CIOs Say Agencies Must Fix Processes First, Then Layer in Emerging Tech

Digital transformation starts with effective processes, data foundations and people — not the latest innovation, federal officials said Wednesday during the ACT-IAC Digital Transformation Summit in Reston, Virginia.

“First, look at the existing process. Do you actually need to automate that? Or do you need to change and remove that process or modify it?” said James McCament, chief digital transformation officer at Customs and Border Protection. “Automating something that is already burdensome is just going to, well, automate it, not going to make it smoother.”

McCament said this approach has allowed the agency to reduce the most cumbersome tasks, leverage innovations in the field and return time to agents across the enterprise.

“If you take a minute of time and we say that process is cumbersome and we need to reduce it, we need to look at a way to change it. You go from one minute down to 20 seconds in that process using AI or another technology, that 40 second gain of time means that in one week, you gain over 4,000 operating hours back to mission,” McCament said.

Focusing on Data Before Turning to AI

Gharun Lacy, deputy assistant secretary and assistant director for cyber and technology security at the State Department, said AI is ineffective if the foundational data work and modernization isn’t addressed first.

“If you haven’t done that work and that foundation is not solid, then when you do sprinkle that magic AI fairy dust on top, it’s not going to help you, it’s going to hurt you,” Lacy said during the event. “It’s going to amplify the cracks in your foundation, and it’s going to disrupt your business instead of accelerating … The key is to keep one eye on the emerging technology, but always circle back to your foundation and make sure that it’s solid.”

Upskilling the Workforce for Effective Digital Transformation

State’s CIO Kelly Fletcher said navigating the human side of large-scale transformation initiatives has required constant communication with constituencies to help them understand how the agency is undergoing the transformation.

“Humans are an area of challenge. What I can say is a lot of it is training and education,” Fletcher told the audience. “I’m consistently surprised by how much communication is necessary at every level, all the time, to every constituency. That’s a place where we’re spending a lot of time and energy making sure that the information we share with our regular customers is in English.”

“Technology is easy, culture is hard. We all know there’s natural lives of systems and software packages, but I think the hard part is the people in the processes that have become intertwined with that,” Central Intelligence Agency CIO La’Naia Jones echoed.

Jones said that transitioning away from legacy technology can upend workflows and just because a technology is ubiquitous across an enterprise does not mean all employees engage and use it the same way.

“The reality is, the more that you can do at much smaller steps and smaller spaces, the easier it is on the customer or the user,” Jones said. “Large-scale change is typically not fraught without a challenge, because then there’s the whole process of the users getting used to the product adapting to that in the way of business.”