As technological complexity continues to expand, it’s more important than ever for government agencies to invest in upskilling and incentivizing their workforces in the use of software-as-a-service (SaaS) products, a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) technology official said today at the Axonius Adapt conference in Washington.
Kim Pugh, director for digital transformation center within VA’s Office of Information Technology, talked about efforts underway at VA to build the right kind of talent lineup for the SaaS era.
“The thing I would say is invest,” she explained. “If you don’t invest in getting a good pipeline of individuals … that really understand your ATO [authority to operate] process and really understand how your privacy and PTAs [privacy threshold analysis] match that, then it doesn’t matter how much of a desire there is if you’re not going to be able to accomplish it.”
“So to this day, we invest very heavily in our process,” Pugh continued. “We invest very heavily in getting the right people that understand the process to support what we’re doing.”
One strategy that Pugh has used to make the best of VA’s tech personnel is by providing incentives. “I always tell people find the carrot – what’s going to sell,” she said, while explaining an example of incentivizing IT personnel to take on projects with assets “that they don’t own.”
“We gave them a carrot … we said ‘well, what if we did it faster, safer, and a little bit better and gave you the credit for doing that,” she explained.
“So we started this project called the Software Factory in the VA and that’s exactly what we’ve done,” Pugh said. “We’ve pulled all of our IT counterparts together and we’ve kind of shown them how they can do a lot of the work that they did today with a SaaS component.”
