Why Agencies Need to Put People at the Center of Their IT, Process Transformations

Featuring Stephen Ellis, Government Solutions Lead at Zoom.

I would challenge government purchasers to say, this new IT solution that I'm deploying in whatever area that is, is it designed in a way that's very easy or intuitive to use? Are people comfortable in how they're using it?
And certainly a lot of thought has gone in and in terms of how, how zoom works and how it can be used, and we continue to do that, for the future and in our development. And I would imagine that my colleagues across industry are trying to do the same thing. And so I would put, I would say to anyone who's out there who's looking at making a federal purchase of some technology to make sure that it's it's intuitive and usable.
We need to look at the modernization in a very human way. But we also need to say, look, we have a fundamental need to reorganize the office in ways that are more collaborative. Everything from just the words that we've we use really speak to the era of and the ancientness of some of these terms. If you think about the silos, we say government was, you know, full of silos. And one of the things the wins from COVID is we're able to break down a lot of silos. Well, silos, obviously an agricultural term we're talking about a farm, we're talking about a grain silo.
And you know, what was it 100 years ago when people came up with that term? That was something that was in the common experience of all people to understand what a silo was, and yet nowadays, who knows, when the last time we've seen one is, so that means we've had these silos for 100 years, and now we have an opportunity to break them down because it's just as easy to talk to someone in a different division, a different agency, as it is to the person on your team. So when technology offers those opportunities, we definitely want to take advantage of that.