Podcast: CIO Crossroads – State Department Edition

Time and again during the COVID-19 pandemic, Federal IT has proven its value as a vital service-delivery lifeline between government and citizens. MeriTalk is chronicling the untold stories and lessons of Federal IT success as the nation takes its first steps toward recovery. In this chapter of CIO Crossroads, we explore the State Department’s accelerated IT modernization journey in the midst of the storm.

State Turns to Cloud, Browsers to Jumpstart IT Modernization – CIO Q&A

Federal agencies don’t get any older than the venerable Department of State – created in 1789 as the first Executive branch department and charged with advising the president on policy and conducting diplomacy on the nation’s behalf. With a presence in more than 160 countries, few agencies are responsible for maintaining such a far-reaching network around the world.

With the COVID-19 storm gathering on the horizon in January, long-standing traditions at State regarding how to conduct business – face-to-face meetings in offices – were put to the test. In an exclusive interview with MeriTalk, Principal Deputy CIO Michael Mestrovich tells the remarkable story of how the agency quickly shifted from telework “in the hundreds” to remote capabilities for State’s entire 107,000-person workforce.

By deploying a combination of browser and cloud technologies that gave the workforce access to Microsoft 365 and a great majority of the agency’s internal applications, State scaled robust remote capabilities to the workforce almost overnight. More than 40,000 existing mobile deployments and quick moves to upgrade firewalls and internet circuits were also crucial components of the agency’s successful strategy.

New and existing capabilities were instrumental in accomplishing State’s most important mission over the past three months – rapidly repatriating more than 100,000 Americans around the world and maintaining worldwide financial and logistical systems that enable such feats. The investments will continue to pay tremendous dividends down the line, as Mestrovich estimates that the three-month whirlwind of tech improvements have advanced agency IT modernization by four to five years.

MeriTalk: Can you provide some metrics to illustrate the success of your work during the pandemic?

Mestrovich: The Department of State has 107,000 technology users, including foreign service, civil service, contractors, and local staff – both domestic and overseas. When we started on a pandemic footing in February, our telework number was probably in the hundreds.

The Department of State is a very long-lived institution, where people came into the office and held meetings in office spaces. Telework was seen as kind of an accommodation in cases of a long illness or something similar. It wasn’t considered a way that the vast majority of the workforce could actually effectively perform their functions. We all had PCs at our desks. It wasn’t an organization where people had laptops.

We had been deploying mobile devices for several years, and so people had mobile phones and tablets, and were familiar with working remotely through those. But there’s a big difference between consuming content through a mobile device, and the active art of creating content, where you need a more robust platform. We had deployed 40,000 mobile devices, but it probably wasn’t effective for the masses to create content and continue the promotion of diplomacy and foreign policy.

Knowing we weren’t going to get 100,000 laptops out to people in a couple of weeks, we enabled two things. We had remote access via virtual desktop, and we ramped up that capacity. We had capacity for 5,000 and we doubled that in two or three weeks to get to 10,000. Then, we put in equipment orders to scale that up to the 15,000 range. In the process,

Federal IT has bridged the gap between government and citizen service during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the country takes the very first steps toward recovery, MeriTalk is chronicling the untold stories of how Federal IT is getting the job done – and lessons for the road ahead. Our latest chapter of CIO Crossroads explores IT operations at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Podcast: CIO Crossroads – VA Edition

Federal IT has taken the ultimate stress test during the COVID-19 pandemic – and has withstood the strain. Fortified by ongoing modernization efforts, agency CIOs and their teams have ensured the delivery of vital government services during unprecedented crisis. As the new normal paves the road to recovery, MeriTalk is chronicling those success stories. Today, we go into the eye of the storm with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the second-largest Federal agency and largest civil agency.

VA Outraces Demand in Virus Crisis – CIO Q&A

Even in the best of times, the VA has a huge mandate with a department budget of $220 billion – to provide healthcare, benefits, and services to support the nation’s nearly 20 million veterans. Its largest unit, Veterans Health Administration (VHA), offers healthcare at 1,440 facilities under an annual budget of more than $80 billion. The agency’s Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) delivers a host of other benefits and services for vets, and the National Cemetery Administration takes care of burial sites and services across the United States.

In these extremely trying times, VA has met the health crisis with a remarkable expansion of IT-driven patient care capabilities, thanks to modernization of key underlying service architectures. VA is innovating to outpace service demand during the coronavirus pandemic and to prepare for whatever lies ahead. Here’s some of that story by the numbers:

VA expanded its telehealth capacity tenfold, to handle up to 35,000 appointments per day. That includes a boost to 17,000 concurrent sessions thanks to cloud service expansion. Traffic on its va.gov website has spiked to 12 million hits per month, while users of its MyHealtheVet patient portal have risen 30-40 percent.

The agency scaled up telework capability from 10 percent to 35 percent of its 400,000-person workforce – and is prepared to go higher. It ordered 225,000 laptops and relocated half of its end-user operations out of VA medical centers to ensure continuity of operations. And by harnessing data in its business intelligence service line and corporate data warehouse, VA can provide a single source of truth around the coronavirus for the entire department, as well as build out its digital experience information and applications on VA.gov, thanks to Chief Technology Officer Charles Worthington and his team.

Its reward for a job well done? The VA’s score on the American Customer Satisfaction Index is up three points in the last three months, and eight points over the last year. That puts it on par with some of the most respected corporations in America.

In an exclusive interview with MeriTalk, VA CIO Jim Gfrerer covers how the agency prepared for unprecedented demand and continues on the modernization fast track.

MeriTalk: As the CIO of a large agency with a unique mission to support veterans, please tell us a couple of your largest priorities and successes in this COVID-19 pandemic. What are you proudest of and what surprised you the most?

Gfrerer: We’re proud of the rapidity and the agility with which all our employees and vendors came together to attack the problem. That wasn’t really a surprise, but I was very pleased with the commitment of our vendor partners and how much they really leaned into it. Everyone was scrumming on the problem really hard, trying to find ways in a disrupted supply chain to help us grow exponentially.

One of the things I stressed to our vendor partners early on at the most senior level was VA’s “fourth mission” – supporting national, state, and local emergency management, public health, safety, and homeland security efforts. I spoke with a senior leader at Cisco, and said, “I hope it doesn’t happen, but you may find one of your non-veteran Cisco employees or family members ends up getting treat...

Podcast: CIO Crossroads – CISA Edition

Federal IT has played a critical role in sustaining delivery of critical services to citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the government and the nation take the first steps toward recovery, MeriTalk is chronicling the untold stories – and lessons – of Federal IT operations during three months of pandemic. In this latest chapter of CIO Crossroads, we explore cybersecurity operations at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Protecting Healthcare in the Storm – CIO Q&A

CISA, a component agency of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), protects Federal civilian executive branch and U.S. critical infrastructure from physical and cyber threats. It also works closely with organizations in the 16 critical infrastructure sectors to support their priorities.

In an exclusive interview with MeriTalk, Bryan Ware, Assistant Director for Cybersecurity at CISA, reveals the agency’s massive efforts to protect the pharmaceutical, hospital, and public health agency sectors as the pandemic gathered force and slammed into the U.S. With more than 1.8 million COVID cases reported nationwide since late February, and 107,000 deaths from the virus, CISA’s focus on healthcare cyber threats was right on the mark.

The threats to the healthcare sector that CISA has uncovered are downright alarming. The agency has identified and targeted 10,000 critical vulnerabilities, taken action to block 7,000 malware domains, and worked with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to take down another 10,000 fraudulent domains. CISA has notified more than 100 organizations that they are active threat targets, and offered help.

And while the world waits desperately for a COVID-19 vaccine, CISA is beating back efforts by Chinese, Russian, and Iranian government hackers to steal U.S.-based research on vaccine development. The battle is far from over, but CISA’s cyber defenders are taking every measure to make sure that the war is won.

MeriTalk: Tell us about some of your largest priorities and successes during this pandemic.

Ware: The first priority going back to February was to take everything that the Cybersecurity Directorate normally does, look at it through a different lens, and ask, “How can we use all of our assets, tools, capabilities, and knowledge to protect our nation’s COVID response from a cybersecurity perspective?”

My colleagues at CISA’s National Risk Management Center (NRMC) did some really early work to that would get us through the pandemic. We then created the critical infrastructure workers guidance that all the states adopted, to determine who could go to work even when their offices were shut down.

We used that product to focus our outreach to pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and public health agencies to offer them cyber scanning services. We’ve had those services for a while; they just hadn’t been specifically focused on COVID response. Beyond the scanning, we’ve done threat and vulnerability briefings for industry, and we’ve published products that are specific to the healthcare sector and COVID-related threats. Healthcare became our number-one focus.

Second, I’ve been focused on a strategy, which sets out where we think the world is going to be in five years and what we need to do to modernize this agency and improve our capabilities. We’ve been able to develop and communicate that strategy potentially better while working remotely than in the office – just because we’ve removed meetings and other distractions and can spend some more time on it.

Finally, we’ve kept up with the other important missions that we’re entrusted with, in particular protecting Federal networks and bolstering government cybersecurity.

Podcast: CIO Crossroads – DOT Edition

The unique ability of government IT operations to ensure the delivery of vital services to citizens has formed the backbone of the larger Federal pandemic response. MeriTalk is chronicling the untold stories of that effort in our CIO Crossroads series. Please join us for our latest chapter: Department of Transportation.

When the Wheels Can’t Stop, DoT Keeps Rolling – CIO Q&A

Cars, trucks, planes, trains, ships, buses, subways, and drones – if it moves under motor power in the public space, it’s a good bet it’s under the purview of the Department of Transportation (DoT). Like every skillful regulator, when the mission is carried out well, the agency tends to remain mostly invisible.

Here’s a refresher: DoT regulates for safety the critical infrastructure of airlines, rail, and maritime systems. On the roads and highways, it strengthens the safety of trucking and automobile traffic. Round that out with pipelines and movement of hazardous materials, and you have an agency with a very tall order. It’s an even more vital one during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the movement of food, medicine, and other supplies forms a literal lifeline for citizens.

How do you take 55,000 DoT employees and send them home to take care of that job remotely? In an exclusive interview with MeriTalk, DoT CIO Ryan Cote credits foresight by agency leadership over the past three years to break down multiple interagency IT silos, and invest in modernization. Add to that VPN capacity expansions, extensive system testing, and employee training in the run-up to the pandemic.

The payoff? An immediate increase to 100 percent telework-ready status, up from 40 percent. Within that new service delivery paradigm, use of video and other collaboration tools jumped 300 percent routinely – with some up ten-fold – along with a huge increase in mobile use. DoT is also rethinking its cybersecurity approaches with focus on encryption, cloud access security brokers (CASB), and software-defined networking.

Whenever things get back to “normal,” DoT may actually retain many of its current processes, as employee productivity has increased during the pandemic. Please join us for an in-depth discussion with Cote about how the past three months has changed everything – sometimes for the better.

MeriTalk: As CIO of a large Federal agency with an incredibly diverse mission, what have been some of your largest priorities and successes during the last three months? What are you most proud of?

Cote: I’m proudest that we have continued to execute our mission without any disruption. In fact, I believe we are operating at a higher level today than pre-COVID.

We were able to leverage the technology we had and improve it so when we went to maximum telework, it simply worked instantly. From the IT perspective, our largest priority has been ensuring that the technology is always available and that it’s robust, resilient, and secured. In less than 10 days, we switched from about 40 percent telework ready to 100 percent telework ready. We were able to add a lot of bandwidth to our existing circuits and a lot of VPN licensing for connections on infrastructure that already existed.

With the first big CARES Act funding that came out of Congress, we were given a lot of extra responsibility in the transportation sector. The DoT offices that oversee specific transportation Modes had new grant money that they had to dispense in a hurry. From the Secretary, to every modal administrator, down to the IT folks – we all came together and simply did it.

When we went to maximum telework, we had to rethink cybersecurity and the network. For many years, we had built an inside-out network, where most people come into offices and work from behind firewalls on a secured network. We were able to protect a lot of what they did by virtue of ...

Podcast: CIO Crossroads – GSA Edition

It’s hard to fathom the number of critical government processes that have had to evolve – very quickly – to meet the needs of the American people during the COVID-19 pandemic. And if this crisis has a silver lining, it’s the accelerated modernization and innovation being born out of it. MeriTalk is surfacing the untold stories – and lessons – of those efforts. In the latest installment of CIO Crossroads, we turn to the General Services Administration (GSA).

GSA’s Lessons: Put People First – CIO Q&A

In the Federal IT community, we’ve all seen the analogy of the three-legged stool – technology, process, and people. After speaking with GSA CIO David Shive, it’s clear that a “people first” focus pays great dividends toward agency mission success, especially in a time of crisis.

GSA delivers the products, services, and facilities that agencies need to serve America. It oversees $66 billion in annual procurement, and it’s the largest landlord in the world, managing approximately $500 billion in U.S. Federal property. GSA’s job is to literally keep the lights on for the Federal government – every hour, every day.

As a modernization leader, GSA became mobile-enabled more than five years ago, and has moved over 50 percent of its technology workloads off premises. These shifts helped the agency adapt easily to the new requirements of the COVID-19 era, and it now has a 99.6 percent telework-ready rate.

Having quickly stabilized in the “new normal,” GSA has been on the front lines, providing other agencies with Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), IT, and other equipment in the hundreds of thousands of units. And, even as it deals with these short-term critical issues, GSA is already looking ahead to how it can sustain the modernization advancements that have been made during the national emergency.

Please join us for an in-depth conversation with David as he talks about how GSA has managed its workforce during the pandemic so its people can help serve the rest of the Federal government during this challenging time for our country.

MeriTalk: As CIO of a large agency with a government-wide support mission, can you share your biggest priorities during the COVID-19 response? What are you proudest of?

Shive: I’m most proud that we immediately focused on the safety and well-being of our workforce by starting a daily accountability tracker for all employees. This lets us see where everyone is – if they’re teleworking, on leave, or on facility – and make sure they are okay. An important aspect of this was requiring a rationale for people going into the office. We are under mandatory telework, and our Administrator meant that, so we need to make sure that anyone going to the office has a very valid reason for doing so.

MeriTalk: What successes are you seeing?

Shive: We became a mobile-enabled agency five or six years ago, so this is not new for us. We’ve made the investment in tools, policy, and practice to support our mobile workforce. When we made telework mandatory on March 17, we already had the right technology and practices in place to enable our employees to work from home, with almost no disruption of work.

99.6 percent of our workforce was telework-ready, which enabled us to continue to deliver on our mission and do the hard work of GSA across multiple business domains, regardless of where people were working.

MeriTalk: Any other examples in addition to that very impressive telework number?

Shive: During the pandemic, we have been able to onboard people completely virtually – providing the secure access they need for remote connection and shipping hardware directly to their homes. We figured out what policies we needed to change to enable that – no wet signatures, no fingerprinting, etc. We’ve been able to work through it and deliver badges in a sa...

The critical importance of Federal IT operations in sustaining vital government operations during the COVID-19 pandemic is nearing the status of universal truth. What’s much less obvious to the naked eye – and meant to be that way – are the security operations underpinning and defending the vast Federal technology enterprise. As the nation takes its first steps on the road to recovery, MeriTalk is bringing to light the untold stories of those efforts. In the latest chapter of CIO Crossroads, we examine the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program.

The ability of Federal IT operations to adapt almost overnight to support citizens and workforce amid the unique challenges of the national pandemic is one of the few bright spots in the past three months of turmoil. The drivers of that performance are neither easy nor accidental, and depend on steadfast leadership. MeriTalk is chronicling the untold stories – and lessons – of Federal IT success during the pandemic. Please join us for a conversation with Federal CIO Suzette Kent, who spotlights the value of teamwork, fast action, and focused leadership in times of crisis.

Underpinning the delivery of citizen services, funding, and an all-important sense of normalcy during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal IT enterprise has provided firm footing in uncertain times. As the nation takes its first steps on the road to recovery, MeriTalk is chronicling the untold stories and lessons of the ongoing IT odyssey. In the latest chapter of CIO Crossroads, we explore the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s IT operations three months into the fray.

Americans rely on government services 24/7, and even more so during times of crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has proven the critical importance of Federal IT in sustaining the nation, but left its tech leaders mostly unsung. MeriTalk is surfacing the untold stories – and lessons – of those agency and leadership efforts. In the latest installment of CIO Crossroads, we turn to the National Science Foundation (NSF).