U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

• GovCast
• Data

As a founding visionary for its data strategy, Elizabeth Puchek discusses the importance of citizen development for citizenship services.

Federal information technology officials often prioritize better serving their customers’ needs, and creating human-centered design in their products and attribute Agile methodologies as key ways to iterate alongside end users' shifting requirements.

When U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services CIO Bill McElhaney assumed his position in March 2018, IT offices within each directorate were very siloed across the agency. Repetitive processes and excess IT spending impeded mission delivery speed and inhibited effectiveness and efficiency.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services offered agencies to take a piecemeal approach in determining which applications to migrate to the cloud and also keeping in mind proper security controls. The agency, which is currently in a multi-cloud environment, is re-architecting applications for platform-as-a-service (Paas).

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services "is a data agency," according to its chief data officer, Beth Puchek. With the agency handling thousands of citizenship applications every year and receiving the most Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests of any other federal agency, managing data is its strong suit.

• Workforce

In the process of IT modernization, getting rid of tech debt could lead to an improved cybersecurity landscape that would help federal agencies better fulfill their mission needs.