agency realize its long-term vision in 2040.
“Now, we actually have a little bit of an appetite for it,” Marlowe explained. “The simmering on slow heat, that’s very much about building the trust, building the appetite, building the buy-in – I think that’s essential.”
Similarly, Akanksha Sharma, the director of digital transformation at the Department of Labor (DoL), said trust is one of her secret ingredients.
“When I come to you and I say, ‘Hey, I think there’s a better way of doing things. Why don’t we try this approach, which is more human-centered design-based?’ You need to be able to trust me and say, ‘Yes, I will go ahead and give that a go.’ And that can be really difficult.”
Another one of Sharma’s digital transformation secret ingredients is persistence. “You have to be obsessed with some of these concepts,” she said.
“You have to be sort of persistent and obsessive in your messaging of, ‘Hey, there’s a better way to do things. There’s a new way of doing things. It’s not going to slow you down. It’s actually going to help you,’” Sharma said.
As for Neil Chaudhry, the associate administrator for the Office of Planning and Analytics at the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration within the Department of Transportation (DoT), one of his goals when he’s cooking up a successful digital transformation is creating a good recipe.
For example, he said a boiled piece of chicken and a glass of water will provide you with nutrition, but “you don’t enjoy it.” On the other hand, a seasoned piece of chicken with a glass of wine, “you look forward to it.”
When Chaudhry looks at digital transformation, he tries to view it from a platform perspective as opposed to a technology perspective, so that the end result is more enjoyable or successful.
“At the end of the day, when I look at how to get technology working for the program manager, it’s really about thinking through it in terms of platforms and ecosystems,” he explained. “So, we’re not focused on, ‘I just need this new capability that the vendor provides or I need this new tool’ … because in two years, that’s going to be irrelevant.”
“If you haven’t thought about a data agnostic, technology agnostic way of doing things, you’re going to do rinse and repeat every couple of years,” he added. “So, those are some of the things that I think of when I’m cracking the code to make a good recipe.”
