Tech Transforms

Lonye Ford, CEO of Arlo Solutions speaks to some of the challenges she faces as a woman in the government technology workforce. Lonye has had success and challenges from her time at the U.S. Air Force help desk, to her current role of CEO at Arlo Solutions. Carolyn and Mark get a uniquely human perspective surrounding government technology.

Episode Table of Contents

• [01:18] Bringing the Women in Technology Together
• [06:24] Women in Technology Are Creating Their Own Lane
• [09:36] Issues Women in Technology Have to Deal With

Episode Links and Resources

• LinkedIn

Lonye Ford Brings the Team Together

Carolyn: Today, we have Lonye Ford, CEO of ARLO Solutions. Lonye served for over 10 years in the US Air Force. Thank you for your service, Lonye. She was named one of the Top 50 in Tech Visionary at InterCon 2021.

You talked about your superpower which is to get the teams, all these experts with these egos, to come together. I'm wondering, when you walk in a room you have to be a little bit disarming. You look super young, you're a woman and you're African-American. When you walk into a room, do you think those things help you with bringing the teams together? Have you seen it played against you?

Lonye: It's so important to ask those questions. To be honest, I have been feeling weird about addressing that directly. You come up in the military and you don't talk about sex, religion, color. Now, I'm asking a lot of diversity questions this year, because diversity has really been pushed to the forefront. It's really the first time I have been asked those questions before. We talk about it, but not in the open forum.

I'm getting more comfortable with addressing it. When I first started, it did not help me. It was very difficult to gain respect. So when I walked into the room, I would tell people I had to be over-prepared.

Not Because I’m a Woman

Carolyn: Dismissed because of the way you look. Tracy and I talked about this a little bit. I want to be known for what I can do, not because I'm a woman. So I haven't even wanted to address those questions. It's like you know what, it's not about me being a woman. It's about me being capable.

Lonye: I struggle with that. I'm going to give you an example. We're in an award for Moxie Group for DC, we're finalists. The category that we're in is women owned. My partner went back and she said, "Actually, I don't want to be in this category." That's how much we struggle with it. She was like, "I don't want to be in this category." We went back and forth. She's like, "Why would we get an award based on our gender?" So then, we went back and explained, this is where we're struggling too.

I told her to think about the message also, that people are trying to integrate and highlight the work that women are doing. Is it perfect? No. Sometimes it'll come across as odd. No, but you also don't want to always push back when someone is trying so hard, explain to them. And then, we're still competing with other women.

But her thing is, "I don't want to compete with other women, I want to compete with everyone. I don't want to be put in that category." I'd say that we struggle with that, too. We do.

Lonye Ford Probes for the Intent

Carolyn: I don't want to be on a panel for women in technology. I want to be on a panel for superheroes in technology.

Lonye: It's important if we think about the intent. Personally, I don't. But if you think about it, if our intent is to serve and to provide this ability, there are a lot of women and young women that are looking at that. That has a very positive impact on them.

So if you take out how you feel about it and if you look at it more as, "How am I serving the community," that'll help us change. We'll continue to mature. Right now, people are trying.

People are trying to integrate women and highlight women. The intent is right. As we mature, we start saying, "Hey, guy that's running this, maybe it's better to integrate us in this way," or have us join the panel. "Oh, well we have these talks." Once you gain that visibility, now different organizations are reaching out.

I started a lot on the different H.E.R. Talks, it was March, Women's Month. A lot of people asked me to come and speak. But, what happened was other folks in Tech Talks and MITRE, and those things, they heard me. Now they reached out separately. That may have been the kickoff to my conversations, so that provided visibility. If they hadn't done that woman talk, I may have even gotten that visibility.

Lonye Ford Created Her Own Lane and Space

Lonye: But anyway, I get what you're saying. It was very difficult coming into the Air Force, doing cyber. I’ve started in tech, a very technical domain, very difficult to gain respect. I remember when I first started, I would go back and forth. I’ve started acting more like the man because I tried to assimilate. I did a lot of performing in the beginning because I never saw anyone that looked like me that was doing what I was doing. Never, almost, until this day.

So you really have to create your own lane and space, and it's difficult. You have to have a strong belief system that you can do it because a lot of times, you are the first. A lot of times, people don't make it easy. They may not trust your feedback or what you're doing, just because of their own preconceived notions. It's difficult.

The way I've done it is I've been able to not take things personally. I'm very direct. I am the type of person that reflects what you do. So I may say, "Okay," and it sometimes makes people uncomfortable. If I'm in a room and things get out of hand, I'm the person to say, "Okay everyone, let's take a pause. Let's just pause for a second, think about how we're speaking to one another."

Pause and Reassess

Lonye: I don't care what the room looks like, I don't care what the dynamics of the room is. And I don't care if it's the SES in there. I don't care if it's an airman base. When you make people pause and reassess themselves, or allow someone to speak, or I'll jump in even at the defense of another woman. "Okay, all this person to speak."

But again, it's very difficult. It's still difficult. I am the CEO of my own company and I still have a difficult time with my own employees. All of my employees are very senior level folks as well, men. So I still have a difficult time with that, too.

Carolyn: You're probably still one of the only women in the room.

Lonye: Yes. Now, the difference is, because I've been in this field so long, at this point I'm invited to the room. Maybe leading the room, and sitting at the head of the table. It makes it a lot easier, where I am now. But for women that's coming up, it's still difficult. I understand what they're putting out about diversity and that's true.

But it's very difficult to change people's mind frames. These are people. It's just regular individual people that came from whatever their background is. They have been in technology for 40 years, running it. How do you change that?Lonye Ford Asks What Issues Women Have in Tech

Carolyn: Coming back to that culture thing again. I have a book for you, it's called Soundtracks. It's by John Acuff. When I said, "Well, I don't want to be on a woman's panel. I want to be on a superhero's panel," you were like, "Well, let's change the perspective. Let's change what I think about it." I'm like, "Yes, cybersecurity has its own month, we celebrate that." You don't say, "We want to be like everybody else." Let's celebrate that we have Women's Month. I love that.

Lonye: It is really about the message that we're sending to all the other women and you are a superhero. Why not celebrate that? Our path is different. It is tougher in some spaces, there's a different perspective. People want to hear that perspective and sometimes you can't talk to that perspective. We're really not speaking that perspective on shared panels. So they want to focus on, "Okay, what issues do women have in tech." It's okay to talk about that. But, I get it. It is difficult.

Mark: Do you think that it starts with promoting women in STEM at an early age and getting them involved in the field? When I came into this field, there weren't that many women that were doing this.

Carolyn: There still aren't. We outnumber you today.

Mark: There's more than there used to be but it still is an issue.

Lonye Ford Couldn’t Imagine a Woman in Cyber

Lonye: Promoting women in STEM, that's the reason that I do like the women panels. What I struggled with was I did not have access or I did not see people like me. That's really the reason that I like the women's panels. I couldn't even imagine a woman in cybersecurity, I couldn’t even imagine a woman leading cyber. And I couldn't imagine a woman leading a meeting related to technology and cyber.

I had never seen that, not even leading a meeting, not even sitting at the head of a table with technical talks. The benefit to those is exposure. At a young age, they need to be exposed. Whether it's STEM training, whether it's through seeing it, whether it's Google, whether they are looking at a panel.

Carolyn: It's just reminding me of your non-profit passion. It seems like this might be part of it, UrbanPromise.

Lonye: UrbanPromise, that's a group that's out of Camden. My business partner actually came up through UrbanPromise. They get the young kids, at a very young age. Then they walk the journey with them through school, to getting them in college. Even now, we raise money, and we go out and donate that money to kids. We call it gap funding.

So they may have gotten money to go to college but they can't get a laptop. It could be that they don't have appropriate clothes. They have some things that are due to the administration, so it pays for those types of activities. But, it's not specific to women, it's more the minority population in general. It's just going to be, to change that for women, again exposure.

Individual People Change the World

Lonye: I'm a person, I don't believe in the big bang theory.

Individual people change the world, one action at a time. For us women, it’s through that exposure and taking the time to speak to other young girls. That could mean that I just go to a high school that's in my neighborhood. Then say, "Hey, guess what, I'll give a talk." Out of 400 students, maybe two will resonate with you.

Each of us individually, helping with the exposure will be very helpful to getting more women and girls into STEM. People get a lot of the technology and geeks speak. It's unique when you can come from the human aspect of technology.

Carolyn: Thank you for thinking of the time to share your insights with us. Thank you to our listeners for joining Tech Transforms.

On this special episode of Tech Transforms, Carolyn and Mark look to the new year with trends and predictions for government technology. Willie Hicks Public Sector CTO at Dynatrace, Lonye Ford CEO at ARLO Solutions, Jazmin Furtado Military Captain at Space Force, Rayvn Manuel, Senior Application Developer at NMAAHC and Tracy Bannon, Senior Principal / Software Architect & DevOps Strategic Advisor at MITRE talk about their predictions as we move into 2022.

Episode Table of Contents

• [00:32] Willie Hicks’ 2022 Predictions for Government Technology
• [09:07] Lonye’s 2022 Predictions on the Acquisition Process
• [17:09] Jazmin’s 2022 Predictions for This Day and Age
• [21:31] Rayvn’s 2022 Predictions in Technology Will Never Be the Same
• [24:03] Tracy Bannon’s 2022 Predictions on New Technology

Episode Links and Resources

• Willie Hicks - CTO of Public Sector at Dynatrace
• Lonye Ford - CEO of ARLO Solutions
• Jazmin Furtado - Military Officer at Space Force
• Rayvn Manuel - Senior Application Developer at NMAAHC
• Tracy Bannon - Senior Principal/ Software Architect & DevOps Strategic Advisor at MITRE, ambassador for the DevOps Institute

Willie Hicks’ 2022 Predictions for Government Technology

Carolyn: Today, we have a special episode to cover some topics of tomorrow. We asked a few of our guests their predictions for the U.S. Government technology in 2022. First, we have Willie Hicks, public sector CTO at Dynatrace. The AI arms race. Will you talk about that a little bit and talk about where you see the U.S.' position in the AI arms race? I know this ties into the massive, National Security Commission's on Artificial Intelligence final report.

Willie: Yes. The term AI arms race is actually in academia and industry, it's a debated term. Are we in an arms race? Some people are more purists when they think of an arms race. You think about the Cold War, you think about past arms races. There are certain criteria around that. Like the money that's being spent on, if you think of a conventional type arms race, both sides.

Or multiple sides are investing millions, billions of dollars on arms, on different weapon systems, on trying to keep up, or keeping a step ahead of the adversary. You could argue two things. One, that you don't see that kind of spending today in AI, at least from the government. You do see spending across the board, industry-wise, a higher increase on spending. But some would argue that just by that definition, it's not really an arms race.

You can make the argument that AI itself is not a weapon. AI is a tool that could be used to make weapons more lethal, more effective, but in itself, AI is not a weapon.

By the textbook, there's some debate if there is, but let's just set all that aside to answer your question.

How to Stay Advanced

Willie: Leave out spending. There is definitely increased competition. If we want to say that there is a race from a technology standpoint, that's from industry and from the government, and that's underway today. We see that daily in the advances and the money that's being spent in AI. But also you see that in the national security report that you had mentioned. There are a lot of studies going on.

How do we technologically stay advanced or ahead of our adversaries? Or, at least, we've got to make sure that we stay on top because at the end of the day, AI could be just like anything. AI could be used for many wonderful things. Like I was saying in medical applications, we saw this during COVID. People often think about, "Wow, the vaccines that we have, they came out really rapidly."

Some people say not fast enough, but how long vaccines usually take? It came out very rapidly. A lot of that is due to some new techniques for the whole RNA type of vaccine. But also, there was a lot of AI. There was a lot of compute horsepower that went behind the analysis of a lot of these drugs, a lot of the virus, DNA strains and all that.

There is a lot of good. But then, AI, this technology arms race, this competition could also be used by state actors. I even hesitate and sometimes I don't even like to think about it. It could make war more lethal, more kinetic. Let's just say it can make weapon systems run out of control. We're not going to the Skynet world where things just take over. But what you could have is what we've seen today, which is fascinating.2022 Predictions on AI

Willie: We have seen AI being used in things like drones that can be sent to a target, loiter around, scanning the system. Waiting for his target to come in range and then go and attack that target. That arms raise is to be able to not only have those same capabilities but also counter those capabilities.

Also in the cyber front, how do we protect our power grids? How do we protect our water systems? AI is being deployed in all of these ways to attack us in multiple different ways.

Carolyn: Is AI being used to protect as well?

Willie: It's definitely and defensively being used.

Mark: You mentioned the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence's final report a couple of times here. I wanted to ask you if you had a couple of takeaways from that?

Willie: That is a pretty beefy document and a lot to go through. But at the end of the day, there were some really good takeaways. Honestly, there were some, no-brainers in there. Number one in my mind, we've got to increase funding and research. This goes back to a question you asked earlier about the arms race. One reason you might not want to call it an arms race is because a lot of money is not being put into it by the government.

Mark: It's got to be an arms race if there's money, if there's not money.

Willie: Let's just cut to the chase. There needs to be more funding of research, public and private. One thing that I found interesting is that we need to address the talent and diversity deficit in AI. More importantly, we need to address how to develop an internal government talent to meet these challenges.

Diversity in AI

Willie: I say diversity because I mentioned AI systems being able to recognize targets. To be able to look for certain things and understand patterns, and then respond to those patterns. So some might argue that we need diversity in thinking in AI.

Some argue that AI systems themselves aren't inherently biased because they're programmed by humans. But if humans are programming some of their biases, even indirectly into the system, they're not recognizing targets. They're not really factoring things like skin tone and how people look.

Carolyn: Yes, they are inherently biased because they're being programmed by humans.

Willie: I'm trying to be tactful about it, but at the end of the day, that is a very important part of the report. We need to have that diversity of talent and we need more, I shouldn't say better, but we need more talent in this field. Also, I found it interesting that the report called out. This is something dear to me. They're calling out agencies, the government, especially.

They're focused on the IC needs to really start leveraging AI to more fully automate tasks. Things that are repetitive, things that are prone to error, things that could be tasked well to an AI. Those things need to be looked at for more automation through AI systems. So those are some of the bigger takeaways that I saw. But also most importantly, more industry outreach and partnering.

Carolyn: Thank you Willie. Next, we ask Lonye Ford, CEO of Arlo Solutions. What are your predictions? You've talked about a lot of things, like a cyber security integrator. What are your predictions for cyber security in the next year? We're coming up on the end of the year. We all love a good prediction.

Lonye’s 2022 Predictions on the Acquisition Process

Lonye: I only speak to the government. In the next year, I hope that we see more of our cyber experts in the acquisition process. Working with the acquisition teams to build out these statements of work and those types of things for these program offices. I’d love to see that. I think that we'll continue to see more automation, the government wants speed.

Cyber from an authorized perspective, is not a speedy process. We're going to start finding ways as our cyber workforce works with our developers to integrate. You hear people say bake it in, grow it in. But to really focus on doing that in real life, not just a cliche term, “how do we do that”?

I'm seeing now that the cyber is working more with the developers on the technology side. My prediction, again, I told you I'm optimistic that it’s going to mature. We're going to start moving more of that cyber work to the left so that you're not trying to prove things to me via a document. Once we get to the end of this gravy train and you're baking that in, the developers are understanding the responsibilities from a cyber perspective. So, I would love to see that.

I know we're going to see a lot of focus on supply chain rightfully so. That truly needs to be a focus in the government. I see it from an internal perspective. It's a real issue. Supply chain and software supply chain too. I'm not just talking about hardware. Based on the executive orders and those types of things that's coming out, there's going to be a major focus on supply chain. That would be my prediction.2022 Predictions From the DoD Perspective

Lonye: I hope to see from the air force and for DoD, I work mostly in the air force. From the DoD perspective, we went through a time in cyber where everything was decentralized.

A lot of the workforce was decentralized. Each program has their own cyber and doing their own thing. They're spending their money on cyber. It's time to centralize some of that. I don't mean take away the decision making from other agencies. But I do think that the workforce, to understand cyber and cloud and DevSecOps is slim.

The air force and DoD in general is paying for all these different pockets of cyber expertise. I'm including myself, I'm a vendor and I'm in those pockets. But you're hiring all these different vendors to do cyber for all these different programs that are doing it differently, that truly don't understand DevSecOps.

They're learning on the government's dime too, and there's no centralization of it. If we centralize training, if we start centralizing some of this and then from our expertise, our experts out to these different program offices, that will be a win too. I hope to see more centralization in that as well.

Carolyn: Leverage each other's wisdom. I heard about acquisition, better processes up front, DevSecOps, supply chain, and then to centralize. That's a shift from 20 years ago.

Lonye: We really shifted, decentralized. The workforce is so slim and there is a lot of competition. We were just talking about the D.C. area once the Amazons are coming in, there's competition in the workforce. So people, the cyber workforce because it's so popular right now, they have a lot of options. We have to find a way to use our workforce as smartly as possible.

Decentralization

Carolyn: Now it's interesting that you brought up this whole decentralization thing. It seemed like working in the DoD arena, that was the strength. I understand why they would do that. I don't think this has been a common thought that the civilian side of the house is in some ways ahead of the game. They are more centralized in their approach on some of this stuff than the DoD. It may be because of the nature of what they do, they're very siloed.

Lonye: I agree. Money and funding makes a big difference. In industry, at the company there's someone at the top that's controlling how they spend their funds. That person's going to look at everything from an enterprise perspective. DoD, internal too to the government, the way that the money is farmed out to the different agencies, that they can come up with their own solutions in their own workforce. That's what they're doing.

They are building solutions that work specifically for them. We do, we try our best to be more focused on enterprise, but it's tough. We're looking at a diverse need from someone who needs to work on CE and may work on the air conditions for a DoD. Someone else may be focused on jets, someone else may be focused on providing typical IT.

Their needs are so vast and different that it is hard to centralize that from a funding and a solutions perspective. It's difficult, but where we could centralize is the cybersecurity support because that support shouldn't change. Whether I'm assessing it, or authorizing it, I say all the time, "You can put anything in front of me."

The Right Framework

Lonye: I can show you how to assess and authorize code going to the F35, or how to assess and authorize your air condition system. If you have the right framework, even if I don't understand the technology per se, that's when I collaborate.

Carolyn: Thank you, Lonye. Our next prediction is from Captain Jazmin Furtado of the U.S. Space Force. I want to get your predictions for technology in 2022.

Jazmin: We're going to continue to see growth in AI capabilities and not just within the DoD, but everywhere. We'll see a lot more and better personalized services that we see in finance, medical, legal, things that are more for you. So you no longer need to go through a middle man. You no longer have to go through trial and error to get and to converge on the right answer, you can get it faster.

These services are a lot more available and easily available. The barrier to access is a lot lower because they’re technological solutions, rather than people and process solutions. I also think we're going to see an increase in no-code capabilities. People are able to access software or tools without having to know how to code. They can have better user interfaces.

We're going to continue to see technology with increasingly better user interfaces. Allow people to be more data minded without having that formal background. All of these just blend into more transparency and literacy when it comes to data. Because we can no longer afford to have people that are like, "Oh, I'm not technical."Jazmin’s 2022 Predictions for This Day and Age

Jazmin: We are in this day and age where that's no longer something that we can afford to have. Everyone needs to be technical and be treated as an analyst in their own right. We're moving into this stage in society where everyone has to and everyone produces data. Everyone needs to ingest data, everyone needs to process it in their own way. Going into next year, we’ll continue to see services that emphasize that.

Mark: How do you feel the air force, maybe space force are too new to it, prioritizes this?

Jazmin: Data transparency and literacy are these sorts of tools. They are asking for it. They're definitely prioritizing it because these conversations are very difficult to have without these things. People need to be able to speak that same language. They can't do that without these tools, these no-code capabilities as visualizations. We need to have people go in and be able to do discovery into the data for themselves.

And we can't continue to just have, "Oh, we'll just present something to you about the status every month and you can make decisions." People need to be able to go in themselves and figure things up for themselves.

When we treat everyone as an analyst in their own right, it's becoming apparent very fast. The limiting factor in a lot of these conversations is that people don't have access to all the information that they need.

Carolyn: I'm going to give a sneak peek to a survey that we just completed among government and IT people. One of their number one pains was the lack of expertise in these very things that you're talking about.

The Highest Pains in the 2022 Predictions

Carolyn: Just that people are coming in, "Well, I'm not technical enough to understand what the data means." That was one of the highest pains that these IT managers that responded to the survey talked about.

Jazmin: That is not surprising.

Carolyn: Yes. Thank you, Jazmin. Now we will hear from Rayvyn Manuel. He’s a senior application developer at the national museum of African American history and culture and an army veteran.

Mark: As we approach 2022, tell us what your predictions for technology are going to be this coming year.

Rayvn: Do you want me to tell you about cultural institutions or in general?

Mark: In general, both.

Rayvn: There's a lot happening out there in technology and there's quantum computing. A lot of focus on AI and AIOps, ML, and MLOps. Those things are what technologists are focused on. I belong to a group and we're looking at Hyperledger, not Bitcoin per se.

For blockchain technology and cultural institutions, I'm thinking about how can a cultural institution leverage blockchain technology to track its assets and the objects? How can we even use Bitcoin maybe? The government is not ready for that. To use Bitcoin, to be able to procure things or to let people buy things for technology. There's also this push in the accessibility realm.

How do we leverage the existing technology that we have to make experiences for people with various disabilities? All disabilities, because when people say disabilities, they think of people who have no mobility or have visual issues or hearing. But there are other disabilities that are out there like cognitive disabilities. How do we use these technologies to give them similar experiences?Rayvn’s 2022 Predictions in Technology Will Never Be the Same

Rayvn: It'll never be the same, a similar enhanced experience in cultural spaces. I believe that everything that I'm hearing from application development is how to take these monolithic applications and make them into microservices. That's all the buzz right now, so that's where those things are going. At my space in the museum specifically, it's how do I take mobile technology, things that can only be done on a mobile device, and make it so that we can have interactives that are contactless?

One of the things that I'm actually thinking about is for the application that I'm building with this other agent. One of the challenges is that if a person doesn't have a particular version of iOS or Android, they're not going to be able to engage. So what can we do? I thought, "Well, I can use a Raspberry Pi because they're small and blocky." But who wants to steal that from a place? That's something you can put in your pocket.

How can I actually use a Raspberry Pi and get the same experience as I can on a mobile device? It’s a challenge because the mobile manufacturers' devices are integrated. When you want to do AR or VR, it's integrated with the hardware. Mobile has certain libraries and a Raspberry Pi is pretty much a desktop. It's just an operating system and...

Senior application developer at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and Army veteran Rayvn Manuel explains why her job is the best job. From serving our country as a soldier, to serving our history through dynamic storytelling, Rayvn has a passion for development that shows in her work. Listen in as Carolyn and Mark learn about the innovative technology behind the newest addition to the Smithsonian.

Episode Table of Contents

• [01:46] The Purpose of Technology Is Huge
• [08:54] The Purpose of Technology Is Transformative Inclusion
• [17:49] They Take Cybersecurity and the Purpose of Technology Extremely
• [28:26] What I Wish the Purpose of Technology Can Do

Episode Links and Resources

• Rayvn Manuel LinkedIn
• NMAAHC
• A Fool's Errand
• Broken Earth Series
• God, Human, Animal, Machine

The Purpose of Technology Is Huge

Carolyn: Today we have a guest who, as soon as I heard about this guest, I'm like, I want to talk to her. We've been trying for a little bit. Ravyn Manuel, welcome and thank you so much for being here.

Ravyn: Thank you for having me here. This is actually exciting.

Carolyn: Ravyn Manuel is Senior Application Developer at Smithsonian Institute National Museum of African-American History and Culture. The NMAAHC is the 19th museum of the Smithsonian that has been open since 2016. Since opening, it has collected over 36,000 artifacts and gained nearly 100,000 members. It was awarded the People's Voice Webby Award in 2017.

Mark: Can you describe your role in the context of a modern museum experience? What that means and what your role is at the museum?

Carolyn: Why do we even need an application developer? Having been through it, I have to look back and I'm like, oh yes, the technology was huge. I didn't notice it at the time. Looking back on it, the technology is what really bathed me and immersed me a lot in the experience, especially as I moved up.

Ravyn: That is awesome. It was so integrated, that you felt it was just part of that experience from what I was hired for. Our museum is not just the only one that has application developers. There are other museums because every museum and gallery has a website. We have to have somebody on staff to actually maintain the website. I don't work on the website, I actually have three hats.

The Whole Purpose of Smithsonian

Ravyn: One, when there are smaller exhibits and they are interactive. Those things that you touch, which are going to be contactless, moving forward. Those are the things that I develop. Or I will work with a designer like the UI, UX designer then develop these interactives. These will bring home the message that the education department would like people to take away from an exhibit.

The whole purpose of the Smithsonian itself is for education. When we make an exhibit, it isn't just to have you have a feeling. It's also for you to have an opinion for you to be immersed in that history. To walk away with some knowledge that you didn't know before, or to change your opinion about what you felt before.

My role as an application developer is the R and D person. I look at spaces in our museum and I go, how can we get the message across better here? What would help make this, not only a fun engaging process but also help people learn? My particular interest is in accessibility. I’m always looking for ways to make our interactions or the museum visit accessible for people who may not be able to experience it with their eyes.

For people who may not be able to hear the audio that's going on or have cognitive differences and how they actually interpret. That's what I do. I'll make a prototype, show it to my supervisor and say, what do you think about this? Most of the time, what I feel isn't going to go there. But it gives me a chance to say, “here's how we can use technology to actually assist people in their experience and to tell the story in an engaging way.”

Interactive Exhibits

Ravyn: A lot of our exhibits are interactive, some of them are really huge. So we hire out for that. We have contractors for that. But if it's small, if there's a game like World War II which was the last one, I think I made. There was at the end, once you got through that whole exhibit, you should have learned about the nine luminaries that were highlighted in the exhibit. When you get to the end, you have a quiz.

What the quiz does is ask you, do you see yourself as a writer? At the end, you actually came up with a luminary that should have mimicked what you felt. So, that was an interactive that I actually implemented. That's actually my role, the best job ever. There is nobody who has a better job than me.

Mark: What options are there for virtual visitors that can't get to DC, that you want to have some sort of experience of the museum? Do you work on that stuff?

Ravyn: I didn't. There is a big project and I think it's going to be launching in a couple of months. It is a Smithsonian vision. It's not just for our unit. It is the Smithsonian vision of making everything digital so that it can be experienced on the web. We have a virtual museum experience that's going to be launched and it is phenomenal. What it will do for you is it will have you pick an object. Pick an experience and then connect it with another experience or another object that you would not have actually thought about.

An Open Access to the Purpose of Technology

Ravyn: Most of the museums have some type of digital, like we have open access. I don't know if you are aware of that open access. The developers or anybody can actually go online and use the images in this space. We have the Smithsonian. If you go to the Smithsonian website, si.edu, you can just search for open access. You'll see that you have access to any number of objects from all the museums.

Carolyn: Cool, I didn't know that either.

Ravyn: The Smithsonian High was something that was started at the Hirshhorn Gallery and you use your mobile device. When you go into the units, the museums, or galleries that have this implemented, you'll take your mobile device and put it on the QR code. Then you'll get more information about that object, or about a tour, or a way of finding things. That's actually something that we have.

Then there’s the other websites, our website is unique, but it's pretty put together like the other websites. It is where we highlight our objects. You can search for our objects, you can see what the exhibits are about. We have a mobile app that will help you plan your visit. I'm actually working on a mobile application with the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Believe it or not, we are coming up with a mobile device for accessibility. It will give people who are low vision or blind, a way to navigate not just through the facility, but also to have a similar experience and learn about those particular objects. They can go to an exhibit and then point their phone onto something. They’ll be able to hear something about that object. That's actually next year's thing.The Purpose of Technology Is Transformative Inclusion

Carolyn: That's transformative inclusion. That's the way we do technology.

Ravyn: Yes, exactly. Not just for technology’s sake, it has to have a purpose.

Mark: Do you guys have any plans or vision to do stuff like virtual reality?

Ravyn: That's actually me, that's my thing. I want to add AR like the app that we're using. I am making this with my co-developer, Neon, using AR, Artificial Reality. I'm looking into how we can use AI or machine learning or VR into these experiences. One of the places, the contemplate of court actually is where I've looked. I thought this was a great space. But if you don't know the people who have the writings on the wall, then you're missing it.

Mark: What's the difference between VR and AR? That's a good term.

Ravyn: Artificial reality is when you take reality as it is and then you expand it. You have to have something there in order to expand it. Virtual reality is you make something out of nothing.

Carolyn: I read a couple of articles about it in the last Signal magazine that DoD is doing a lot with it. It is like simulating reality. What you're doing is awesome though.

Ravyn: I worked for the State Department way back and for the Diplomatic Security Service. That is what we did as programmers. We tried to help with the training by using VR and AR, which was really cool.

Carolyn: There were certain rooms, like when I got to the ancestry room, I don't know what it's really called. I did obviously notice the technology in there.

Plan for Security Majors

Carolyn: One of the reasons that I didn't is because it was seamless. There was no glitch. Like how do you keep it running all the time? How do you plan for security majors? I’ve noticed that one of the descriptors in your job includes DevSecOps. Another term I would not put in a Smithsonian museum.

Ravyn: I personally do not keep them running because I don't actually work in the museum. I work at the capital gallery. We have an AV crew, we also have facilities. People who go to the museum every day and make sure everything works every day, that is the one thing that we do. We make sure that the visitor experience isn't hampered by anything that doesn't work.

Carolyn: Do they manually walk through and make sure everything works? Do you monitor from afar as well?

Ravyn: They do. They have a way to monitor, especially if it's a web-based thing. We have an internal network. The monitoring system is tapped into the internal network so they can see what's happening. There are times when they have to be down, maybe for maintenance. But there are people that go every morning that the museum is open to make sure everything is open, and it is correct.

When I got to the museum, I worked for AOL. I was a developer there, but I also did systems and system admin stuff. On the backend of things, we have our servers, we have these things that have to happen. Even though we don't produce a lot of software, we do produce applications. I told my supervisor we could be a little bit more performant in the way we get things from the developer to the floor.

How DevSecOps Got Into the Museum

Ravyn: That is how DevSecOps actually got into our museum. I have counterparts, like in SAM, in the American Art Museum. Their title is DevSecOps engineer. They're application developers as well, but they do take care of their systems. Our IT infrastructure, the enterprise, IT, which is OCIO, the Office of the Chief Information Officer, they're investigating how to implement DevOps into this Smithsonian. Because they manage most of the web applications that are out there.

Mark: Including you guys. It all comes together to the greater Smithsonian team.

Ravyn: Sort of. We're autonomous, most of the units are autonomous. We can do whatever we want to the chagrin of both CIOs. But we do try to be good citizens and work with them. They do have a server, a server farm I guess, that we have some things on. We do have this big IT presence that you never would know that the Smithsonian would have. You wouldn't think that's part of it, but it is. It's cool.

Mark: So, how did you manage all this through the pandemic?

Ravyn: We had to close for a bit. We have the bigger Smithsonian which we call the castle that is like the mothership. The units mimic that, so we have a new normal team. It was one of the teams that we had. We did this castle to figure out how to go from where we were to the new normal, whatever the new normal is going to be.

Also, we had another team, a COVID team that was specifically to help with the health thing. If you needed assistance with COVID and to be able to pipe what was happening down at the unit level to go to the Smithsonian. We had those two teams.

The Phase Approach

Ravyn: The COVID team is responsible for how, when we open in the phase approach. How we keep our visitors safe, how we ensure that we're following CDC guidelines and our own stricter guidelines. Making sure that everybody stayed healthy, including staff, visitors, and security.

The new normal team is the team that took all of the staff input about how we were feeling. What were our concerns, what were we willing to do and what we were not willing to do? And what were we doing because of COVID that actually seemed like best practice?

One of the things that came out of that, from my understanding, is, we have so many options for telework. It's ridiculous how people can pretty much make a buffet out of how they would like to telework. People like myself where I don't really need to be at the museum. We have at this point, we are not going into our workspaces or into the museum.

I've been teleworking for almost two years now. I haven't been anyway, but we can go. But if we don't have a reason to go, then don't go. What we're trying to do is keep everybody safe. That's really how those things happened.

You asked me about security. Security has always been on property. Even when the museum was closed, security has always been there. The level of security across Smithsonian never diminished. It's always been like we're in a very visual place and there's some controversy sometimes with what we display. Security has never actually been diminished.

Mark: That's like physical security, but what about cyber security?

Carolyn: What about your applications?

Taking Cybersecurity and the Purpose of Technology to the Nth Degree

Ravyn: For our applications, the ones that are in the museum, when I make the ones that I've been implementing, I use the internal network. There is no access outside really because it's an internal network. The network itself is OCIO. They are responsible for the whole network and because they take cybersecurity extremely, to the nth degree, which is to my chagrin as a developer. That means, I have to be careful about what I'm doing, about libraries that I'm using, about open source stuff.

There's got to be a balance, but it's really a tug of war between I need to use this thing. Security is like, if you use that thing, it's going to open us up for an attack. We really don't like to have our websites down. It's not good because there are people who don't get to come to the museum who want to experience the museum. The only way they can touch us is through the websites.

Carolyn: I wanted to ask you about just your recommendations for navigating the museum. You touched on this application. I'm not sure if it's ready yet. You can plan your trip because I wish I would've done that. I feel like I missed so much, I could have spent a month in that museum.

Ravyn: It's our mobile device and it's going through some upgrades. I will get back to you to let you know when this feature will be available. But what the features are supposed to do is, like you say that you only have 5 hours. You want to spend two and a half hours in that museum.

What the App Is Meant to Do

Ravyn: Then in our museum, two and a half, like NMAI. You're like a baseball aficionado. So you say, give me some suggestions of where I can go in the museum if I have this particular like. Or if I only have these particular things, or I only have this particular amount of time. That's what the app is meant to do.

I believe that that feature might be coming. It's being worked on. I will definitely email you and let you know if it's available, then you do it on your mobile device. It's another QR code thing that you do and then it'll come up.

Mark: Do you have an app that someone can download onto their phone and then they navigate through the app?

Ravyn: That app is that one you can download.

Carolyn: This'll be a new feature to the app where you can actually plan your time. That's brilliant.

Ravyn: Yes.

Carolyn: I have a love-hate relationship with museums in general, because I want to see it all. I like the idea of going exhausted before I'm even there because I know I can't see it all. Let’s jump to our tech talk questions. These are just fun questions with rapid answers. I’m always looking to build my reading and my television viewing list. So I want to know what you're reading, listening to, and watching that inspires you or that you just do to chill.

Ravyn: I live in the mountains and I have very poor internet connection, so I don't have TV. I don't even have a signal. And I don't really like TV. I never did when I was a kid. But I read a lot and I listen to audiobooks a lot.

The Whole Journey of Building the Purpose of Technology

Ravyn: One of the books I just finished is a Fool's Errand by Lonnie Bunch, our secretary who used to be our director. He wrote the book and it’s about that whole journey of building the museum. It was great just to hear his experience about how to get that in there. I'm also a geek. I won't talk about the tech manuals I'm reading because I read a lot of tech manuals.

But the museum, I grew up in the Bronx and I grew up going to Catholic school. It kind of ditched history for placement for religion. I didn't really know history very well or geography. And I thought everything was New York. Like Chicago was part of New York when I was growing up. I just thought that was how it was.

I'm trying to make myself learn more. But the reconstruction exhibit and the records that you were able to search, they had me thinking about my history, because I didn't know it. And so I started reading the constitution and reading books about American history. I'm really not a person who likes history because I don't do well with dates, but I'm really great with numbers.

I think about why reconstruction failed because we're still in a place where we have racism. Like why do we still have this? Where did that come from? Those are the types of books I read when I'm in a contemplative mood. It's about American history, the founding fathers, about England and the English system. For fun, I read anything that's fantasy, sci-fi, I've got this thing about murder mysteries that I like.

The Broken Earth

Carolyn: What's your favorite sci-fi? Have you read the Broken Earth series?

Ravyn: No. What series is it?

Carolyn: It's called the Broken Earth series. I'm going to send you the link and it is one that I started. It's a trilogy. She won the Hugo award, three years in a row, and that's never happened before. It's sci-fi fantasy, but she approaches things on this cosmic level. So rather than looking at time, like in years, it's billions of years. It blew my mind and it's fantastic. But I have another one for you.

Ravyn: Have you heard of God, Human, Animal, Machine by Meghan O'Gieblyn?

Carolyn:...

Find out how the DoD's Kessel Run Office is digitalizing longtime manual processes through AI, taking the military to the next level of its digital transformation. Listen as Captain Jazmin Furtado talks about her experience with Kessel Run, and now Space Force, spreading a culture of data driven communication.

Disclaimer

The opinions expressed in this episode are those of Jazmin Furtado, our presenter, and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Defense, U.S. Air Force, or U.S. Space Force.

Episode Table of Contents

• [00:40] Captain Jazmin Furtado of the US Space Force
• [11:19] The Important Contribution of Kessel Run
• [19:34] Learning From the Kessel Run Role

Episode Links and Resources

• Jazmin Furtado LinkedIn
• SpaceForce Website
• Squid Game
• Ted Lasso
• Phoenix Project

Captain Jazmin Furtado of the US Space Force

Carolyn: Our guest this morning is Captain Jazmin Furtado. She’s a military officer with the US Space Force and a data science and artificial intelligence leader. Before joining the Space Force, Jazmin worked as a military officer for the United States Air Force for over four years.

The information expressed in this episode are those of Jazmin, our presenter. They do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Defense, US Air Force, or US Space Force.

So Jazmin, talk to us a little bit about your journey. How you started with the Air Force, what you did there and how you ended up with the US Space Force.

Jazmin: I went to the Air Force Academy and graduated there in 2016. The reason I entered was because the challenge was very enticing to me. I like the idea of being challenged, not just academically, but also militarily and physically. There was a big focus on leadership that I think is pretty invaluable. After I graduated from there, I was able to go to MIT and continue with my degree in operations research. I got my master's there.

Afterwards, I am a program manager in the military in the Air Force. That's a little bit of a different background than most program managers have in the military. A lot of times you'll have a management background or an economics background but I had more of a tech background. The military is trying to figure out what to do with me for a little bit.

From a Traditional Program to Kessel Run

Jazmin: After a year of being in a more traditional program management role, I was pulled into Kessel Run. I was there for two years. So I was plopped into that organization just to do AI because I had some sort of background. One thing about this space and you see this in a lot of the organizations like Kessel Run, is that you just figure things out as you go. You're put there with a very vague job description and you just have to figure things out.

So I went in there initially with my operations research cap on knowing stuff about data science, machine learning, and AI. I was like, this is great. Then really quickly realized, that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of capabilities that are needed to make AI actually applied. You need to put in, invest in the other 90% of the iceberg, which is the data infrastructure and that architecture piece.

I spent a lot of time, the two years I was at Kessel Run, building a data portfolio. It consists of data scientists, software developers, and data engineers to build the things needed for analytics. That was really the goal there. When the Space Force was created, I had the opportunity to move over. I put my name in the hat because I really liked the idea of space.

I've always been inspired by space. I wanted to be an astronaut when I first graduated from high school. I've been very inspired by Star Trek. I have a little Star Trek thing I drew over my desk to remind me of where I came from, Star Trek.

Kessel Run Is a Star Wars Thing

Jazmin: Kessel Run is a Star Wars thing, but I will forgive them for that. But now in the Space Force, I was very excited. It's just such an inspirational place to be. It's like The Next Frontier. And to be able to influence that branch from the start, I thought it was a really great opportunity. The amount of data that we're developing, that we're gathering from space is also very tremendous.

There was really no reason for me to say no. So that's how I got to the Space Force. I've been here for a couple of months. I'm really like a sponge gathering a whole lot of information about our space operations. Yes, I'm really enjoying it so far.

Mark: You talked about Kessel Run where you started out in the Air Force. Many of our listeners probably won't know what that means. Can you describe a little bit about what that is and what Kessel Run actually does? Then we'll talk about Star Wars.

Carolyn: Kessel Run, I know it's a software factory but I don't even really know what that means. I just know the buzzwords.

Jazmin: Software factory is definitely a term that's put out there. Kessel Run is a software development organization within the Air Force that develops software for airmen. So it's code, it's applications that are built by and coded by government, civilians, military, contractors. It's all government-owned. We own all the applications, we own our own data. Kessel Run doesn't just create the code for the applications, they also build the platform that those applications reside on.

What Gives Kessel Run the Ability to Deploy Applications

Jazmin: They are responsible for the different environments, the development environment, and the production environment for these applications. The pipelines to deploy these applications to production, they are responsible for the security behind all these. It's a lot. It is that same analogy with the iceberg, the applications are really the tip of it. A lot of the Kessel Run's offerings come from its platform. That platform is what's given Kessel Run the ability to deploy their applications continuously. It's very iterative.

Mark: Is this for military applications and things like that or across the whole spectrum?

Carolyn: Or just on the Air Force? Is there anything on the Kessel Run platform that is not developed by the Air Force? Are there industry applications or code or is it all homegrown?

Jazmin: The core of Kessel Run is really homegrown. It's building applications for airmen. So airmen such as schedulers for their famous tanker planning scheduling tool. Where you have tankers that need to be scheduled to be flown for different missions. There's an application that takes that previously manual process of scheduling these aircraft. Putting it to the cloud and making it available and for multiple people to collaborate on the same application.

That's a really powerful tool. Tools like that, applications like that that are making the current manual processes digital. Creating digital parody to a lot of things that are done manually right now. It's helping schedulers. We have analysts with people like maintainers, pilots, those airmen. Kessel Run's platform, like the All Domain Common Platform, is used for other applications as well. It is not its core functionality because that's really for the Kessel Run's applications.Space Force Kobayashi Maru

Jazmin: But there are other groups that are government entities that are utilizing it to deploy some of their applications as well. I know Space Force Kobayashi Maru is another "software factory" for lack of a better term here. It uses that platform to deploy its products. Their applications are more space-specific, so space operators, satellite operators.

Mark: It seems that Kessel Run has set themselves up to operate and go to market so to speak as a commercial organization. They have a CEO and a CFO. Is that by design or is that a cultural thing?

Jazmin: It definitely is designed to be more of a disrupter in the space to introduce a new way of acquiring software. Kessel Run is an acquisitions program office. So they're acquiring software, just happens to be one that they're building themselves. Kessel Run's put together because there is a thought that we can do software acquisition better, faster. We don't have to follow this waterfall method.

As a result of the idea that we need to go fast, that created the startup mentality, flat organization. That's where these concepts from industry have been brought into the startup world, and have been brought into the government space. That is how you're seeing the different roles or the parallel roles that you don't see traditionally in military units.

Carolyn: It almost sounds like Kessel Run was born out of the need for culture change. Like the acquisitions process is a painful process antiquated. You're telling me that Kessel Run turned that on its head? Did it work?

Mark: It did work.

The Important Contribution of Kessel Run

Jazmin: It should work. I don't know if you could say that at the end of day. It is a process. It's going to take a lot to create change. The most important thing that Kessel Run has contributed is that cultural piece. The fact that we need to value ideas over rank in acquisitions. I'm very much a proponent of that. We can no longer afford to have people at a table and only listen to the highest-ranking officers.

Because we have people with relevant experiences that are coming through the ranks that may be are actually more relevant in some cases than people that have come from different backgrounds than those that have made it to higher ranks in the military and now are overseeing a unit that may not be something that they are used to commanding. It's not a field that they're well versed in.

We need to be able to listen to all the voices in the room. That's something that I have really appreciated and I've really thrived in the military. Having that experience at Kessel Run, I've been very fortunate to have that as a military experience. I know that's not the same for everyone. The goodness that has been created in Kessel Run needs to be replicated elsewhere.

That cultural shift, that's really where the value proposition in Kessel Run comes from. It’s this lighthouse in a sense of another way of doing things, creating the documentation, the processes. Improving that out so that other units can start to adopt, at least in piecemeal, these different things that make up that Kessel Run culture.The Old Ways of Doing Things

Carolyn: Is there an effort to do that right now, to share this? The wisdom of the many is coming to the table here with Kessel Run. Then the next piece of that, it's hard to share something like that. To get it to take in other places, especially where we're so entrenched in the old ways of doing things. Is there a committee, a group that's tasked with sharing these ideas?

Jazmin: I'm not sure if it's a committee. The military already has sort of a natural way of sharing knowledge. Its officers and its military members are moving every few years from base to base. That's how a lot of goodness has been spread. A lot of the upcoming hubs, these innovation hubs, a lot of its members have come from places like Kessel Run. Kobayashi Maru for example on the Space Force side was really started and put together by a core crew of ex-Kessel Run members.

We see the same thing over in Colorado Springs with Space CAMP. Even Platform One, AF Works, Space Works, all these innovation groups. What I've seen recently in my own professional development is that there's two tracks you can go down now. There's like the more traditional track where you're a military member. You have knowledge of a lot of things but you're really a master of none.

There's also this new track that's forming that's a digital transformation track. They try to keep these people that have these experiences in these hubs. Keep them in the space so that they can share that goodness, that digital transformation goodness to other units.AI’s Role in the Space Force

Carolyn: Speaking of the digital transformation, I want to shift gears towards AI. There's a lot of talk around it. We just had a big report that came out. I'm wondering how important it is, what role it's playing in the Space Force.

Jazmin: It's been talked about a lot. A lot of senior leaders, especially in the Space Force, are talking about how we need to leverage innovation. We need to leverage technology like artificial intelligence and we need to take this opportunity in developing a new branch. Really just becoming the digital leader of the military. That's really something that the Space Force has embodied and just a message they're putting out. It's very exciting.

There is so much potential for artificial intelligence in the Space Force. Think of all of the data that we're gathering on a regular basis, every second from all of our space assets. That's a lot of information. Being able to harness the power of that in starting a new branch is not like turning a new link. It's what really puts the Space Force in a really great position. We don't need to adopt the things that were already status quo from the Air Force. We can start over again, we can start fresh.

That jumpstart is a really powerful thing. Not a lot of branches can say that, "Starting August, or whatever this month, this day, we are now looking at everything with fresh new eyes. Looking at everything from soup to nuts with fresh eyes." Not a lot of branches get that. That's one of the reasons why I joined the Space Force, because of opportunity.

Creating a Digital Parody

Jazmin: Artificial intelligence in the Space Force is going to play a similar role that it does in many other industries. It’s creating more automated and augmented ways of doing things. Creating this digital parody to what may be done manually right now. How do we make our operators' jobs easier?

With the proliferation, with the increase of space assets that we are now seeing, our operators are getting inundated with things they can't keep up. How do we make their jobs easier through automation? That's really where the power of AI is going to come in.

Mark: A lot of people think of the Air Force as one of the leaders in the digital transformation or technology. They're in front of the other branches of the military being innovators. It's exciting to hear your thoughts about the Space Force and where they're going with that.

Carolyn: Is the Space Force part of the Air Force? Is it its own branch?

Jazmin: The Space Force is the newest branch, but it's falling under the Air Force. The same way that the Marines fall under the Navy, that's how the Space Force is falling under the Air Force. The Space Force really just was previous space units within the Air Force. They just rebranded them to be Space Force units now. Eventually, we'll grow into additional units that didn't previously fall under the Air Force.

Mark: You've only been in the Space Force for a short while. You talk about the collaboration of Kessel Run on the Air Force side. Bringing together the industry and the government, all these different pieces and parts to collaborate. How have you seen that happen in the Space Force, the bringing of the industry and the government together?

Learning From the Kessel Run Role

Jazmin: The Air Force has been doing this, all the services have been doing this well. We're continuing to try to increase our collaborations with industry. I've actually participated in the fellowship with industry. I was with SpaceX for three months where I worked with them. It’s because I needed to learn in this Kessel Run role that I was in and how to create a data portfolio.

I had no formal experience in being a system architect and understanding what role data folks need to play in the organization. So I went to SpaceX to learn how they approach artificial intelligence, what support they have to oversee these types of capabilities, and just overall to get an idea of how their organization culturally approaches data and artificial intelligence. So I gained a lot from that experience.

There's a lot of those smaller-scale collaborations where military members are learning from industry and bringing that back. Upskilling our own workforce to learn what is the most cutting edge or what's the newest to do or way to do things. Or just to see another perspective, see another point of view, just to see what another possibility may be to run things. Those are really beneficial. We have defense ventures, education with industry, those sorts of things.

But from an industry to government, more from a capability application perspective, that's always been so tricky. That's the topic that's constantly brought up. It's so difficult for some small companies to make their way into the government. That's something that we're going to continue to try to better that relationship. There's that whole valley of death where we need to invest in these smaller companies.Give Them a Shot of Kessel Run

Jazmin: Give them a shot because these non-traditional companies are how we're getting these cutting-edge technologies. But we do need to make these processes more transparent. It's not just to the companies. The companies will do their due diligence of figuring out how they need to make their way and utilizing those resources. I've definitely seen that being leveraged quite often by industry.

What I think we need to spend more time on is in educating our military members and our government members on that process. Not everyone is aware. If someone were to go and approach them, be like, "My technology may be valuable for your use case," most people don't know where to point them or where they are in the process. A lot of members don't know the direction of phase one, phase two, phase three.

Depending on where you are, you may not need to. You're an operator or you're not an acquisition. But there needs to be more education around that. A better guidance given to military members on how to help these companies navigate the DoD. It's such a vague organization, it's impossible to navigate. The more people that know about the process, the higher probability of success of the company being able to find a valid user.

Carolyn: We've got tech talk questions. Our last few questions are just pretty quick answers. Tell me what inspires you now. We know you're a Treky. I would love to know what you are watching or reading about in the Treky realm. Just in general too, what inspires you? What do you do for your downtime fun or inspires you for work?

Squid Game

Jazmin: What's all the rage now is Squid Game. I don't know if you've watched that.

Carolyn: I've just heard about that.

Mark: It'll freak you out. I'm watching it now and it's intense.

Carolyn: I heard about the premise and I was like, "No. I'm sticking with Ted Lasso."

Mark: You know why? It's not Ted Lasso.

Jazmin: So Squid Game, it was very stimulating.

When it comes to industry and government technology, who is the glue that holds it all together? Lonye Ford joins Carolyn and Mark to give her insight on roles and responsibilities within the cybersecurity field. From Lonye's time at the U.S. Air Force help desk, to her current role of CEO at Arlo Solutions, she offers a unique perspective on cybersecurity career path. #CybersecurityAwarenessMonth

Episode Table of Contents

• [01:02] The Ever-Evolving Landscape of a Secure Foundation
• [09:20] Understanding the Importance of a Secure Foundation
• [16:37] The Secure Foundation of the People
• [26:28] A Secure Foundation Is Void of Decision Fatigue

Episode Links and Resources: Secure Foundation

• LinkedIn
• Website
• Calm App
• Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
• SoulCycle

The Ever-Evolving Landscape of a Secure Foundation

Carolyn: Today, we have Lonye Ford, CEO of Arlo Solutions. Lonye served for over 10 years in the U.S. Air Force and was named one of the top 50 in tech visionary at Intercom 2021.

Since it's cybersecurity awareness month, we're super excited to talk to Lonye about her 20-year career in the cybersecurity field. Her experience on both the government and industry teams, and insights on the ever-evolving landscape of government cybersecurity.

Lonye: Thank you Carolyn, for having me. Hi, Mark. When I heard the intro, I think I'm going to ask next time to move out with that 20-year experience. Makes me sound super old.

Carolyn: You caught Mark and I discussing your age because we looked you up on LinkedIn, we're like, there's no way she's been doing this for 20 years.

Lonye: I appreciate being invited, so thank you, I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Carolyn: It's October. We have the best holiday of the year, which is Halloween, but also, super important, cybersecurity awareness month. We'd like to start out with you talking about your cybersecurity career journey. Why do you think it's such an important component of our lives?

Lonye: Halloween is actually my favorite holiday as well. I have two little ones and so I get all into Halloween.

Carolyn: What's your costume this year?

Lonye: We're going to be the Space Jam family and I'm going to be Lola Bunny.

Carolyn: We got Alice in Wonderland theme going on at my house, I will be the Cheshire cat.

A Proud Veteran

Lonye: COVID messed Halloween up for me because, we get into it, as far as in our house and a holiday party. We open our bottom floor, so whenever the kids come through, we do a scary, little, haunted house and give. They'll have to come in and have scary movies playing. I missed that, I can't wait till we can open back up that way.

My journey started in the Air Force, I am a very proud Air Force veteran. When I started at the Air Force, I started at the help desk. I like to tell people I started from the bottom, literally. No offense to help desk technicians, but working on a help desk gave me an amazing place to start. You get experience, visibility just across the gamut.

I’m a service type of person, I like to service people. I am a person that really likes to help in every capacity, so I love the help desk when others hated it. Started at the help desk, then I did more network admin stuff, SOS admin, and network admin. I've been a cable dog, I've pulled cable through buildings. Then I went on to work for the program offices within the Air Force, doing things still in cybersecurity.

I like to be very specific in what part of cyber I'm in, because cyber is such a huge domain. My focus is more on assessment and authorization of systems, so we started at a system called Disc Cap. It's the way that they used to do it back in the day, and then it matured into a program called Dye Cap. Now you hear people talk about RMF, Risk Management Framework, so that's what we're doing now.A Secure Foundation Focuses on Risk Assessment and Authorization

Lonye: So, that was my journey in the Air Force, I got out of the Air Force and I supported the government via contract. I was contracting government, went both ways, but I've supported DOD CIO, Army CIO, and the Air Force CIO. I've also supported some programs at the program office, which I love. But satellite-based systems, telephony, all focused on risk assessment and authorization.

What happened in my career is that you start technical. As you mature with cyber, as you increase your skillset and your knowledge, you get to the point where now I'm focusing more on policy, procedures, compliance, building strategies. That's what I really do, that's what my niche is, what I love to do.

I helped build the strategy for the Air Force that's an authorized called the fast track ATO process, doing the same type of thing for department USDA. Working across some of the Air Force, major acquisition programs like the Aircrafts and the F35's. But now I'm looking at DevsecOps, how do we assess and authorize code? How do we assess and authorize what we're putting on a cloud that may be code that's transitioning over to the aircraft?

Mark: Is that what Arlo Solutions is? Is that the primary function of Arlo Solutions?

Lonye: It’s what you would consider the sexy part of Arlo solutions. The part that we talk about the most is cyber, but we have more work probably in the Intel space. We do Intel and cyber security, but even from an Intel perspective, we're still looking at strategy.

The Strategy Level to Secure Foundation

Lonye: We have a contract. It's still personnel security, but the process of how they transition that personnel security over to DOD. So we are still at the strategy level, we have contracts at the Pentagon actually. We still really work, we're advisors to senior leadership.

Mark: You started talking a little bit about Cybersecurity and the early years of cybersecurity. It seemed like it all started with the network. You did a lot of networking type stuff early and computing and cybersecurity. It seems like it's changed over the last 20 years. Can you talk a little bit about the development or how cybersecurity has grown or advanced?

Lonye: First, I would say, cyber is now sexy. People didn't like to see us coming. The focus in the government is call, schedule, and performance. Typically, cyber in the past, they wouldn't send us one of the friendlies. Nira calls more, it really decreases the time, and increases the timeline. It affected the schedule. Many times before we were mature, it could possibly affect the performance. I would say the difference now. Senior leaders didn't like to see us coming, the tech people didn't like to see us coming. We were not usually welcomed, and cyber was an afterthought.

Some of it is because of the cyber security workforce. Back then cyber security focused on NO, I would say everything someone wanted to do. We found NO is insecure, you can't do it. So holistically, we weren't very helpful, it's just my opinion. Now we are integrated into the team. From a maturity perspective, once you're building these programs, cyber security is a tenant that you're going to have to speak to.

Understanding the Importance of a Secure Foundation

Lonye: People are understanding the importance of cyber now, and that wasn't the case in the past. Number one, the cyber security workforce has matured in the way that they communicate, and we need to do a much better job. In the past, we may communicate, Hey, AC One! You don't have AC One talking and control and specific cyber jargon, which has not been helpful.

Now it’s starting to learn how to communicate with senior leaders, to help them make decisions. Because you should be posturing your leaders to make risk based decisions. Not saying no, just saying that this risk is high. But for leaders, it could be okay to accept this high risk because maybe that risk is for 10 seconds. So we have to learn how to communicate risk to senior leaders.

Carolyn: You're tapping into something that a lot of our guests bring up. It's about culture and that you have to find a way, or change. I don't know if it's change the culture, but it has become part of the culture. Look at you now, you have your own domain and the best month of the year.

Lonye: Yes, it is. I was going to say culture changed at night, but I didn't want to sound so cliche because that's what's happening. It's difficult. I'll give you an example, I just told you my history. If you think about that, that means I haven't touched technology in years. But I’m the person that's developing a strategy and telling you what the policies are, and what the process is. Do I fully understand Kubernetes? Am I a developer? The answer is no.

The Risk Management Framework

Lonye: So the difference now is we have to learn how to collaborate. These people that have advanced in their career, that's putting out these policies, they have to be able to collaborate with developers. The same, if you look at the risk management framework and any type of framework, and sometimes RMF gets a bad name. But I love it, because it's a framework. It's just really how people implement it, but the framework is a really good framework.

The issue is that we have to integrate the developers, the operations, the decision makers, as you develop these policies and thresholds. We're maturing there, and from a culture perspective, what I'm saying is a lot of issues with ego. Because now in these domains, everyone, they're experts. I have a developer that is an expert, I have an operations person as an expert, I have a cyber person as an expert. These experts don't talk to one another, because they're all the smartest in the room.

Carolyn: How do you do this? How do you facilitate the collaboration and deal with the egos?

Lonye: I would say, that's my niche, that's what I do well at, that's what I like actually. You break down those egos. I go in and I'll start the conversation with, I'm not an expert in Kubernetes. I'm not an expert in containers, I'm an expert in my field. You may be an expert Kubernetes, but I promise you, you're not an expert at what I do.

Break Down That Ego

Lonye: So what we have to do is work together, this is the only way that we're going to do it. I'll break down myself and try to break down that ego so they can understand what we're saying. I see a lot of that, a lot of bickering and back and forth because everyone has their own perspective.

And I understand the developers because if I'm a developer, I'm moving fast. Here you come at the end saying, “I've integrated all this cybersecurity”. Now the cyber person’s saying, “Can you give me 50 documents to document what you did? Developers, you're antiquated.” “No, I'm not.” That's what I'm seeing a lot from a cultural perspective.

Mark: You talk about culture, and you've seen this from both sides, industry, and government. Can you tell us how you've seen change over the past few years between government and industry?

Carolyn: What does it look like now?

Lonye: I'm a very optimistic person, so I'll say that in general, so honest, but very optimistic. I'm proud of the government, and what the government is trying to do. I don't think people understand how difficult it is to either change culture, to integrate all of the industry because the government has their own processes and procedures. It's not in compliance to statutory requirements, law, acquisition law.

It’s very difficult to sometimes integrate more of the smaller, innovative companies into the acquisition process. So, I would start there. I would say from a maturity perspective, I do see the government trying to do innovative things.

Secure Foundation and Streamline the Acquisition Process

Lonye: Use the OTA, check and help streamline the acquisition process so that it's more consumable by smaller companies. I do think that they're trying the best way they can to innovate companies outside of the larger defense companies, which is difficult. It's really difficult, but I see them trying. I'm on programs, they're doing CIBERs, they are finding different ways to integrate.

From an industry perspective, I see more of a partnership. I see the government trying to be more open. In the past, the government has stayed away from even having a lot of conversations with industry because there's a lot of rules. For industry, I can't go out to the government. I can't buy them a meal if it's over $25, I can buy my friend a meal. I'm not bragging.

Carolyn: I hear you, I feel that pain.

Lonye: So many rules stand in the way of open collaboration because everything has to be fair competition. You can't give that perspective to anyone that is not. It could be, I just want to talk to the industry about this issue. I just really want to be open and tell you, this is my problem. The government has not been comfortable doing that in the past.

They're starting to, more freely, open up those lines of communication. It's not for around upon, so I do think that, that's the difference with industry. Another way that we have to mature, in my opinion, is that the industry likes to throw tools at problems. They like to scale the government, all these different tools, and a tool that can answer all of your problems.

The Secure Foundation of the PeopleLonye: But if you don't have the foundation of the people in the process, those tools do not work. They don't, you have to be configured right. You have to have the right people that can run these tools, they have to make sure they are interoperable. That's an area that industry has to continue to mature in, because the government doesn't always have the workforce to consume your tools. You're talking about huge enterprises.

That's an area that industry can mature in, and that's an area that we focus on. I don't sell tools and I'm trying to be very non-biased on tools. I'm looking more so at the capability. The work that I like to do is really to team with the government, to work on behalf of the government. To team with the government versus coming in as a new industry selling something like a tool.

Carolyn: Often, we have the tool, we have the features in existing tools. But rather than figure out how to use it, we're like, let's just throw a new one at it. That's so frustrating. On a macro level, it sounds like government's getting better at diversity with smaller, innovative industry companies. What about on a micro level? So within your teams, how are you managing the need for diversity? Just on the people level or do you see that as a need?

Lonye: From a diversity perspective, it goes back to, you have to have a diverse team now. The domain is so much larger than it used to be, the internet of things.

When There’s a Secure Foundation, Everything Is Connecting

Lonye: You know, everything is connecting, it's so many different types of technologies and tools. Your team has to be set up sometimes for people that understand strategy. People that can understand that you want to do these cool things, and I'll come in in this case sometimes.

But how do I cross-map this to the requirements, the compliance, the statutory law, and make sure that you're covered from that perspective? How do you integrate these cool things that you want to do into current processes and procedures and laying out roles and responsibilities. You need a person that can do that. But then, you also have to have diversity from a person that understands technology.

You have to have diversity from a person who's going to use it, the user community, or the operations community. From a thought leadership perspective, you really truly need a diverse team. Technology is moving so quickly, every week there's a new technology. You really have to have folks that understand that, and those typically are not the people that's been in this domain for a long time. They graduated from the technology part.

Mark: Do you see the recognition of this across customers? Or you have to go out and make that happen?

Lonye: Make it happen. I will almost consider myself a cyber security integrator and that's not necessarily a domain. The government is not saying I want to hire a cyber integrator, they hire technology integrators. The issue the government is having, to me and some of these major programs, is the acquisition process. The way that the acquisition process is working now.

A Secure Foundation Needs an Integrator

Lonye: We may have a company that comes in and focuses on infrastructure or building a cloud. You may have another company that's coming and doing the pipeline work. Then you have another company that's coming in, maybe doing integration of that. Another company comes in and does O and M, so that's doing maintenance. You have another company that's coming in that's doing cyber.

They're on all different contracts. They are supporting the same client and there's a lot of integration. So you miss that. There has to be an integrator that truly focuses on, maybe technology integration, but then they crosswalk the contracts. Some companies are very specific about what's in their statement of work. So if the government is not very tight on contractual actions and acquisition upfront before the company even comes, they have failed.

It's a failure because of those gaps there, no one is going to fill it. A lot of times, bless the government but, you may not have a strong program manager in some of these programs that can talk across all that technology, or can do that integration as well. As we continue to mature on being diverse in all the different companies that we bring in, the government has to really focus on acquisition, and how we integrate those.

Mark: That's no easy problem.

Carolyn: Let's move to our tech talk questions. Our tech talk...

AI capabilities range from providing on-the-ground safety for US soldiers, to removing the time delay of the Mars drone. But what misconceptions are there about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning? Join as Carolyn and Mark welcome Willie Hicks Public Sector CTO at Dynatrace on to debunk myths and confirm beliefs about the power of AI.

Episode Table of Contents

• [00:41] Willie Unpacks What AI Is
• [09:22] What AI Is in the Medical Field
• [16:44] When AI Starts to Become Practical
• [23:38] Staying in the Vein of What AI Is

Episode Links and Resources

• LinkedIn
• Website

Willie Unpacks What AI Is

Carolyn: Today, we get to talk to Willie Hicks, CTO of Dynatrace public sector, on the very hot topic of artificial intelligence. Willie is going to unpack what AI really is and isn't. Apparently, I will not be having an in home version of Star Trek's Data to do light chores anytime soon, spoiler alert. But we also get into the nuances of AI versus ML, how the government is developing and using AI.

Willie is going to tackle the recent National Security Commission on artificial intelligence final reports. He's going to share his biggest takeaways from the 800-page report. That's going to save us from actually having to read anything. Finally, we're going to discuss how he has seen the industry and the government partner in AI, the wins, the losses, and how we can do better.

I want to go straight to our topic of the day and just have you level set us on AI. Define what we're talking about here.

Willie: When I think about and talk to people about AI, often I get the question, "What is AI?" We can talk about it from the strict definition of AI, if you wanted me to rattle off the Oxford English dictionary version of it.

It is a theory in the development of computer systems that can perform tasks. These are normal tasks that humans would do, so it's artificial intelligence. But in reality, AI is more than that definition.A Task-Oriented Type of AI

Willie: Most people have heard or directly experienced AI in one fashion or another, and they don't even realize it. Every time you call into Amazon or some company to chat about a product that didn't arrive, or you're calling to pay a bill, you'll get an automated chatbot or an automated service. A lot of times, it asks you to speak to it, in a natural language. It is processing that information and giving you back some type of feedback. That's a very task-oriented type AI that you're interacting with.

We actually interact with AI all the time, and that's growing day in and day out. If you've got devices, smart speakers in your home, you're interacting with a type of AI. Or if you are using a lot of systems today on computers that are trying to keep you from gaming the system, like they're getting a lot more complex. The CAPTCHAs and things like that are getting more complex to try to understand when other bots are trying to get into the system. All of these types of systems are some types of AI.

Now, we'll get into this later. There are different types of AI. There's what you were just talking about, Data. I would love to have Data in my house, or Jarvis. Not Skynet, but one of those AIs that has a more general purpose that doesn't exist. Those types of AI don't exist today, except in science fiction.

Carolyn: At all?

Willie: Not really, at least not that we know of. If they're in a secret lab somewhere, we don't know about it.

How People Misuse What AI Is

Mark: They probably do at Bill Gates' house. It seems like the use of the term AI is all over the place. Everybody uses it pretty ubiquitously, but it means so many different things based on the description that you just laid out. Literally, the spectrum is massive. But people use the term, it sounds like artificial intelligence to mean just about any of that.

Willie: Also, they misuse terms a lot of times too. Some people say machine learning is AI. A lot of sci-fi and a lot of what we see on TV has driven what people think about AI. But there is really more of a practical side of AI. The funny thing is AI is becoming really more ubiquitous. AI is being embedded in systems. There are manufacturers' chips that are really being designed to leverage AI at the edge.

The smart speaker is one way, but a lot of times, you'll interact with devices in buildings. You might not even realize it, but in the backend, AI is processing and understanding what that user is doing. How to respond back to the user, how to feed data and capture that data for marketing purposes, all other sorts of things. AI is really ubiquitous, but people kind of misunderstand what it really is.

Mark: Let's break this down into a practical sense. How are you seeing artificial intelligence being used? Let's just use this example, how do you see it being used in military agencies across the DOD? Then I'll just tack onto that on top of it. What role do you see the industry playing in that mission?

Two Parts of What AI Is

Willie: Two parts there. How do I see AI being used in the military?

Mark: Or DOD in general maybe.

Willie: DOD in general. It's funny because I was thinking about this recently for another talk. Most people, when they think of the military, they think warfare, rightly so. The military is really more about peacekeeping, hopefully. We don't want to go to war. But a lot of times, we are thinking about it from a war platform standpoint. So again, going back to sci-fi like Skynet kind of thing.

People have these fears that AI is going to take over military systems and all. But the military is actually using AI in a lot of different more practical applications. Things that you see in industry, business systems, data analytics, big data analytics. I'm not talking about just from a warfare standpoint, but the military is a massive organization.

Mark: Logistical stuff, yes.

Willie: Logistics. When you think about transport, you think about having to move thousands of people at a moment's notice, maybe overseas. You're transporting equipment, heavy equipment, and so forth. The maintenance of that equipment, all of these things take a lot of manpower to maintain. Or if you use AI, which the military is actually investing a lot of time and resources into figuring out how to better maintain their fleet, how to do predictive analytics on their fleet.

When do I need to change, instead of constant rotation of maintenance, having more smart systems. Decision systems helping them say, "You need to replace this part no based on X, Y and X." And systems are becoming more explainable for the military to understand. Okay, this is why I'm giving you this decision.

What AI Is in the Medical Field

Willie: Also, you'll see this in things like the medical field, battlefield medicine, also non-battle field, conventional medicine for our veterans in the VA. AI is being implemented in these places in a lot of different ways. A lot of cool things that may not be here today, but things that I have seen and read about and talked to others about. This is more futuristic.

But having drones that have AI built into them that could do dangerous tasks that you would have to use a person for in the past. Let's say you had a soldier in the field and you had to extract that soldier in the middle of combat. If you could send a drone out, or something that could actually go pull that soldier back without endangering another soldier.

Mark: I went to a dinner recently and was listening to the CIO of the Navy talk about this question. He brought up the example, it made me think of it because you were talking about drones. He said the thing that popped out in his mind was to remember the videos of the drone on Mars that we saw. I don't know what the gap in communication is between Earth to Mars. But he said it was nine or 19 minutes, or something like that. He said that they're using artificial intelligence to extrapolate out that gap, so a drone doesn't crash into the planet.

Carolyn: What does that mean, extrapolate out that gap?

Leverage GPS Mapping

Mark: Well, that was my interpretation, but to leverage GPS mapping and things like that. So if a drone is flying across the landscape to be able to see that there's objects coming. Or how to navigate terrain and things like that, or weather conditions and stuff like that.

Willie: And NASA, granted, we're talking about military applications. There’s a second part to your question.

Mark: The second part was how's the industry supporting that mission.

Willie: Let me get right back to that because that is actually a very interesting point and something that's fascinating. I've got two young kids and we always love to watch the science things from NASA and videos from NASA. They watch over and over again, that Mars landing. I don't know if people recognize and appreciate the engineering and the science that went into doing something like that. There is a physical limitation of how fast we can send a signal between Earth and Mars. There's the speed of light and you can only send the signal so fast.

If we were trying to remotely control that lander, but the time we sent, got the first signal back to the lander, it would've crashed into the planet. So to maneuver and land a probe like that, you have to do it automatically. Or it has to be AI-driven, it has to be a more computer-driven system. What's fascinating about that is that it was using multiple, different sensors. I don't know the exact number. But if you think about it, it has to be calculated from the moment of entry into the planet, its speed, its velocity, its position.

The Best Thing About What AI Is

Willie: It had to have cameras to see where it was going to land. This is the best thing too. Automatically, it could correct for itself in flight. It knew where it reached the point where it needed to deploy its heat shield, release it. Then, it lowers itself. It continues down until it gets to a point where it can start scanning the landscape. This is where AI really starts to come in because it has a map of where it wants to land, where humans want it to land. It can then start looking for, based on criteria, the best place for me to set it down.

Mark: Would you consider what pilots, 25 years ago, were using autopilot to land a very rudimentary or an early-stage artificial intelligence?

Willie: I don't even know if I would put it in the same vein as what the AI is doing today. In the early '80s, I used to have Simon, this little robot that you could program. It was cool. You could talk to it, you could program it. It would walk around, bring you a little drink or something. You couldn't call that AI, you programmed it to do something, but it was equivalent.

Carolyn: So back to NASA, how much of the industry is part of that AI engine that's making all of this work?

Willie: There is a lot of industry. First of all, I will say JPL. This is truly a partnership.

What AI Is in Places Like the Defense Research Agency

Willie: What I've learned over the years, especially working with NASA, places like JPL, working with the Navy, a lot of this technology that we're utilizing today, it starts as military projects a lot of times, or NASA driven. These are massive programs to get off the ground, to research, takes a lot of money. In the early days when the industry didn't truly see a revenue stream out of that or a benefit, they're not investing that kind of money. But the government is going to invest in that, especially if it's around national security and other topics.

So you'll see early on, AI being invested in by places like DARPA, the defense research agency. You'll see this in places like NASA and JPL. People also probably don't realize AI is not something that's new. People think about AI and they think about it in the last 10 years, five years, just because of how technology moves today. Things happen so quickly. Those advances, people are like, "AI's only probably been around five or 10 years." No.

Honestly, the rudimentary thoughts around AI go back to the 1800s, or 1830s. It was only probably until the 1950s that some practical applications could start being conceived. But having the technology to conceive some of these more practical applications, only in the last few years do we have the capability to really exploit AI. This has been a topic that's been around for a long time. Now the question around industry is that this gets started and gets funded and researched by education, by higher education, by some private sector, a lot by DARPA and JPL, and some of these government institutes.

When AI Starts to Become Practical

Willie: Then what will happen is, like you see today, AI starts to become really practical. There starts to be a lot of applications where it could help cut costs in business. It could help save resources, X, Y, and Z, a lot of practical applications. Then industry gets involved, and they really start funding and putting money into research and into development. Now we've taken that catalyst, that's been started often by the government. And now the industry is taking over and really taking it to the next level.

Then the interaction begins because now industry and government can really partner together. Government can help with a lot of the heavy research, and what they've done already. Industry can take what they've done and made practical applications. The industry's really good at taking and making practical applications, and making systems that can do very specific tasks. Those tasks and applications are usually things that the government needs.

Carolyn: The industry, typically, we think that they can iterate a lot faster. Partially because industry's not iterating on a fighter jet. So a fighter jet, you're not going to do 50, to Tracy Bannon's point, our guest from Mitre a few weeks ago. There's a reason that you're not deploying code 50 times a day to a fighter jet. But in the industry, we're not working on those things, necessarily. Although, sometimes.

Willie: Granted, you're not deploying to a fighter jet 50 times a day. But what the industry is doing is that with every iteration, with every advancement, we're making this process better. We are making it more stable. We're making these iterations not just faster, but each iteration becomes a little bit shorter, but also less error-prone.

Adversaries Constantly Attacking From Cyberspace

Willie: So over time, you will start to be able to, even in the military, because you see this today with sulfur factories and so forth. They're starting to embrace some of these ideas around agile development around being able to deploy faster. It's in our best interest. It becomes a national security consideration then because we have adversaries that are constantly attacking us from cyberspace. Constantly attacking us, not just from a military standpoint, but from our national infrastructure. And these aren't just state actors all the time. These are proxies that may be working for state actors.

So we have to be able to move as fast as a lot of those actors as well. Over time, you might not be deploying to, and you have no need to deploy to a fighter that many times. But I've heard of cases where you do have newer, more modern technology, even in fighters. You hear about containerization and having modular code. There are some subsystems that I would imagine have that type of capability. So they can quickly deploy and upgrade a system if they need to based on the threat.

Mark: You mentioned something in your answer right there that made me think of this. It made me think of machine learning. How do you delineate what people consider machine learning and artificial intelligence?

Willie: People will equate AI and ML. The short answer is they're not the same thing at all. Anybody who thinks that AI and ML aren't the same thing, that's a common misconception.

Carolyn: I thought that's how AI did its thing, through machine learning. Like it was another term to say it's what it was doing.

Machine Learning as a Sub-discipline of AI

Willie: Think of ML as a sub-discipline of AI. It's just one way you can do AI, as you might say. But ML is just a sub-discipline. It is not artificial intelligence itself. Think of AI as just much more of a general term or concept. That definition I gave earlier, it's just more generic high-level general term that talks about machines performing complex tasks. ML, machine learning is an aspect or a sub-discipline of AI. That's how you can conduct, machine learning is one way you can get to AI, as it were.

So that's really the difference, and if you think about it, there is machine learning. Generally with machine learning, you use different types of algorithms, different types of methods in different circumstances. Machine learning is good at certain types of tasks. It might not be so good at tasks that need to be, let's say tasks that are on data sets that are constantly changing. That are changing really fast, really rapidly, and you need to be able to respond to quickly.

Machine learning takes time. You know it takes a lot more time to learn the system, to learn the data sets. To also start to feed back good answers, good data from those data sets. Sometimes it takes interactions from humans to help augment what the machine learning algorithms are doing. So machine learning might be good for some applications, maybe not so good for others.

Carolyn: Does machine learning eventually lead to AI or not necessarily?

Willie: Yes, it would lead to more of a task-based type of AI. It would lead to a type of artificial intelligence. It’s a technique for getting to a type of artificial intelligence.

Staying in the Vein of What AI Is

Carolyn: Let's get to our tech talk questions.

Mark: Willie, what do you think the next big leap in tech's going to be?

Willie: If we can stay in the vein of AI, I don't know when it's going to happen, but there’s one big leap that I'm waiting for that I'm looking towards. This is getting more nerdy, but I was just reading about this lately, quantum computing. I think that there is investment in that now. That is a very technical discussion, I don't understand half of it, but let's just put it this way. If we are able to really take advantage of just quantum computing, think about quantum computing as using the most fundamental parts of our universe.

Getting down past the atom, getting down to a very rudimentary part of the fabric of this universe. If you start looking at what are called quantum states, there is this idea that something can be in multiple positions. I could be in multiple places at one time. Sounds counterintuitive, but it can be in something called superposition.

And so what my understanding is, you can have this idea of superposition. Basically, until you observe it, it doesn't make a decision on what it's going to be until it's observed. You can use this and there's a lot of math and science behind it that I don't even pretend to understand. But you can use that to

Building a culture starts with communication and a willingness to change. Tracy Bannon Senior Principal / Software Architect & DevOps Strategic Advisor at MITRE and ambassador for the DevOps Institute talks with Carolyn and Mark about her recent event #StraightTalk4Gov hosted by the DevOps Institute. Listen as Tracy outlines ways to create a culture of comfortability in the government technology workspace.

Episode Table of Contents

• [01:11] A Straight Talk Featuring a Culture Built on Moxie
• [06:34] Acquisition in Government Is a Culture Built on Moxie
• [13:34] A Collaboration Between the Industry and the Government
• [20:17] A Common Theme in a Culture Built on Moxie
• [28:14] Sisyphus Moments

Episode Links and Resources - Culture Built on Moxie

• Straight Talk On Demand
• Skill Up Days
• Nicolas Chaillan Post
• Control Global Article

A Straight Talk Featuring a Culture Built on Moxie

Carolyn: Our guest today, Tracy, is a returning guest. She's senior principal, software architect, and DevOps strategic advisor at MITRE. Tracy Bannon is just an all-around badass. She’s an ambassador for the DevOps Institute. We had her a few weeks ago, we talked a little bit about a conference that was her brainchild. She facilitated it.

Straight Talk, that's what we want to talk about today. Which, by the way, the conference is still on demand. You can rewatch these sessions that we're about to talk about. Tell us how it went overall, and what was some feedback that you've been getting from attendees?

Tracy: Overall, it went very well. We didn't expect the spike in folks who registered for it. Even during special sessions, when folks saw the different sessions happening. We're getting real-time registrations happening and people joining. There's such a thirst for going beyond the technology. That's what this was all about, taking a step past the technology. Overall, it went very well.

The feedback that we're getting has been, I want more, can I meet with X, Y, Z, I want to talk to Brian directly. So, folks who have done the different sessions, where they want to talk to Don, they want to meet up. They want to keep going, which is exactly what we wanted to have happened. We wanted to start those organic connections with people.

Mark: What made Straight Talk for government different than other events that you've participated in?

A Shiny Quarter Organization with A Culture Built on Moxie

Tracy: Let me track it back to why I was so passionate to get this going in the first place. Every time I deal with a government sponsor, with the government client, they'll often say, I need to do some DevOps. I need to be like this group over here. It's almost always, exclusively, pointing at something in the commercial area that's a shiny quarter organization, I want to be like Netflix. Well, do you really need to be like Netflix? What's important about that? But there's also a focus on the technical pieces of it.

I can go and get an excellent Udemy course, I can go to Cloud Guru. And I can get really awesome technical advice on how to accomplish the building of the pipeline. But what's missing is the front matter, the architecture, the engineering, the people, the process, and culture. Because I always say, people, process, tech, culture. The underpinnings of this was to pivot away from the technical pieces. Start to build out of a community that is really focused on opening the doors with the government and with industry and with academia.

We've got to make sure that everybody is on a level set. What are the real problems, what are the challenges? How is it similar? How's the government similar to industry? How is it different? Because in understanding the differences and in opening the door up and letting industry know, letting academia know, they're going to help us solve those problems that much more. We're going to build this cohesive set of examples. Real examples, that have to do with the government, instead of, I want to be just like Netflix. I want to be like Carnival Cruise, I want to be like whoever.Trying To Change the Dialogue Around Culture Built on Moxie

Tracy: Fantastic stories that they have isolated but I'm not, necessarily, in the government space, deploying 50 times a day to a jet, for example. Because on the defense side, there's a lot of interesting things that have to happen before I can just hit that deploy button. So, that was really the kickoff moment for this or the catalyst. It’s trying to change the dialogue and really having talked to so many people in my network, talking to my sponsors, my clients on a day-to-day basis. It has just become so obvious, especially the last two years, that there's a need to bring real examples forward.

Mark: Listening to some of the discussions that were said, did you find that you were hearing pressure points that come up time and time again? I guess this goes to the culture aspect that you were wanting to address.

Tracy: What was interesting was, because it was a remote conference and that was intentional, a virtual conference. I would say, about 75% of the sessions were recorded within a couple of days ahead of time, to make sure that we didn't have too many glitches. There's a really excellent crew that the DevOps Institute had put together that was helping us. They were leading through these.

A young woman came to me outside all of these recordings and said, I'm not a technical person and I don't work at the government. She said the theme of culture is everywhere. This was somebody independent, totally outside this domain, not a techie, who heard that loud and clear, in talking to each one or in listening to each one of the sessions. Not everybody was there to talk about culture.

Acquisition in Government Is a Culture Built on Moxie

Tracy: We talked about leadership styles, we talked about acquisition, we did talk about tech. We talked about metrics, we talked about all kinds of different things but the common thread was muscle memory hurts. It's so strong and changing muscle memory takes a lot of effort. A lot of energy and a couple of change agents thrown in the mix to make that happen.

Mark:  Acquisition in government is a culture.

Tracy: It has its own. We actually did a training session, a 101 on acquisitions, so that people understood. So many small businesses or so many startups, they have fantastic, amazing ideas, they should be helping the government. They also need to understand that, the way allocations are happening, the money that we're spending on tech right now was approved two years ago. The money that's getting approved right now for the government, will be spent in two years.

People need to understand those kinds of crazy things that you never think about. You just go to think, I've got a really great idea, this is going to help the war fight or this is going to help the taxpayer, this is going to help the CDC. Well, yes. And we have to figure out how we make that happen credibly and quickly but within those budget cycles or change the policy. Or change how acquisitions happen. There's some good things happening in that way.

Carolyn: Changing acquisition processes?

Tracy: There's something called the adaptive acquisition pathway. It's created about two to three years ago, at least. It's all about changing it from being these waterfall approaches where you've got tens, maybe thousands of requirements, all set down.

How Can I Buy Features Instead of Systems to Have a Culture Built on Moxie?

Tracy: Forecasting what you need for three or four years, breaking it down so that you can do things in a more lower case agile, a more nimble fashion. So, how can I buy features instead of systems? How do I no longer buy a project but I buy a capability that inserts into my program? It is a different way of thinking, it really is.

Carolyn: Is it fair to say that, the acquisition processes, in general, really were developed 200 years ago? A lot of them don't serve us anymore. Some of them still good or am I simplifying it too much?

Tracy: It is so complex that I have folks that I turn to that keep me walking straight and narrow. I am not an acquisition specialist. It's like living in a house with your parents who are techies, so you just know the language. Or your parents are doctors, a nurse and you know the language. I'm around it, I'm associated to it. I've put together RFPs and responded to the acquisitions. The intentionality of it has always been to make sure that there's fairness.

That all of the acquisition, all of the scaffolding around it, comes down to mandating or legislating or policying. To force people to behave well, to force people to not collude, to force there to be equality. It's like many things that we do. We start out with a good idea that we should probably narrow this down and make it an even playing field. Then we have to add on to it because people come up with interesting and new ideas and ways to skirt things. There's some goodness there, there definitely is goodness there.

Getting People’s Attention

Tracy: Especially when we think about some of the laws that we should have and do have about foreign trade. I can't automatically allow a foreign country to provide technology to the federal government. That would not necessarily be in our best interest. Interesting article that came out today. It’s talking about an assessment that was done of our power grid and the number of foreign components, Chinese components and specific, that are part of our core power grid. Well, goodness, imagine it, our tech. What pieces of technology are coming from foreign folks?

Mark: That's great to get people's attention. It already has.

Carolyn: I love what you said, coming from industry, if you don't know government well, it's easy to have this knee-jerk reaction of, acquisitions process is just stupid. They don't deploy 50 deployments of code a day. You're like, there's a reason we don't deploy 50 deployments of new code to a fighter jet a day. That's the idea of bringing industry and government together so we can understand the different cultures. It's not all bad, what you just said, there's some goodness in there, let's keep the goodness.

Tracy: Absolutely. This is not a negative, government is bad, industry is bad, it's actually the opposite. The opportunities are endless for us to work together. Now, industry has been working with the government. This isn't as though it's brand new but the upstarts, the number of folks that are coming out of universities, the number of folks who are working in one field and have an amazing, bright idea, it's not all about the big firms. In some areas of government, not all of it, it's been the big players for a long time.

A Culture Built on Moxie Have Better Results

Tracy: The big players, whether they're big system integrators or whether they're some of the big defense contractors, they have entire departments that are specialists in acquisition law. They have entire departments that understand how to engage in protocols. That's a lot different.

So, if we can open the door, providing that aperture for smaller, private startups, academics, whoever, to get in the mix with this, we're going to have better results. Now, that also means that we have to really pay attention to security and cyber risk. Making sure that we're very laser focused on understanding lineage of software.

In one conversation that we had was about something called SBOM, software bill of materials. People are probably aware of some of the things that happened this spring, with there being bugs or back doors, to the SolarWinds. Well, I think about open-source and how beautiful and wonderful open-source can be. I also need to know who's contributing to that open-source.

Even though my best friend is living in a foreign country and what they intend to do with that piece of code provide goodness, we, as the United States, as a government, especially if we're talking about securing the sovereignty of a nation, have to double-check, why was that code change made? What's the lineage of that? So, there's a lot of goodness because we shouldn't be throwing out open-source, we should be embracing it. But with making sure that we're dotting our I's and crossing our T's, that's all.A Collaboration Between the Industry and the Government

Carolyn: You said, this collaboration between industry and government is not new. What did you do at Straight Talk that would be good to carry over? Or what lessons might other conferences take from Straight Talk, to facilitate this open collaboration even more?

Tracy: I'm hopeful that we're able to take forward the asynchronous conversations, whether it's a Slack channel, whether it's Mattermost. Being able to not send emails back and forth, not necessarily always have to pick up the phone. But be able to have that async community conversation, where we're tagging things and we're going back and forth. We're jumping in and weighing on each other's conversation. That has started and that's something that I would like to definitely see move forward.

Join in the conversation, it's transparent and open and that's a goodness for all of us. The second part will be listening to the different voices. I sought out voices that hadn't necessarily been heard but I knew their messages, I had heard their message but I hadn't heard it broadly yet. So, some of the content was from folks who had not yet been on quite as broad as stage but need to be. There's some advocacy that I'd like to see. The people who are putting together the different sessions, they're putting together these different conferences. They’re trying to shine the spotlight in a number of different places.

Mark: If you could summarize two takeaways from the event, what would you say?

Carolyn: A couple of things that jump out.

Mark: Or 10.

It’s Not About Having a Culture Built on Moxie

Tracy: We've said the word culture, we've sprinkled the word culture. One of the things that needs to jump out is, it's not about culture change. Because if you say to me, Bannon, Trace, you need to change your culture. First thing I do is, my head starts to bob and I get a little bit of an attitude. Like, excuse me, I need to change my culture. But if you say to me, Trace, let's get together and let's figure out how we, together, need to move forward.

What we're talking about is culture building and it's a joint thing that we're brought into. That's probably one of the biggest takeaways of all of this. It's not about changing culture, it's about building a world together. It is about building a professional culture together. That is the number one thing that came out of all of this. The second thing is, it's okay to debunk myths, urban legends, tech legends, DevOps legends. It's okay to look at those things and say, maybe not.

What I'm bringing up there is a friend of mine, Brian Finster. He was working with a global retail corporation. Then he's looking for a bigger challenge, something even more complex and has started to work with the Air Force. He and I have a gnash and talk, at least once a week, about things that need to change. Where he's really landed on is the weaponizing of metrics, the weaponizing of how you measure. People talk about DevOps. They're like, I need your burn down, I need to know your velocity. Are those really the right metrics, are those really the things that we need to be focused on?

Applying the DORA Metrics

Tracy: They'll look at some of the wonderful industry published publications, like the Phoenix Project, Accelerate. They will look at the door of publications and they'll say, we need to apply the DORA metrics. What Brian took away or should I say, what Brian brought to the table was that, we need to question this. So, the second big takeaway is, don't be afraid to question because it's good to question. It's good to have that diversity in the conversation, diverse thoughts to get a better answer.

Mark: Speaking of the Air Force, one of the sessions that you had at your event was by major Austen Bryan, from Platform One. The subject of the session was, it's not about the tools. Can you explain a little bit more about what that was all about?

Tracy: Austen is the chief operating officer and he's been there since the beginning of it. Now, they have over 250 people, acquisition and engineering teams, all responsible for delivering Platform One and the services that they're providing. In his role, he's delivering to all four military branches, so Platform One is Air Force but it's Air Force at the end.

Manpower and People Power in a Culture Built on Moxie

Tracy: He was really passionate and he was one of the first people who said, I really want to be a part of Straight Talk. He want to talk about manpower or people power, whatever we'd like to call it, whatever is appropriate there. Hiring not being the biggest problem but how do we retain? How do we retain talent, if there's not a career path? In the Air Force, you may rotate. I may have six months working on something that I love and it's amazing. This is where I want to go with my career, from a technology perspective and then, I'm rotated because that's what happens.

He was really passionate about talking about career paths, to help with the retention, developing, moving people from being entry-level developers. Helping them with a career path that gets us to those mid-level and senior-level architects and engineers because the demand is high. The experienced higher numbers are not as high as what we want them to be. Second thing that he talked about was acquisitions, he was all over acquisitions.

Now, we didn't talk about the colors of money because that would be really huge but modular contracting mechanisms. Doing active market research to understand different approaches to acquisition and being more dynamic about it, not having a four year run-up to it. How do you get the smaller tranches, smaller acquisitions, and multiple smaller acquisitions? The third thing just blew me away. This really lines up with some of the things that we've been seeing. LinkedIn posts, the chief software officer, has put in his resignation.

A Common Theme in a Culture Built on Moxie

Tracy: What’s really a common theme across what Austen was talking about as his third point and on Nick's resignation is, leadership style. What changes when you're building software? Command and control type leadership is absolutely core. It’s central to the military but a lot of times when we're building the software, it's not the same life or death situation. It will be used by warfighters in a life or death situation. However, that's not the same style that you need to use as a leader, it's much more flattened.

There's a lot more autonomy given for decisions, decisions to be made at a more junior...

Mary Hagy went from serving in the U.S. Army, to showing our future generations that the sky is not the limit. Carolyn is joined by guest host Eric Monterastelli to learn about Moon Mark's mission and have imagination personified in Mary Hagy.

Episode Table of Contents

• [00:45] I Want to Be Mary Hagy
• [08:37] Where Humans Have Never Been
• [17:55] One of the Things Mary Hagy Is Proudest Of
• [28:11] The Leap That Mary Hagy Hopes For

Episode Links and Resources

• Moon Mark Space
• Racing On the Moon
• LinkedIn

I Want to Be Mary Hagy

Carolyn: I have Eric Monterastelli as my co-host. Thanks for being here. You actually introduced me to today's guest, Mary Hagy. I listened to your podcast. You interviewed her on Break/Fix. Honestly, I'm telling you right now, I want to be Mary Hagy. She's cool. Like she has one of the coolest jobs ever.

Mary Hagy is a veteran of the U.S. Army. She is a creative entrepreneur, storyteller, and civic enthusiast. She conceives, capitalizes, and executes profitable projects that have inspirational, entertainment, and educational impact across broad audiences. Her current project is Moon Mark.

What we're here to talk about today will capture global audiences. With the stories of six teams of high school explorers who compete to become the final two that will design, build, land, and race to autonomous vehicles on the moon. Let me just repeat that.

She's got a project that has six teams of high school kids who are going to compete. To become two teams of finalists that will design, build, land, and race two autonomous vehicles on the moon. They'll communicate peer-to-peer with young people who will become explorers in space and on earth. And open a talent pipeline for the workforce of the future. Welcome, Mary Hagy, CEO of Moon Mark.

Mary: Thanks so much, Carolyn. I really appreciate that introduction.

Carolyn: Let's start with, what is Moon Mark? Can you give us an overview?

Mary: What you just described is very much a capsulation, if that's a word of what we're doing. When you think about Moon Mark, the idea really came from the notion that humans right now are on the precipice of commercialization of space.

The DNA of Moon Mark

Mary: Yes, governments will be involved. They have been involved for 60 years. But also, the way that the opportunity for really getting to whether it's the moon or an asteroid or Mars or Pluto or whatever, we're on that precipice. It's the commercial industries that are going to get us there.

We came up with Moon Mark and the DNA of Moon Mark remains that of the high school kids that happen to be that age. Human beings that happen to be that age, wherever they are on the face of the earth, they’re going to accept stewardship of space exploration.

There are aspects to space exploration that are, I'm going to call them mistakes and paradigms. The space industry has really been all about the agencies of countries. Whether it's NASA, the Canadian Space Industry, the European Space Industry, whatever agency it is.

What has occurred is that young people, there's no real access for them to be able to understand that they can be a part of this. Until now, it's been very much about, "If you want to go to space, you have to be an astronaut. And if you have to be an astronaut, you have to go through this excruciating process with very high attrition and likely you won't make it," and all of that stuff. That's just not true anymore, that's the good news. It's not true.

With Moon Mark, at our DNA level, we are creating experiences and opportunities for young people. For them to understand that the game has changed, that they can have access to space exploration. It doesn't have to be one astronaut out of 30,000 applicants.Exploration in General

Mary: There are all kinds of ways to reach their potential if they're interested in space exploration, or exploration in general. That's kind of what we're really all about. It's about accessibility, it's about opportunity, it's about exploration. It is about a little bit of competition.

Carolyn: I used to teach middle school. I taught 13 year olds and that age and the high school age, they still believe that anything is possible. They still have that sense of wonder and awe for the most part on a daily basis. What you're doing right now is fostering that. I love that you're doing this for these kids.

Mary: I really appreciate that, Carolyn. Moon Mark has been quite a story in the making itself. We've had a lot of spirited discussions, mostly with people in the space industry. Mary, why are you targeting high school students?

How do you think they're going to be able to do what's really needed to put vehicles on the moon? Race them from afar and all of the other stuff that's about Moon Mark. The reason why we decided that the high school age demographic was the right one for us is because they do still have that sense of awe.

Carolyn: Tainted, jaded.

Mary: The high school kids will absolutely look at this and they'll turn their thinking caps on. Once a student reaches a certain age, she or he becomes skeptical, because that's what human beings do. What we want to do is offer opportunities for those that are right on the edge of being skeptical, but they're not. They still have the ability to dream big and achieve big.Mary Hagy and the Home on the Moon

Mary: That is the demographic that we know is the steward of commercialization of space. One of the things that I want to share with you this morning is a new program that we have called home on the moon. It's going to be a challenge for kids across the world, that age group, and also middle school. You know, we're all about that too. We're working with the Aldrin Family Foundation and their curriculum and their experiences and stuff like that.

Carolyn: Is it a US-based program only? Or is it worldwide?

Mary: It absolutely is global. Here are the reasons why. When we crafted Moon Mark, came up with the idea and started to really flush it out. One of the tenants, one of the values that we hold dearest is that no one owns the moon. Every human has experienced the moon in their own way, in their own life. We use the moon as a unifying element. A unifying force for people in all cultures, in all locations, because they can see the moon, it's their moon.

Carolyn: I got chills when you said that. It made me think of John Lennon's Imagine song, just where we stop trying to own stuff. You're right, no one owns the moon. I love that.

Mary: It really has given me a lot of inspiration when I think about how we have already. And we're going to reach young people across the world and to do it in a way that is meaningful for them. At the same time, it really challenges them and helps them understand what they can do personally to affect the future.Where Humans Have Never Been

Mary: Humans have never been to this place. We've never been at the place where we're really going to go and explore space. I don't mean in any way to detract from the achievements of the people that have gone to space before. It's a different ball game now, it's a completely different ball game.

If you think about what it must have been like when the silk road was created years and years ago. Those people were doing trading and they were exploring new lands and all of that. That was a real moment in time. Right now, the responsibility that we have at Moon Mark is to make sure that young people understand how they can not only access the ability to explore space.

But also most importantly, the responsibility of making the right kinds of decisions. We don't need to go out there and create wars in space, we got enough of them here. We’ve demonstrated pretty strongly how humans can be drawn to those types of situations where it's mine, not yours. Let me fight you for it or your beliefs are different from mine and all of that.

What we really want to do, and are doing, is integrating the message of responsibility into the experience that we're creating. You don't get to race on the moon, unless you really have demonstrated through a series of structured experiences and things like that, that you understand the responsibilities and the potential consequences of what you do.

Eric: Let's circle back and talk about how we got to this point. If anybody dives into your background, obviously the claimed Philadelphia businesswoman, military veteran, you've worked with veterans in the past.

Mary Hagy Has a Compulsion

Eric: Journalism, broadcast, television, all these fun things that we even covered on the episode that we did together. I remember specifically, there's a story. There is a turning point. There's a threshold that you crossed that got you to space, and it wasn't watching reruns of Star Trek. So how do you go from the army and the IT world, and the business world to Moon Mark?

Mary: There are certain people in the world, and I'm one of them, that has a compulsion. For me, it's a joyous one. That is that I really love being in the startup space. I love creating ideas, ideation, rumination, creation, and execution. A couple of years ago I didn't have anything to do on a Saturday afternoon. So I went to a high school robotics competition.

I had gone there because number one, I wanted to enjoy the experience. Number two, I really wanted to see the kids in action. So I went there. One of my favorite moments was when the folks gave me a group of kids, a team that was competing that day. We were talking and one of them said to me, "Why are you doing this? Why are you doing that? Mary, do you want to see the pit?"

I was like, "Oh yeah, I want to see the pit." And so they took me to the pit, as there is in racing. There's the pit where the team is working on the car. It was really incredible to me. We of course went there and they explained to me everything that they were doing. How they had built this robot over a six-week period.

The First Competition That Was So Influential to Mary Hagy

Mary: Now they were at the first competition. How they were going to win it. That was just so influential for me. When I left that day with a very happy heart, I thought, "Whatever I do next, I need to work with young people again." It’s what I had done in the past, but then I've done a couple of other things in the meantime.

I said, "Yes, it's important to me that I work with this group of kids, this age demographic. They haven't become skeptical yet," as we were saying earlier. That's how it actually started. I didn't have any idea what I was going to do to make that happen. But when that happens for me, when I have an experience like that, it means that I must listen. I must listen to what I'm supposed to hear.

Sometimes that's easy, sometimes that's hard, because sometimes you just want to put the puzzle piece together. And say, "Oh, well, that clip, that never happens for me." I started listening. That's how I was drawn into the notion of space, which I've not been a part of my professional life. I started learning about it and understanding where we are as a human species. Saying, "Okay, there's something here." So that's how it started.

Eric: This is actually a really important point that she's getting to hear. This goes back to the episode that you and I did together. That has to do with all this telemetry, all this data, the crossover, and the intersection between let's say the racing world. And even this, the space world with technology.

Mary Hagy and Her Team

Eric: Mary Hagy and her team and the kids can't do what they do without being invested in different facets of technology. That technology stands not just sitting behind a keyboard and programming out what these robots and these race cars are going to do. It's engineering, it's science, it's mathematics, it's thermodynamics.

It is the aerodynamics, it's all these things that we talked about before. It's amazing how STEM extends itself and how many different programs, applications, and pieces of technology you need to make this all work. I can see Mary bringing her vast experience in that world to the table as well. It makes the transition a little bit easier.

Carolyn: We're in a place in human history where all of this is converging. You're bringing in the technology piece of it. I'm thinking about how you refer to me as the meat behind the wheel. I'm thinking about you, the meat here, your brain bringing all this telemetry in. These ideas and coming up with Moon Mark, the technology piece. But then, the brain piece, that's the ultimate piece of technology.

Mary: I do want to call out what you and Eric just said, which is, you don't get to the moon. You sure don't get to race. And you sure don't get to leave a scientific experiment there that's going to last the next 30 years. You don't do that without the skill set of STEAM.

We have had some interesting conversations with folks about, "No, it's STEM." No, it's STEAM. It’s the arts. The arts are, for example, we were working with Frank Stefansson in London, who is a world renowned auto designer. He cannot create a Ferrari or a Maserati, or a McLaren.

A Very Compelling Experience

Mary: He can't do any of that if he doesn't understand the other aspects, or be able to call upon science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In bringing together what we know to be a very compelling experience and opportunity for young people. It's very much also about what skills are you drawn to?

What skills do you need to learn or want to learn? How do they affect your future? And how does your future affect the future of humankind? It very much is an amalgam. We happen to be at some place where we've got an acronym.

Carolyn: I like your acronym the best, I like STEAM. I've never heard that the A is so important. The creative part, the art part, you're right. It can't happen without that piece.

Eric: But A is silent, it's like French. You hit on something really important. In projects like this, technology is a more broad term, it's not just IT. There is technology in mechanics. There's the technology of electronics, there's technology for different things.

When you look at this, as people are building these machines to go on the moon, how much do you think old technology is being rediscovered? How much of it is future-proofing, things that we want to last the next 30 years. An example I'll bring up, ancient technology.

Sometimes people forget, like how are we going to move water from this lower level to the upper level? There's something known as Archimedes' screw. We don't want to reinvent the wheel, but we want to take that type of old technology and modernize it. So how does that work in this arena when you're talking about vehicles on the moon?

One of the Things Mary Hagy Is Proudest Of

Mary:  One of the things that we are really proudest of, and for me has been such a joyous part of the journey is that we have existing technology. It possibly can work on the moon, or it possibly cannot work on the moon.

An example of that is the requirement for data transmission. We watched the astronauts walk on the moon. We've seen videos of the rovers that are up there. We're very much about capturing the journeys of these young people. Obviously, a critical part of the journey is the race on the moon.

What we did not expect is that the technology does not exist for anything to be able to be captured and brought back in a form that people would watch. It's very useful to have the data streams right now for scientific purposes.

It's very useful and very effective for us to understand that we can't really capture and bring back what we need. Or we couldn't be like, wait a minute. Number one, this is something we need to solve that we didn't expect. Number two, equally important if not more important, is solving for that acceleration in technologies.

That may not have occurred if we had not been here and said, "We need this." It will enable future explorers to have more capability in a more timely fashion than exists now. Like you're saying, Eric, when you were talking, I was thinking about cranes.

You were talking about water distribution, but the same thing, who came up with cranes? I've watched this wonderful documentary about cranes and it was fascinating. Humans continue to develop capabilities that hopefully affect positively the larger scale of life and potential.

You Can Go Race on the Moon

Mary: That's one of the things that we are charging our young people to do. You get to go race on the moon, but there are all of these other things that are involved. Here's your backpack of responsibility. You're not going to get there unless you fill that backpack. And you put those pieces out when they need to be put out.

Carolyn: Has the program started? Let's talk a little bit about logistics, how participants are chosen and teams are narrowed down. What's the timeline of the whole program?

Mary: We're talking in September of 2021. The goal that we had been marching towards relentlessly was to launch a rocket and a lander, and land and race in October of 2021. There's a couple of things that have happened. This is just a moment in time when there's a confluence of stuff going on. That confluence, it is COVID for sure.

It's also a shift in the space industry. Talk about COVID for a moment, as we were talking earlier about having young people participate and compete in Moon Mark. There's a requirement that when we get to the six teams, they have to be in the same place. They got to be competing. That's not possible right now.

Carolyn: Physically in the same space.

Mary: Yes. So we will have a lot of teams that are competing virtually. But then, when we get to the six teams that have to compete, they have to be together. COVID over the last year and a half has just barked our shins on every front. If we were doing it in the United States, it would be difficult enough.

The Requirement of Global Participation

Mary: What parents want to send their kids in the middle of a pandemic to Houston Johnson Space Center? Not many. That would be hard enough. Having the requirement of global participation has really been a challenge for us. So that is one impact of COVID, and it's been meaningful.

It has required us to come up with virtual challenges that will enable us to continue to interact with kids all over the world. At the same time, keep them safe. To me, job one is to keep them safe. That's one impact of COVID. Another impact of COVID, which you probably have heard about, but bears mentioning here is that COVID affected the global supply chain.

What happened is that with this impact in the global supply chain, if you need a microchip or you need this particular kind of part for a lander, or you need this kind of rocket, the global supply chain has just slowed everything to a snail's pace....

On this crossover episode Carolyn and Mark learn about the power of racing. Eric Monterastelli, Public Sector SE at Dynatrace and host of Break/Fix: The Gran Touring Motorsports Podcast, joins the Tech Transforms team to talk about where the rubber meets the road in government technology.

Episode Table of Contents

• [00:51] Across the Side of Racing
• [06:59] All Racing Cars Have Self-Correcting Computers
• [14:16] From the Performance Racing Side
• [20:09] The Rule of Three in Racing
• [27:00] International Racing of Champions
• [33:01] Unlimited Funds To Fill a Racing Car Garage

Episode Links and Resources

• Break/Fix the Gran Touring Motorsports Podcast
• Eric Monterastelli LinkedIn

Across the Side of Racing

Mark: We have invited our friend, Eric Monterastelli to join us on a crossover episode for this morning's Tech Transforms.

Carolyn: His podcast is Break Fix. Thanks for being here, Eric, and we're super excited to talk to you today.

Eric: That's right, folks. It's not uncommon to see IT branding plastered across the side of race cars in many motor sports disciplines. Names like AWS, CrowdStrike, and SailPoint immediately come to mind. But for application performance monitoring and artificial intelligence, the relationship between technology and racing goes far beyond stickers and sponsorship dollars.

As Carolyn pointed out, this is a crossover episode between Break Fix and Tech Transforms. I'd like to personally thank Mark and Carolyn for having us on their show to explore this idea.

Carolyn: It's a little bit geeked out for me, so let's just get really basic. Talk about cars and racing first. Tell me how you got into cars and racing in general.

Eric: I'll keep it brief because I think that could be a whole episode into itself. Gran Touring Motorsports was founded in late 2013, officially 2014. Our mantra is to continue to spread motorsports enthusiasm. The idea is that people understand that there's multiple disciplines to racing. Racing is a big part of our world, whether you believe it or not.

The chemistry, the science, the technology, the engineering that trickles down into your daily car is incredible. It all stems from manufacturers using the racetrack as their test center. Think about it from that perspective. Here at GTM, we want to continue to spread that enthusiasm because if we don't, racing will dry up.Tied Into the Racing Community

Eric: That advancement in technology ceases to exist. We've been around now for almost eight years. We have our own podcast, Break Fix, we talk about all sorts of different things. Ranging from these super technical episodes, all the way up to advice episodes.

Like, what should I buy, and things of that nature. Personally, I got into cars by way of genetics. From my grandfather to my dad, and to me. Hopefully I get to pass it onto my daughters along the way. We've been tied into the racing community for a very long time.

I’ve been a high-performance driving instructor for almost a decade. Before autocrossing, I was a cart racer nationally. It's unfortunately in the blood. What I find most interesting about it is that there's a huge intersection between the automotive and the IT world.

I also followed in my father's footsteps, who was a mainframe programmer. I’ve had the IT side, and also the racing side. As a younger racer, I was involved in things like timing and scoring. I went to work for British Aerospace, where I tried desperately to get in on their helicopter division.

Because I was actually working on engine management systems at another company. So, data, technology, IT, racing, it's all very intertwined. As I grew more into ProAm racing, time trials, and other disciplines, I started to realize how valuable the data that we collect.

Not just from the cars, from the track, and from the motors and all this stuff related to what I was doing in the SIM and threat intelligence world and also in the APM and artificial intelligence space. There's this huge crossover there. I want to be able to explore that with you guys.

The Mechanics and Infrastructure of Cars

Mark: It seems to me that in the sixties and seventies, the things that teams would do to increase their edge was around mechanics and the infrastructure of cars. Over the last 20 years, there has been that shift to IT and leveraging technology to give racers an edge on the racetrack.

Eric: You're a hundred percent right. I'll use an example. Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus is infamously known for both pushing the boundary and cheating like crazy. What he did is, he found loopholes in the rules where he could take experimental technology and push the boundaries of racing and engineering.

So how do you control that? More rules get put into place to try to squelch that. You penalize people, these kinds of things, but really what he was doing is he was moving everything forward. Back then in the sixties and seventies, and even still partially in the eighties where you didn't have big data available, it was all trial and error. Let's use Formula 1, as an example.

You'll see cars back in the seventies with six wheels. You're like, "Why is that a good idea?" Because somebody needed to try. Chaparral was famous for mounting fans on the bottom of the cars to try to absorb them into the pavement. To create ground effects instead of doing studies and aerodynamics.

Mark: So the cars wouldn't fly off the racetrack.

Eric: Exactly. There's all this trickery and all this crazy stuff that they would do, but we've shifted away from that. We've shifted away to raw data to say, what is that tire doing in that corner, under load at this pound of pressure?

Bridging the Physical to the Digital

Eric: But if we change it by half a pound, what difference does it make? How much more G can we pull in that corner? We've gotten to the deeper layers of the science, and the engineering to make these cars go faster. That's why, if you look at a Formula 1 car of today versus 1960, it's completely different.

Mark: To bridge the physical to the digital, cars have sensors. These microchips are all embedded throughout the structure of the car to feed that data back.

Carolyn: Even on the tires?

Eric: Yes. So get this. Starting in the 1990s and the advent of something known as OBD1, so now we all run OBD2 or CAN buses. There's actually a port in the car that you can tie a laptop into, and pull all sorts of information from all over the vehicle. More and more manufacturers are putting that up on the heads up displays and on the dashboards these days, which is fantastic.

It's right there at your fingertips. But starting in the 90s, they needed a way to interface with the engine because they were putting in more sensors. Thanks to electronic and programmable fuel injection, engine management, it's also known as. So, there's a sensor for water. There's a sensor for oil. There is a sensor for pressure.

There's a sensor for the rotational speed of the motor at the crank and at the cam. It's very nit-noid information. And it's all to keep the engine running at maximum efficiency under multiple conditions. So just because you're tooling down the highway, that computer on board is making corrections in microseconds, if not faster.

Carolyn: It's correcting itself?

Eric: Yes, it is a self-correcting computer.

All Racing Cars Have Self-Correcting Computers

Mark: The electronics we have are just a much more simplified version of that, not corrective.

Eric: All cars, even your street cars have these self-healing self-correcting computers. The way it works is that a lot of it is for emissions. A lot of it is for efficiency, a lot of it is for power. For instance, in the old days, I'll draw a parallel to understand that a carburetor is very static. You jetted it a certain way, ran terribly when it was cold and the barometric pressure was wrong.

You had to reject it, and tweak it, and get under the hood to get it to purr just perfectly. Now with electronic fuel injection, it takes that into account. It takes into account atmospheric pressure, air temperature, elevation, all this kind of stuff. And it makes corrections based on where you are, where the pedal is at any given time.

Carolyn: Are we talking about AI?

Eric: We're talking about mechanical aid.

Carolyn: My car?

Eric: Yes. That's pretty cool.

Carolyn: In my mind, I'm drawing all these parallels to what you do for work with the government and how these race cars and cars in general work.

Eric: So telemetry used in a race car finds itself on the back of a Humvee. Finds itself in a tank, finds itself on an airplane. So, weapons systems, navigation systems, all that can be tied back in some ways to the automotive world, including GPS work. Because we do use GPS telemetry as well to calculate speed, and distance, and all sorts of additional telemetry when objects are in motion.

Carolyn: Does the government use the data gathered on the racetrack?

Engine Management

Eric: I'll put it this way. I've worked on some projects that were tied into engine management on tanks and Humvees. So it is possible. I don't know that I can expand too much further than that. But the data collected there is very similar to the data that's collected in your passenger car, as well as the race car.

Mark: I would imagine it's probably more finely tuned for aircraft than land vehicles.

Eric: In the airplane, yes. Because you have to take into consideration yaw and pitch and elevation and all the atmospheric conditions. But that's also true in other disciplines of motor sport. If I'm talking about off-roading the terrain, then the pitch and yaw of the vehicle is extremely important. When I'm looking at using sensors to show the articulation of my suspension.

How much suspension travel do I have, how much rotation per axle am I using? Do I need to transfer power from the front wheels to the rear wheels? You see those commercials all the time from Audi and Subaru about how it does all this stuff. A lot of that is computer-controlled. It's very much that mechanical AI, making those decisions based on the sensors, and the telemetry that it's collecting in real-time.

Mark: I imagine in the performance racing industry, when you're going at speeds at 200 miles per hour, or greater. Decisions need to be made and milliseconds, it ups the ante a lot greater.

Eric: That is very true. We're not at Mach two or whatever, like a fighter jet, but you're absolutely correct. In both cases, there's still that common denominator of, as we say in our world, the meat behind the steering wheel.

The Augmented Reality of AI in Racing Vehicles

Eric: There's still an organic computer making those minute by minute or second by second decisions. With the augmented reality of AI in the vehicle controlling those multitudes of different systems that are helping that person, that pilot, that driver be able to do what they do.

Carolyn: A lot of tech companies plaster their names on the sides of cars. I'm not going to lie, I thought it was a testosterone thing. But you said, there's this intersection between the racing and the tech world. Is it just an advertising ploy or is there more to it?

Eric: If you ever speak to any race engineers, or if you happen to go to say an IMSA where you can get really close to the pit boxes. Something like the Rolex 24 hours or the sale in six hours at Watkins Glen. If you can get your eyes inside the booth, you'll see that it looks like a command center.

You'd think you were at NASA, it's all screens. All data coming in real-time, over wireless into the booth race engineers are analyzing the data. They're also leveraging platforms like AWS and Azure to run their applications. They need to be able to get this stuff immediately. Because what they can do from those, let's say control booths, is also send corrections back to the car.

Some drivers, let's say Formula 1, if you've ever looked at the steering wheel, they have dials and knobs. They can make changes. They're talking back and forth with the pit constantly, "The car is doing this." And they're like, "All right, give it a little bit of tweak on this dial," and it'll make a change to the suspension as they're driving.

Other Disciplines of Racing

Eric: But there's also other disciplines of racing, especially endurance racing, where they're watching the cars for longer periods of time. They need to be able to manage them over the course of that race. They can send over the air changes to the vehicles.

Carolyn: Are they correlating the data like in this command center? Do they have a big seam that they're pulling everything in and cross tabbing and data analysis? Or do you have specialists like one's looking at the tires and one's looking at the key.

Eric: You actually have both. Then you also have on-track telemetry. You've got folks that are responsible for certain parts of the car, let's say the tires, they're responsible for fueling. You can get really deep on many different portions of that stack. Let's call it the racing stack there that goes on on race day.

On the other side of it, it's also the telemetry from the track. They're going to have people that are just watching the weather. Studying the weather and how the weather conditions and slight changes in temperature of the air are going to change the way the motor performs. Like losing upwards of let's say 20 horsepower, because there's one degree of weather change or rain is on its way.

We've got to make strategic decisions on what tires we're going to use. How long are we going to stay out? We just passed Le Mans a weekend or two ago. That track is famous for being rained on one side and completely dry on the other because a full lap is almost nine miles long.

Carolyn: The one in Ford versus Ferrari?

There’s a Lot to Take In

Eric: Absolutely. There is a lot to take in, there's a lot of data. There's a lot of different sources of authority that are providing data just like there would be in an IT ecosystem. You've got firewalls, routers, IPS's, and an active directory. You have storage systems that are providing you with tons of metrics. And you have to have a way to correlate all that together and make sense of it.

If there's a problem, and if you happen to listen to Le Mans two weekends ago. They could pinpoint an issue on the car before even the driver could tell it was about to happen. They're always talking back and forth. Like, "This is about to go down. You should bring the car in. We want to look at this particular thing. A sensor is telling us that there's an issue."

The same is true of IT. If you can forecast that, "We've got an IOP degradation here on this particular sand server. It's going to cause this ripple effect, we're going to have to V motion. We're going to have to do this. That's going to cause an outage, looking at real user monitoring. We're going to have an issue where we're going to have people that are down and are going to be stuck in limbo." The same is true on the racetrack.

There's this interesting intersection between two worlds. Where racing is this more mechanical application performance monitoring versus what we're used to on the IT side of the house. View a race car as an application, view the track as an ecosystem. Very similar to your data center or to your mission application, that you might be working on right now. From the Performance Racing Side

Mark: I'm interested to see how you can talk a little bit more about how you apply some of those disciplines. From the performance racing side to IT that we see or that we're talking to government customers about.

Eric: There's always the physical side of racing, the car, the machine, the boat, the airplane, whatever it might be. But there's also the driver's side. How do you determine a talented driver from another driver? There's also another subcomponent of data there.

Mark: Is that like the end-user?

Eric: Absolutely. Lewis Hamilton, eight-time world champion Formula 1 driver. He was good, he was naturally talented. If they left him where he was, maintaining the status quo, he would have only gotten so much better. So then there's the telemetry of the driver. It coincides with the telemetry of the car, but it has to do with their physical abilities.

It has to do with their risk mitigation, it has to do with how consistent they are on track. The key on track is consistent lap times being not a second apart, a second is a light-year. You need to be hundreds, if not tens of thousands of a second lap per lap. And you need to be that precise, racing is a precise sport.

That being said, there's other forms of telemetry that we use to better the drivers. To help teach them, help educate them, and get them away from the status quo. I relate that back to continuous monitoring, CIC pipeline. All these kinds of things where not only is my driver, the end user, but he's also my mission act. How do I make my mission act better? And how do I make it more efficient?Monitoring the Driver App

Carolyn: How are you monitoring the driver app? Is the driver hooked up to sensors?

Eric: Sometimes, yes. Actually, in the longer endurance races, they do have health and status monitors because they are in the car for long periods of time. In a race like Le Mans, there is a minimum of three drivers per team. Sometimes there's four, and they'll do double stints. They're out there for six hours or they're out there for three hours at a time. That's a lot to take in.

You have to think about health, hydration, nutrition, all that stuff. There's doctors on staff. Let's take that out of the equation. But also how do I make that guy be consistent for three hours in the middle of the night when he's only running on two hours of sleep? Obviously, I could probably inject him periodically.

Mark: Think of the endurance of doing an ironman. But when you're going 200 miles per hour, 220 down straight away, you have to be alert. So it does make a difference. I think about the endurance where you sit in a car for eight hours.

Eric: To go back to your question and to your point, there's one system. Even in my more grassroots world where I'm teaching folks that might be from the government. Or they might be from industry, or they might be from wherever that they got this bucket list.

Maybe they bought a Porsche, they retired or Corvette, and they want to go out and experience the track. Well, how do I make them better? I can teach them how to be safe, I can teach them how to be fast.

What’s in My Toolbox

Eric: But if I want them to be perfect and be consistent, I have to use data. It's in my toolbox of things. There's been a go-to product for a very long time known as the EM. It's an Italian product. They have a whole series, the EM Solo and the smarty system and the DMX's, and all these different pieces.

What it does is you attach it to the car, very simply. It's not something I have to tie in, and integrate like an octopus into the vehicle. I can throw it

The U.S. Government is leveraging technology to improve and accelerate the citizen experience. Listen as Carolyn and Mark learn more about the ecosystem of the mission from Troy Schneider, Editor-in-Chief of FCW and General manager of GCN.

Episode Table of Contents

• [01:35] The Oldest and Most Influential Publications United by the Mission
• [11:07] The Physicians and the Patients Are United by the Mission
• [18:43] The Industry and the Government Are United by the Mission
• [26:17] Not as Sexy as Machine Learning

Episode Links and Resources

• Soulfire
• IEEE
• Wired

The Oldest and Most Influential Publications United by the Mission

Carolyn: Today's guest is Troy Schneider, Editor-in-Chief at Federal Computer Week, FCW, and Government Computer News, GCN. Troy began his career in print journalism, and has written for a wide range of publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, and Political.

Troy, I would love to hear about your professional career. How did you become the Editor-in-Chief at FCW and GCN, two of the oldest and most influential publications in the public sector IT? You've had this long career. I'm really interested to know how you got into the government side of things, especially.

Troy: I started in what most people think of as more of the traditional Washington journalism, more of the politics, and the campaign, the lobbying side of things. I worked for National Journal almost straight out of college, and was there when it was a weekly print magazine, not much else, and just starting to tiptoe into the digital space. I’ve spent about a decade, a little more than that, with different parts of National Journal, which grew into Atlantic Media Company over the years.

I was lucky enough to be there at the creation of the digital business, moving to publishing and even online publishing before websites were the settled-on channel. Covered Congress, covered campaigns, all of that sort of work, and then made a pivot to a think tank. I’ve worked for A New America Foundation, which is now called New America, and went there to help them with their publishing efforts.

The Policy Side

Troy: I really liked the ideas and the policy side of things. It’s a very media-centric organization, where they knew they couldn't just be contributing op-ads to places, but really needed to have their own publishing channels. I did that for seven years or so, and got a call about a job with FCW, to come on as the number two editor. If everyone liked each other, to move into the senior role. It’s a little bit of a daunting transition to focus on the true government side.

My focus for the first part of my career had been about all the stuff that happens to figure out what goes into the budget. To figure out what goes into the laws, to figure out who's going to be elected to those positions. In that politic-centric view, "What happened after the bill was signed?" The agencies got it. That’s just implementation details. Then you dive in, you realize just how big that set of details is, and just how important the operations are. FCW at the time, they wanted to be less about computers, because IT is so much more than that now.

More about the policy, the business, and the leadership side. I’ve done a lot of work with emerging technology during my time at New America. We’ve crept a lot closer than we would have been when I was at National Journal. We would've seen each other in two completely different spaces, but there was enough overlap that it was interesting to both parties. I came in, in 2012, as the Executive Editor of STW. Stepped into the Editor role about a year and a half later, then took the similar role at GCN a couple of years after that. We've just been rolling ever since.

What Agencies Have Done to Be United by the Process

Carolyn: Early on, you had a government beat, but there was a transition for you.

Troy: There was. I knew the government, I knew Congress, I knew the budget process, I knew nothing about things like FedRAMP or FISMA. Or really what agencies have to do to effectively run, and execute their missions. I remember talking to a colleague who had worked in the sector before I took the job in central. This is exciting. There's a lot that I don't know. It's like learning a foreign language.

You walk around, you're scribbling down notes, and looking things up every day. Then six weeks or six months later, you wake up and you realize you're dreaming in Spanish. That was it. I would come out of every conversation I had with Ann Armstrong, at FCW, or every interview I did with someone, with a list of names and acronyms. I had to go dig into the FCW archives and figure out what they were talking about, but it didn't take long for that stuff to start to fit together.

At a certain level, journalists should be able to get smart on any beat. It helps to have some subject matter expertise, but mainly it helps to have curiosity and want to dig in. The federal IT space is just a fascinating community. It's easy to be engaged. The fact that it really is a community is something I didn't fully appreciate when I joined FCW, but is one of my favorite parts of the job now. The people in government, the people in industry, yes, everyone has their jobs.They Want to Work Together and Be United by the Mission

Troy: Everyone has their things they do, and don't want to talk about, but they really do want to work together. They’re generally united by that mission of making government work better. It's nice to be a part of that in a media capacity.

Carolyn: You said something that really hits home to me almost daily. Government is its own ecosystem. You talked about Congress, and that layer and knowing it. The agencies, and what they have to deal with, with the mandates, but then also developing and procuring the different technologies. This podcast is focused on how global technology is changing the way we live, and how critical government decisions are.

It affects the intersection of technology advancement and human needs. That said, you said something really interesting in your promotion of the 2021 GCN Innovation Awards. I'm going to quote you here. You said, "Public sector tech is far cooler than the government often gets credit for." First, I love that. Can you talk more about that?

Troy: There are certainly corners of government where the stereotype of bureaucracy has been earned. I've never met more people who work harder, and are more committed to their job, than I have in my conversations with people in government IT. I care about my job, and I think I worked very hard. But I feel like a slacker when I'm talking to almost any agency CIO. The people part of it is truly outstanding, but you look at the technology side of things.

Over the last 10 years especially, the government has been such a leader in thinking about how to digitize the workflows, and think about how to serve citizens differently.The Emerging Tech Side

Troy: Then obviously in the emerging tech side, and the things that I cited in that short article or intro, that you were quoting, you have DARPA, you have NASA. You have places that have the reputation for being the cool kids, doing amazing things. But you dig deeper and there's no one that's doing more with data than some of our government agencies. At the state and local level, what's happening with the internet, and smart city efforts is really leading edge.

Are there places where everyone's trying to catch up to the Googles and the Amazons? Absolutely. You can't have a conversation in government. Several years ago, it was the dominoes analogy of, "Why can't I do whatever in government, as easily as an order a pizza on my phone?" I feel Amazon, and any number of other companies have continued to advance the user experience even further. There are places where government's still working to catch up.

When you talk about doing new technology, and doing it at scale, there aren't many places that can match what the government's doing. You're seeing some agency beyond the traditional cool places, again, the NASAs, the DARPAs. You've found agencies doing a better job of leveraging that mission and that scale challenge. To bring a whole new type of talent, and a new type of worker into the government space, because you can work on things that you just couldn't do anywhere else.

Carolyn: Can you think of an example, specifically the cool stuff that agency has done?

Troy: Let's go to VA. Most of the stories you hear about VA are like, "Oh, scheduling problems, vets waiting on care over the years."

The Physicians and the Patients Are United by the Mission

Troy: The VA, even 30 years ago, was doing stuff that virtually no one else was doing on digital health records and focusing on long-term care. Making those systems really work, for both the physicians and the patients. The Vista system is being replaced now, as they move to Cerner. VA was a true innovator in developing a real user-centered design, and working all through the health system to both serve individuals. And to try and look at the bigger lessons of what's happening with public health, by looking at the data across their entire veteran caseload.

That's one. Another more recent would be what HHS was doing when the pandemic first got rolling with HHS Protect. Really trying to pull all the data, and bring it together at tremendous speed, so the policymakers could make decisions about understanding how the virus was progressing, and making sort of public health recommendations. Obviously, that's been a very politically charged conversation.

But if you strip away exactly what decisions were made, and look at what the HHS team did in 2020 to build out an amazing data lake, and high-end analysis, that was pulling things in from hospitals across the country in real-time. That's the type of project that you can't go to a private sector company and work on. The impact in the short term for helping us get a handle on the COVID crisis, and in the long term the lessons learned of what we can do with public health data, is just going to be tremendous.

Things That Go Hand in Hand Are United by the Mission

Mark: One of the things that go hand in hand with some of those efforts is security. The president put out the executive order in regard to cybersecurity. I was very curious to get your thoughts about that. Particularly zero trust, and what that means to you.

Troy: I should say that we could fill several books with what I don't know about zero trust. But it's been really interesting to watch that become the organizing principle for so many security conversations in government. I remember it was three or four years ago, at FCW. We were doing a round table with about a dozen CEOs and CTOs, talking about security challenges. One of them said, "I really wish we could get to zero trust. Google has been doing this. It'd be great."

The reaction in the room was, "That would be really cool. It would also be really cool if I had wings," was the sense. Now agencies are actively pushing toward it, but in terms of what zero trust is, it's an idea. I'll give you the layman's explanation. There's a longstanding idea in IT security, of least privilege access. If you're doing your stuff on your computer day to day, you don't want to have the permissions that lets you intentionally or accidentally delete all the files on your machine.

You should be logged in, in a way that lets you do what you absolutely need to do, and have to go in with admin privileges to do more. That's hard. It makes life complicated for users. One of the big cyber hygiene problems that the government and all organizations have had, was rampant use of admin privileges, where they really weren't necessary.

What Leads to Vulnerabilities

Troy: It leads to vulnerabilities like we saw in the OPM hack several years ago. Once people are able to get in and they can get privileges, they can move through the system and access everything.

Zero trust is this idea of, "I am going to give you only permission to access the data you need right now. When you need a new set of data, I'm going to reverify. It's a simple concept. But to do that across government systems, in a way that doesn't grind operations to a halt, because of all the frictions that are being put in, that's the hard part.

That's what agencies are wrestling with right now. Where they get into trouble, but they say, "oh, we're just going to implement zero trust in 2022." Well, it's not a thing you can implement. It’s a mindset and approach. It requires changes at virtually every level of the IT operations and how they're managed. I think it's good, but it's going to be a long slog.

Mark: It seemed about a decade or so ago, there was this analogous executive order that was put out on Insider Threat. It had a lot of specific details and requirements that were laid out as to how to go about that. In this executive order, there seems to be a certain level of vagueness to it. How do you see this manifesting itself as we move forward?

Troy: At this point, I'm willing to give the administration the benefit of the doubt on this. I had a conversation with a group of officials not too long ago. It included Chris DeRusha, the Federal CISO.

What We Have in Place to Be United by the Mission

Troy: One of the main assignments of the executive order was that agencies have to do their own assessment, and say, "This is our plan of working towards zero trust. This is what we have in place now. Here's how we think we're doing against those efforts." You're right, that's a very abstract set of marching orders.

Part of the goal, as I understand it, is for OMB to be able to take that information. To start to get a sense of what building blocks different agencies actually have in place. So they can then take that to bring both more specific guidance out for the agencies, and also to start to make the business case.

To say, "Okay, well, for agencies to get to this certain level that we think is important, we can now see that this amount of time or this amount is required." Part of this is to help establish the facts, and make the business case, for helping agencies move forward with their zero trust efforts. Because there is a recognition that it's going to be a long and somewhat expensive process.

Carolyn: Coming right up, are The Federal 100 Awards. I want you to speak more about it. As I understand them, these awards are all about industry and government innovations. What I'm hearing you say is the government says, "We want to get to where Google is with zero trust." But I've seen a lot of really forward-thinking, especially with the DOD, around zero trust.

The Industry and the Government Are United by the Mission

Carolyn: This coming together of industry and government is so important. I see that with the Fed 100 Awards. Will you talk more about those awards, how you decide who to name because there are so many. How do you decide who the innovators are every year?

Troy: We, at FCW, do not. It's one of the things that makes the Federal 100 Awards so special. They're coming up. The winners were announced early this year. We put off the actual gala until the end of August, hoping we'd be back to a good, safe space. We're now in a safe-ish space. With vaccination requirements for attendance, and masking, we're feeling pretty good about being able to celebrate in person here in a few days.

I'd encourage people to check out the list because it's an amazing list of people. It's all at fed100.com. The award program, what makes it real, is that it’s really community-driven. The nominations come in from across the community. We put the nomination out. It's not just a, "Hey, I like Mark, I like Carolyn," one line, if they did great stuff. It's fairly intensive.

Carolyn: Are you saying I'm not going to make the list?

Mark: That was an endorsement.

Troy: There are plenty of awards as listicles out there, not just in our space, in the world in general. The Federal 100 is not that, the best nominations, they come in. They have a whole slate of nominators from both the organizations of the individual there. Usually, customers or partners who were vouching for her or for him. They have pretty detailed essay questions/answers about explaining the job, explaining what they accomplished in the past calendar year.

Outstanding Individual Achievement

Troy: The criteria for Federal 100 is an outstanding individual achievement in the previous year. We really look for the specifics there. Then what FCW does is we assemble a panel of judges for this. It is often, but not always, previous Federal 100 winners. It’s always people who are both senior in the community and doing work to where they know about a lot more than their own silo.

They're working across agencies. They have ties in the industry. We have often had the Federal CIO be a judge. The CIO of the defense department, other major agencies. We worked very hard to build a panel that has expertise from across the government. There's always an acquisition pro, there's always a security expert. Our industry leaders' there as well. As you all know, from this community, a lot of the industry people have spent a portion of their careers in government as well.

They know both sides of that conversation. The judging process, they get a binder that's about a year thick, and spend a tremendous amount of their personal time going through that. Then we all convene. This year, unfortunately, it was in a Microsoft Teams meeting for seven hours on a Saturday. Normally we'll gather in a conference room, bring in food, and lock ourselves in there.

The group of seven to nine judges goes through each nomination, and reaches a consensus on who makes it and who doesn't. Some of them were easy and slam dunks. And some of them are easy to say, "No, nice person, but this is not a nice personal award there. That project's not far enough along yet."

Intensive Debates

Troy: Then there are really intensive debates about that 80/20 rule that applies to a lot of things. It's fascinating. I learned more on that day of deliberations than I do in any other three or four weeks of the year. I'm just amazed at how much our judges know about the individual people and the individual projects that are going on across the government.

There's almost never a case where there isn't at least one judge who has firsthand knowledge about either the person, or the project. Or at the very least, one of the nominators who's vouching for them can sort of do a quick fact check on it. We bring our reporters in to help take notes in this process. It helps us with writing the profiles when things are done. But I also do it because it's like a masterclass for the edit team, to just sit there and learn from these people. It's legit.

When I first came to FCW, we had a black-tie, what to recognize, who, and why. I was a little bit skeptical, until I went to the first one, and saw how seriously people took it. Then I went through the selection process. Again, where, Ann Armstrong, our Chief Content Officer, who helped create the Federal 100 Awards. She likes to say, "We have a voice, but not a vote in there." Same thing, I will...