Conversations With CXOs: Crash Course on the Future of Government

Posted on by The Carahsoft Team

For government employees looking to build successful and satisfying careers in public service, the curriculum is changing. It’s not enough to develop mastery of agency processes and policies or to stockpile continuing education credits on traditional core competencies. Instead, public servants need to develop a working knowledge of current trends in IT and management that are reshaping how government operates. IT and management: That’s the operative phrase. Technology is continually improving the efficiency of work processes and the productivity of employees. But efficiency and productivity only go so far. It’s at the intersection of technology and management that real change is happening. Agencies are gaining new insights into their operations and services, and using those insights to fuel innovations across their organizations. Government employees at all levels have the opportunity to be part of this transformation, but they need to get up to speed on the key trends. Where are they to begin? Download the guide to read more about four competencies that could be critical to the careers of public servants.

Edge Computing Raises Ransomware Risk

“The problem is that edge computing – in which data is being aggregated, accessed or processed outside the network perimeter – is leaving data exposed to cyber criminals who see an opportunity to make money through ransomware schemes. According to Gartner, a research and consulting firm, edge computing will grow 75% by 2025. In government, the surge is being fueled both by a growth in end-user devices in mobile and remote computing and in non-traditional devices associated with the Internet of Things (IoT) and operational technology (OT), such as sensors and cameras. In many cases, agencies support edge computing by moving data into the cloud, rather than requiring end-users or devices to go through the data center. This hybrid cloud environment mitigates performance and latency problems but also makes the network perimeter even more porous.”

Read more insights from HPE’s Distinguished Technologist for Cyber Security, James M.T. Morrison.

Agencies Need to Maintain a Sense of Cyber Urgency

“Security isn’t just the responsibility of individuals. Agencies also must ensure they treat security as a top priority. SolarWinds recommends two areas of focus: Prioritize the development of cyber experts. Given the high demand for cyber experts, agencies should focus more energy on developing talent in house. Shopp said one approach is to convert IT professionals, who are already tech savvy, into cyber professionals. Prioritize collaboration between tech pros and leaders. Policies and strategies aimed at reducing risk should reflect both technical and organizational expertise and requirements. Shopp said agencies also should collaborate more with trusted industry partners. SolarWinds, for example, isn’t just a technology vendor; it also has a large development shop, as many government agencies do, and can exchange ideas about cyber strategies, tools, and best practices.”

Read more insights from SolarWinds’ Group Vice President of Product Management, Brandon Shopp.

How to Move DevOps from Disarray to Unity

“An agency’s initial forays into integrating their development and operations teams can bear fruit quickly, leading to better quality software produced at a faster clip. The risk is that an organization will treat its initial forays as the endgame, not realizing that a more mature approach, with greater payoffs, is possible. In short, the DevOps initiatives never grow up. GitLab, which has years of experience helping organizations with DevOps adoption, has identified four stages in a DevOps journey, culminating in an approach that delivers even greater benefits than envisioned at the outset.”

Read more insights from GitLab’s Federal Solutions Architect, Sameer Kamani, and Senior Public Sector Solutions Architect, Daniel Marquard.

Why Stronger Security Hinges on Identity Data

“To understand the need for an Intelligent Identity Data Platform, consider two scenarios. In the first case, a user logs into an application from her office at 2 p.m. each day. In this case, she will be considered a low risk, based on three factors: Her credentials, her usage patterns and location data. In the second scenario, this same user logs into the application from her office but at 2 a.m. The aberration in her routine (i.e., usage pattern) raises a red flag, as would a change in her location. Even this simple use case requires an agency to have a holistic picture of an end-user, which is not possible without a central platform.”

Read more insights from Radiant Logic’s Vice President of Solutions Architects and Senior Technical Evangelist, Wade Ellery.

The Case for Data Literacy

“Someone who works in national defense requires different data skills from those in environmental or financial management auditing. ‘We firmly believe it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach,’ Ariga said. Training must be catered to tradecraft. It’s the reason GAO is creating its own data literacy curriculum specific to the oversight community, instead of relying on third-party training that focuses on generic, often commercial aims. Additionally, the best time for people to learn data skills is when they actually need them. On-demand tools such as microlearning videos and a walk-in Genius Bar ensure staff can access data solutions and build literacy when they need, instead of waiting months to register for a class.”

Read more insights from the Government Accountability Office’s Chief Data Scientist and Director of the Innovation Lab, Taka Ariga.

The Future of AI Hangs on Ethics, Trust

“Over the next five years or so, we could see a revolution in the use of AI, Sivagnanam said. Think about the self-driving car industry. At this point, human drivers are still a necessary part of the equation. But AI pioneers are hard at work trying to change that, and quickly. Similar advances are likely in other applications of AI. Over the next three to five years, Sivagnanam hopes to see the AI industry mature. As part of that, he expects to see the development of regulations and guidelines around AI and ethics, both from the federal government and from industry organizations. That work is already getting underway, and NSF is playing a role. Through a grants program called Fairness in Artificial Intelligence (FAI), NSF supports researchers working on ethical challenges in AI.”

Read more insights from the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Chief Architect, Chezian Sivagnanam.

Q&A: Getting Schooled on Zero Trust Security

“Zero trust means zero trust. We’re monitoring your internal systems. To an extent, we are monitoring what individuals are doing. That’s not to say we’re Big Brother. We’re not monitoring the keystrokes of every user in the state or anything like that. For the agencies, multi-factor [authentication] is a huge one. We’ve seen time and time again accounts get compromised because they had a bad username and password. If that’s the only thing protecting a system, that’s not enough. The bottom line is we know people create bad passwords. That’s a given. You can increase awareness about how to create good passwords, and you certainly want to try that. In many cases, people will just figure out ways around complexity requirements to get an easy-to-remember password versus a secure and strong password. You want to encourage people to have unique passwords for every single site. At some point, you need to give them a secure method of being able to remember all these passwords.”

Read more insights from Connecticut’s CISO, Jeff Brown.

3 Tenets for Advancing Equity in Your Everyday Work

“If there were one thing you could do to eliminate health disparities or advance health equity, what would it be? This is a question that Dr. Leandris Liburd gets asked often, but it’s not one she’s fond of. The answer isn’t a simple one, and the COVID-19 pandemic has magnified that truth. There isn’t a magic pill to ensure that no one is denied the possibility of being healthy because they belong to a group that has been economically or socially disadvantaged. And measuring success is about more than data points. Choosing one thing to advance health equity ‘is not possible when you’re dealing with these kinds of complexities,’ Liburd said in an interview with GovLoop. ‘So we have to do a lot of things at the same time.’”

Read more insights from the CDC’s Director of the Office of Minority Health and Health Equity, Dr. Leandris Liburd.

Download the full GovLoop Guide for more insights from chief information officers, a chief data scientist and other senior leaders in federal, state and local government.

Using Technology to Manage Vaccine Distribution

Posted on by Chad Cole

State and local government agencies are struggling to meet the challenges of rolling out a nationwide vaccine. Millions of vaccines have already been given, but there are still many who have yet to get their first dose. And, as new strains emerge, new or updated vaccines may need to be administered. Government agencies must prepare for the future in addition to handling today’s challenges.

It’s not just a logistical problem of distribution, it’s also an information problem. Residents need questions answered. They need to know about eligibility and availability of appointments. They need to make appointments. And all of this information needs to be up-to-date in a fluid situation.

Many agencies are overwhelmed with requests for basic information about the vaccine or appointments. This is huge challenge for state and local governments, and some systems are failing under the weight of demand. Call volumes can overwhelm even the most prepared call centers, and many online systems aren’t built to handle the strain.

Anxious residents make appointments with retail vendors as well as states. If a resident gets a retail appointment first, they usually won’t cancel the state appointment. Vaccines must be administered within four to six hours; numerous no-shows risk wasting vaccine. Vaccination capacity is not achieved if appointment times are left unfilled, and this has a negative impact on the whole process.

Improving the Customer Experience

Fortunately, the right technology not only helps supply information and coordinate appointments, but it can also free up staff for more critical tasks. With a customer experience solution, agencies can leverage AI, automation, and self-service across all contact channels. They can keep the community informed while allowing essential workers to focus on mission critical operations.

Reducing Interaction Volume: The most important task for government agencies is providing essential information to residents without overwhelming staff resources. Most residents don’t need to need to interact with a live agent—whose time is best spent handling the most difficult situations.

AI-powered voice and chat bots can remove the burden from human agents by promoting self-service options and automating answers to requests. Bots must be armed with information, including vaccine FAQs, the agency’s knowledge base, CDC information, etc. They must also escalate inquiries if necessary, seamlessly transitioning to human agents who have the information to pick up where the bot left off. With the right customer experience solution, residents easily find the information they need without long waits, freeing up the staff to focus on high value work.

Smarter Scheduling: A customer engagement solution can automate the handlings of appointment information, allowing automated scheduling and sending out appointment reminders through the resident’s channel of choice: email, phone, or text. By providing the option to cancel or reschedule with an appointment reminder, the system reduces the number of no-shows.

Scheduling Optimization: The right solution optimizes vaccine rates with proactive scheduling, automatically offering available time slots to residents on a waiting list. If a resident cancels an appointment, then someone on the waiting list will be automatically notified and given an opportunity to take the appointment so vaccines aren’t wasted.

Predictive Analytics: Self-service options can be enhanced with predictive analytics. The solution monitors every visitor’s website activity, noting which pages they visit and for how long. It can then offer to redirect them to another page or to self-serve options. The resident gets information or appointments without human intervention.

Proactive Engagement: Government agencies don’t have to wait for residents to call; many customer engagement solutions allow agencies to proactively reach out to residents. Likewise, the system can send notifications about unforeseen conditions like weather or a vaccine shortage so appointments can be rescheduled.

How the System Works

Below is a step-by-step description of how a good customer engagement solution would handle a specific customer.

Step 1. Mary hears that her county is administering vaccines. She calls the county health department to schedule an appointment and get answers to vaccine questions.

Step 2. Because of the high call volumes and resource constraints, Mary’s call is answered by a voice bot rather than a live person. The bot can be regularly updated to include new or region-specific information.

Step 3. The voice bot directs Mary to a website to register for an appointment, but when she visits the site there are no appointments available.

Step 4. When Mary visits a certain page, the solution’s predictive analytics are triggered. A bot offers to redirect her to other self-serve options and asks if she has any questions. She asks if the vaccine contains eggs because she has an allergy. Using AI technology, the bot answers the question—without having to engage a human agent.

Step 5. Knowing there are no appointments available, the bot asks Mary if she would like to be notified when an appointment becomes available. She chooses that option and her preferred notification method.

Step 6. A few days later Mary receives a notification that a vaccine is available and a link for scheduling an appointment. Closer to her appointment time, proactive notifications provide appointment reminders, information about pre-vaccine prep, and a chance to cancel or reschedule.

Step 7. Mary gets her shot; her customer journey is complete.

View our webinar to learn more about how to inform your community and allow frontline workers to focus on vaccine administration and other mission-critical operations.

Successful Vaccination Strategies Through Sentiment Solutions

Posted on by Quinn Chasan

The relationship between technology and the public sector has never been more pronounced than during the pandemic. As vaccine distribution rolls out across the country, state and local governments turn once more towards technology platforms to tackle the challenges a large-scale operation entails. The rollout of COVID-19 vaccines is a story of two sides – one is the mission side, where healthcare providers and federal agencies work to provide vaccines while understanding the opinions of the public. The other side is IT, as groups who once worked in classic IT environments now find themselves handling both increased user activity on public government websites, as well as larger and faster influxes of data that cannot be contained in a singular database.

In a world in which digital security is vital, balancing both sides safely and effectively requires a system that can handle complex and sudden changes. With cloud-based infrastructure and new solutions, many state and local governments are finding new ways to connect to both communities and agencies, all through the collection and understanding of data.

Putting the Public First

Public health does not exist in a silo — the “public” emphasis is unpredictable, as local communities have varying opinions within a single county or state. Sentiment solutions provide a way of examining the response to vaccine rollout within a community, and aid healthcare providers and federal agencies in anticipating changes to scheduling and administering vaccinations. With a sentiment solution focus, these programs can track the interactions of the public with real-time vaccine sign-ups or chatbots, and keep note of how feelings towards vaccine distribution change in a given area. Vaccine distribution can then be altered based on the feedback from the constituents, providing more vaccines in areas that require them at a faster pace. Having a solution examine the needs of a community and what drives their public health decision-making can prepare agencies in anticipating sentiments, and tailor their approach to vaccine distribution in a way that ultimately benefits the public.

Focus on Analytics

For the IT side of vaccine distribution, the rollout of programs involves working with agencies that would not operate together outside of a disaster situation, such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). With data pouring in from users interacting with government websites, as well as data driven by the mission of vaccine distribution, central IT groups need to rethink methods of shared services that will be utilized between agencies. A cloud-based infrastructure can bridge the gap between these agencies, and provide core infrastructure capabilities to examining and handling the influx of data. Someone engaging with a website chatbot, for example, could provide data that shows they live in a location with many COVID-19 cases and a lack of vaccines. These analytics can be passed to epidemiologists, who can then see the impact on vaccine uptake or areas that require targeting for public health decisions. Not only do multiple agencies benefit from shared data, but CIOs can work within an existing ecosystem with less tools. The seamless integration of solutions such as sentiment solutions allows for focus to be directed towards the bigger picture, understanding the role of data rather than being bogged down in website reports or chatbot data. Data becomes unified, and analytics becomes clearer for all agencies to understand.

Transforming Data for Tomorrow

Having cloud-based infrastructure to manage digital data is not a momentary solution. Constituent voices will still need to be heard long after COVID-19 is dealt with, and IT solutions will not be utilized for a singular function. Implementing these solutions now, even for a singular use case, will keep the infrastructure in place to serve future use cases, as data management increases in complexity and scale. Future implementation can be faster, minimizing operation inefficiency as data pipelines will not have to be built, but can be ready to handle any situation. Such technology can even spread outside of its current deployment in communications and healthcare, to be utilized in areas such as the legal field. These new infrastructures and solutions may be used to help end the spread of COVID-19 through vaccine distribution, but they have the ability to provide a new beginning to managing and understanding both public opinion and data.

View Google’s Virtual Healthcare roundtable event to learn more about using Google Services to deliver data insights and other solutions.

The State of Artificial Intelligence in Government

Posted on by The Carahsoft Team

Government agencies have been discussing artificial intelligence (AI) for more than a decade, and as technology and legislation progress, the focus on public sector impacts is stronger than ever. A 2019 executive order highlights American leadership in AI as key to maintaining the economic and national security of the United States. The Trump administration has also issued regulatory guidance on AI, instructing all federal agencies to prioritize and allocate funding for AI programs that serve their individual missions. Numerous national agencies and even multinational partnerships have identified AI as a priority. AI’s similarity to human intelligence means it could potentially impact every corner of society, from cybersecurity to medicine. To learn more about how your agency can use AI to analyze data, recognize patterns and automate manual tasks, get up to date with The State of AI in Government, a guide created by GovLoop and Carahsoft featuring insights from the following technology and government AI thought leaders.

AI Requires a New Approach to High-Performance Computing

“High-performance computing (HPC) needs to evolve. The traditional HPC architecture, now decades old, worked well for previous generations of HPC applications. But today’s applications, driven by AI, require a new approach. The problem? The old systems were too static. That wasn’t a problem when applications had static performance requirements. But AI is different. When developing an AI system, the workload changes from one stage of the process to another.”

Read more insights from Liqid’s Public Sector Chief Technology Officer, Matt Demas, and Director of Sales, Eric Oberhofer.

Bring AI to the Edge

“Legacy computing structures always glued data scientists to data centers. The two were tethered together, meaning scientists couldn’t work where the data didn’t reside, much like how a lab scientist needs their lab chemicals and instruments. Data science, however, is not entirely like lab science, because endless inputs come outside of a controlled environment. AI models are most effective when exposed to open air. The solution is to bring software-based applications to the edge, except for massive data projects.”

Read more insights from HPE’s Defense Department Account Team Technologist, Jeff Winterich, and Red Hat’s Public Sector Staff Solutions Architect, Ryan Kraus.

3 Ways Cloud Improves AI

“Cloud-based AI can help agencies move faster. During the pandemic, it has. One example is automating document workflows so that AI replaces manual data entry and extracts metadata to enhance search capabilities. As a result, AI speeds up timelines for constituents. Without having to wait on employees to manually enter data or respond to simple queries, citizens receive the front-facing information and services they need faster. Agencies can build AI faster in the cloud, too. Developers access capabilities through simple application programming channels, so they don’t have to build or integrate models from scratch. Cloud services like Amazon SageMaker remove the busywork and infrastructure so that data science teams are more productive and efficient when rolling out [machine learning].”

Read more insights from AWS’s Tech Business Development Manager of AI and ML for the Worldwide Public Sector, Joe Pringle.

How AI Demands a New Vision of the Data Center

“Technology originally developed to improve PC-based gaming and multimedia applications nearly 30 years ago is now driving advances in the field of artificial intelligence. In the early 1990s, when PC gaming was beginning to take off, the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) was invented by NVIDIA to render an image by breaking it up into multiple tasks that could be executed in parallel. Today, the same approach accelerates processing for a wide range of applications, not just on PCs but also on the world’s fastest computers.”

Read more insights from NVIDIA’s Vice President of the GPU Data Center Architect, Curt Smith.

DoD’s Battle Against COVID-19, With AI at the Helm

“When you’re talking about a domestic threat like COVID-19, for us to, for instance, predict how COVID-19 is going to be affecting a certain military installation, you might need data from things that would be nontraditional DoD data. So, you might need data from CDC, [or] from Department of Labor when it comes to unemployment. So, these sorts of datasets I think are really hard for the DoD to have, because they’re not traditional military data. But at the same time, for us to do accurate modeling, we do need datasets like that. So, this project had a lot more sort of rigorous policy review for data, more so than a project like predictive maintenance, for instance.”

Read more insights from Chief of Policy at the Department of Defense’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, Sunmin Kim.

Using AI to Improve Veteran Care and Save Lives

“It’s been an amazing journey from a veterans’ experience perspective. The Veterans Experience Office came out of the crisis of Phoenix, when there were the issues with the lists of appointments and veterans were not getting timely appointments – and the data was showing things differently. We did not have the customer datasets. We had a lot of operational data, we had a lot of financial data, but we did not have necessarily the data for [customers]. And I think that from the customer perspective, I think that’s a key aspect with AI. You can’t have AI if you don’t have the right data in place … and that’s something the VA has been very diligently working on.”

Read more insights from Department of Veterans’ Affairs Chief of Staff at the time of the interview, Lee Becker; Director of Enterprise Measurement, Anil Tilbe; and Acting Executive Director of Multichannel Technologies, Laura Prietula.

Improving Public Health Through AI

“Traditionally, public health plays the role of a data aggregator. We’re collecting large volumes of information because we’re interested in understanding how often illnesses or injuries occur, not just at an individual level, but across entire communities or entire populations as a country at large. And we use that information to try to understand why those diseases or injuries occur, and then we use that to take action that will allow us to address really significant threats to the public health at their source. AI can play a role at many different places in that information chain.”

Read more insights from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Entrepreneur in Residence, Paula Braun.

Download the full GovLoop Guide for more insights from these artificial intelligence thought leaders and additional interviews, historical perspectives and industry research on the future of AI.

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