Listen as industry leaders share their insights and strategies for increasing the accessibility and functionality of the digital government.
Speaker 1: On behalf of FedInsider and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast focused around legacy modernization upgrade to citizen centric digital services. In the final panel in this series, Jane Norris, contributing editor for FedInsider sits down with panelists from Adobe Confluent, GitLab and HashiCorp to discuss the solutions available for modernizing IT systems.
Jane Norris: Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I'm Jane Norris, and I'll be moderating today's timely and interesting discussion about digital Citizen Services. Today, we focus on how state and local governments are moving to digital services to improve both their internal operations and data driven Citizen Services. And the most recent National Association of State CIOs or nascio survey, leaders in government identified their top 10 technology priorities for 2021. Cybersecurity was again number one as it has been for the last eight years. But close behind coming in number two is digital government or the framework for digital services. The covid 19 pandemic significantly affected it priorities for state and local communities, as they continue to manage their communication with citizens, including public health outreach, vaccinations, testing and scaling social services to meet unprecedented demand among other needs. Now today with our insightful and experienced guests, we'll discuss some of the capabilities that state and local governments are using to leverage digital services. It's a very important topic, and we have amazingly talented guests today to help break it all down. So let me introduce them so we can all get started. First joining us Will LaForest before will is the Chief Technology Officer at Confluent. Hi, Will.
Will LaForest: Hey, how's it going?
Jane Norris: Good. Thanks for joining us today. And then James Nyika. James is a senior solutions engineer at HashiCorp. Hi, James.
James Nykia: Hi, Jane. Thank you for having me here.
Jane Norris: It's a pleasure. Also here with us is Joel Krooswyk. Joel is the senior manager and Solutions Architect at GitLab. Welcome, Joel.
Joel Krooswyk: Hi, Jane. Thanks for having me on.
Jane Norris: It's a pleasure. And then Jonathan Schreiber. Finally. He's our principal product evangelist from Adobe. Hi, Jonathan. How are you doing today?
Jonathan Schreiber: Pretty good. Thank you so much for having us on. Excited for the panel.
Jane Norris: Yeah, excellent, great, great panel we have today, ladies and gentlemen, we have some great questions coming up about how state and local governments are managing their technology, and moving to systems that enable new capabilities. But first, I want to take a moment to introduce our talented guests to learn more about their backgrounds, and what they do with their companies. Let's go first a will the forest public sector CTO for Confluent will as a passive data technology enthusiast these focused on transforming government through the use of cutting edge technologies, like event streaming, no SQL databases, distributed computing and machine learning will have spent 25 years wrangling data at a massive scale. His technology career spans diverse areas from software engineering, relational and no SQL databases, data science, cloud computing, machine learning and statistical visualization. But he began with code slinging at DARPA as a teenager though that's quite a beginning I have to say, Will, please share some insights with us about your role of carousel?
Will LaForest: Kind of a wordy bio there? Sorry, everyone. Yeah, I'm not gonna lie. I love my job. The majority of the time, I sort of float around working on tough data challenges with amazing organizations and remarkable individuals across governments, both in staying local as well as federal, the rest of the time, I sort of spend navel gazing and thinking about long term trends that are important for government and our citizens, really to help at least our company drive product directions or directly building open source projects that address gaps or can be used by the government. So love the technology, and government missions are important to society. So it's, it's fun and fulfilling at the same time.
Jane Norris: Sounds great. Sounds good. Great job. James Nyika. Also very experienced and a senior solutions engineer with HashiCorp public sector division. James is a trained software engineer and architect working as a trusted adviser to senior leaders in the US federal government, and state and local agencies and other commercial clients is built and supported large and small software systems and architectures for over 22 years in the US, Central Europe, Japan and Africa. He's been a senior business leader in the past and companies have used his technical expertise and focused on he had been focused on ensuring the delivery of value from business systems that are core to the enterprise. Hi, James, please tell us about your role with HashiCorp.
James Nykia: Sure, happy to I work in the civilian space of the federal government, I also sell to state and local groups, what makes this fascinating for me is I'm able to see not just, you know, the technical, the business challenges that they're coming across, but also, you know, talking a lot about the budget and financial situation that we find a lot of state and local governments in, and how that affects the ability to deliver digital services. Now, having said that, you know, I think of my job really, as looking at that journey through the cloud, and how these organizations can get there, I see my job really as two things, it's really to paint the picture of the shining city on the hill, but also help them in a sort of reveal the yellow brick road that leads to that final destination. And all the steps are to take the energy, the incentives, the benefits, and guide them through that journey side by side.
Jane Norris: We'll be talking much more about that, especially the journey to the cloud and what it takes to effectively get there. But let me introduce our other panelists. First, Joel Krooswyk joins us now senior manager and Solutions Architect at GitLab. Jones is a 25 year veteran of the software industry, whose fascination with software quality and automation have led him on many digital transformation journeys, focusing on end to end value streams. Joel is currently a leader in the public sector solutions architecture group at GitLab, and works with clients on dev sec ops toolchain. Modernization. Welcome, Joel, tell us about your role with GitLab.
Joel Krooswyk: Well, thank you again, yeah, I, I've had this lovely run, from the days where I was sitting, hacking at a computer everyday writing a lot of code to kind of going through all of the transformation over the years. And what I love about my current role is I landed here at GitLab. And there's so many things happening in the dev sec ops world that I get to be a part of every day. So you can only imagine all the conversations we get to get into across the software development lifecycle. It's been a whole lot of fun. And, as was stated earlier, I also love my job. I love what I get to do every day and the conversations I get to have across civilian security, intelligence, state, local and education markets here at GitLab.
Jane Norris: That's quite a portfolio. That, you know, in order to accomplish all that, you have to have so many varied areas of expertise. Joel, so we welcome you. And thank you for giving us a little insight into what you do. Jonathan Schreiber is also with us today. Jonathan is a senior manager and a technical product evangelist at Adobe. Actually, for document cloud, I think I should add that Jonathan has 10 plus years of experience in the digital documents space, utilizing various enterprise software solutions, with a specialty in E signatures and partner integrations. He holds a bachelor's from the University of Massachusetts, and a Master of Science and computer information systems from Boston University. Jonathan, tell us about your work.
Jonathan Schreiber: Yeah, absolutely. So in my current role as product evangelist, what I really do is similar, actually, to what Joel just stated, with regards to helping customers, both when it's governmental or otherwise, go through the digital transformation process, and really try to think about their whole use case. And not just individual products. And I know we'll talk about this a little bit later in the panel. But I really find joy in building complete solutions, and making sure that things work end to end, versus a lot of times things happen, scattered. So making sure that things are really seamless and getting used, so that we're making the most of our digital transformation and documents.
Jane Norris: Wonderful. All right, thank you, all of you, great backgrounds, interesting careers. And so let's delve into the topics that our audiences tuned into here. So as we begin the discussion of digital services for government, let's look at some of the areas of modernizations that states are moving into, I guess one of the biggest and the most foundational is the transition to cloud which is happening quickly in both private and public sector. So let's start there. Start with you, Joel. State and Local CIOs have told nascio that in their surveys, that they are prioritizing digital services in their organizations. So from your perspective, should state governments consider moving to cloud environments to enable digital services?
Joel Krooswyk: Oh, absolutely. I love hearing this as a top initiative. The cloud has to be in considering the availability of platforms in the cloud, it amazes me right everything from virtual machines and containers to Kubernetes. There's abstracted environments, you don't necessarily know where it's going almost feels nebulous, right? Server less computing all these fun things that help us simplify deployment in new ways. I personally don't know of a faster deployment capability than when I'm leveraging the cloud. So if you need to pivot quickly, and comply with a new unemployment mandate, like we saw in the last year, or roll out a new tax appeal process, or enable new BMV processes, that the cloud is going to speed that time to production, and really help us get there quicker. You know, one of those a thought on this is there's also the issue of scale and platform demand, when you're talking about the cloud, there's a real advantage there. And we saw this in the last year with the pandemic, systems were stressed like never before. And many of our existing systems simply stopped responding or crumbled under the demand of all these new users. And wasn't always our users that we expected, right? We had some nefarious characters in there trying to take advantage of the systems, that auto scaling technology in the cloud can really help us with things like compute on demand and save us some money, generate operational efficiencies, things that are really difficult for us to attain. So that really can help us out. One other thing with those technologies when we talk about Kubernetes, and it's such a difficult thing unto itself, the cloud simplifies that a little bit and gives us things like auto recovery, right, something starts to go down, it can spin up a new version of the application and keep us rolling. We're not in that world of downtime and trying to get systems back up. And with something like vaccinations, for instance, you know, just how critical is it for our application to stay up these days, it's pretty important. But I do want to wave one caution flag before we go on to I'm sure there's other inputs on this topic. And that is, if you have to look through the cloud, or look at the cloud through a slightly different lens, right, it simplifies it services and pure procurement dramatically. But it's not a simple lift and shift. In most circumstances, not everything belongs in the cloud necessarily. For best results, your applications may need to be refactored to take advantage of the cloud, you may if you don't refactor, actually find some poor performance or dramatic cost increases or runtime issues. So the benefits far outweigh the alternatives. But you do have to do the analysis, be smart about how you proceed to the cloud. And I feel like now's the time to do that consideration, especially with some federal stimulus funds in play, that might be a good thing to spend some time on, leading to new operational efficiency on the other side.
Jane Norris: Thanks, Joel. That's great information. And I'm sure our audience really appreciates hearing it. Will, we're going to take a little bit of a different side of the issue of the transition to cloud with you because your background is data. So I wanted to ask you, what are some of the benefits that organizations may be able to realize from cloud environments in things like real time data movement and elastic scalability?
Will LaForest: Yeah, I mean, I'd say one of the hardest aspects, honestly, building capabilities for citizens, or really any market is the data management side, you know, whenever data is involved, there are a host of considerations for security and privacy. But on top of that, stateful technologies presents additional challenges around high availability and scalability, things that are a lot easier to do with stateless systems. But when you start moving to stateful, technologies, much more complicated. And both of these have become sort of orders of magnitude more challenging as government moves into new scales, new types of data. So you know, I'm working, for instance, with a number of state and local governments on IoT projects, in transportation and in health areas. But the ramifications of success here is, you know, huge impact in terms of safety and health and quality of life for our citizens. But quantities and rates of the data are huge, and the management of it is non-trivial. So, being able to offload the operational complexity of this to manage offerings, really makes projects much more attainable for state and local governments that don't have massive IT organizations. And then, you know, add to this kinds of scale from computational perspective, that also brings a big cost benefits. And of course, you're sharing the costs of the infrastructure and operational across many customers. And then I guess naturally, the elasticity of the cloud creates cost optimization. Possibilities as well. So don't buy or consume infrastructure and software until you need it. The system for the flow of COVID data, which I think Joel was just alluding to, that from state and local to the CDC, for instance, flows through Confluent. And prior to the outbreak, you know, the infectious disease data collection was really kind of modest. So systems of this nature can have fairly dynamic data workloads that can peak seasonally, and just trying to manage it yourself on-prem is really, really hard. So at the end of the day, you know, my mantra typically is let governments focus on what they're really good at being experts on their mission, and what their citizens need, and not necessarily experts on powerful, but pretty complicated data infrastructure.
Jane Norris: Thanks. Will, I really appreciate that. I mean, data, I think, is a foundational element of the move to the cloud. So it's important for people to hear this. Let's talk now about something else that's foundational. And that's infrastructure. So James, with your background as an engineer, what do state and local governments need to consider when they're thinking about a transition to the cloud?
James Nykia: Yeah, that's a great question. Thank you for that, Jean. What I usually do is, I think of this question, really, by pulling back, and by impressing upon business leaders that going to the cloud isn't a goal in and of itself, it is really a response to a business challenge that they've been experiencing, you know, we feel that a lot of that is represented by what we call the new cloud operating model that's emerging, which is things like the boundary around the data center dissolving the fact that you would, you know, you're starting to see deployments in providers and cloud service areas that you don't control the network, you don't own the infrastructure, you don't own a lot of these things. But you know, more closely to the question, you know, the needs are many, and I think of them in really two categories. There are needs related to internal processes, and internal operations. Here are some things like needs for the development organization, those doing the DevOps stuff, putting together applications, legacy applications being migrated being reflected experimentation, they might be performing with artificial intelligence, machine learning, and any kind of data processing that they need to do internally, just to get their house in order. The second bucket really relates to that mission to meet the demand and the needs of that digital citizen, right. And so this is sort of the external bucket. Here, I'm thinking about the demand for engaging applications that is out there from the citizen, they want to be able to talk to their government to engage the government through digital applications. And, you know, the reality is that, for these organizations to meet this demand, in their own government owned data centers, with the existing infrastructure they have in place, that demand and its implications actually outstrip their expertise, in many cases, their budgets, and the ability to respond just because of the skills gap. And this is where organizations like ours, and fellow partners that are on this call, as well come together to solve some of these challenges. We don't have the answer on our own. But through, you know, a measured and considered approach, we're able to put our heads together and say, Okay, if this is your mission, if these are the business outcomes you're looking for, and you can clearly define those basically frame that question very well, from that, you'd be surprised how much the necessary infrastructure needs would tumble out of that, you know, almost for free, so that you understand, okay, these are the things that I need to put in place in order to get that going. And that's where we discover that the cloud offers a tremendous value proposition. And that's why we will take that transition.
Jane Norris: Right. So it's the interdependencies of other technologies that really can make the difference. Thank you for that. Appreciate that. James. It's great insight, Jonathan, with your background in in documents, managing and in the digital space. Give us your insights about how cloud impacts innovation and speed. A state and local governments move to cloud environments to improve digital services for citizens. Does it allow, for instance better omni-channel functionality and other kinds of things that they're going to look for?
Jonathan Schreiber: Yes, it's a great question. And going through the cloud definitely provides that level of flexibility and expansion. The thing that I typically am telling, especially the government and state and local customers, is to make sure that the tools that you're looking for that are cloud based, that they integrate and communicate with each other, because what's really important and often overlooked is, you know, things get siloed, even in the cloud, right? You have your data source over here, and you've moved to a cloud source to place your place and organize and use your data. And then you have a different source for your documents. And so what you really want to make sure that you're doing when you're planning out and scoping your solution to move to the cloud, is that these different cloud solutions, integrate and play nice together, so that you can seamlessly bring the data into the documents, move them out for collaboration, and signing, or processing and whatever that looks like. And then after you get the form completed, whether it's by an internal employee, or constituent that not only the document comes back in, but that you're able to in an automated fashion through these cloud tools, pull that data out, and use that data and store that data in a meaningful way. So absolutely, it expands your capabilities. But you want to make sure that you're taking all those things into consideration so that you get a full end to end journey for your process, and really make it easier in the day to day of your employees who are interacting with these tools.
Jane Norris: Right. Thank you very much, Jonathan. I appreciate that introduction to cloud environments from all of you. So let's look at some other innovative digital services that are being discussed that can help solve common challenges for state and local governments. Will many states you're considering moving forward with better online experiences for citizens according to the nascio survey, 98% of them say that it's a priority for their organization? So what does it mean for their data management strategies? And what should they be considering now? What kinds of capabilities would a more robust data strategy enable?
Will LaForest: I think first, it's, it's awesome that government is embracing the need for a better online experience. And it's something that I've heard when I'm working on the federal side as well, talking to CIOs and CTOs, I guess. We're all now consumers have great experiences online. And so we have the same expectations from our government systems to, I guess, the lesson that we've sort of learned in working with some of the newer consumer companies, I'm kind of one of the reasons or one of the things we focus on is there's not really enough to treat your data as something passive or sitting at rest, in creating in response to specific actions. You know, dynamic, fast citizen experiences need to approach data in motion. Digital experiences are made up of a constant stream of little events, right, that's never ending. So some are the direct results of the things that they're doing and the interfaces or your platforms, but many others are coming from related sources. Event streaming is kind of a new category of technology built to handle data in motion. Apache Kafka, which was created originally by our founders at Confluent is a primary example of that. But to make this more concrete, I kind of like to talk about something that most of us can relate to something like ride sharing platforms like Uber and Lyft. Almost all of the data for those systems flow really as a sequence of events that the digital experience is reacting to. So you know, every rider position or every driver position, traffic conditions, billing information, they're all events being handled sort of in real time. The effect is, you know that the estimated time of arrival, the cost of the ride the correct route to take safety measures, payments, they're all being adjusted as information comes in. So if we think about how you apply this approach to the state and local government, imagine what happens if we can immediately react to, for instance, specific cars going through toll booths, or a volume of traffic in a lane, or detection of biological properties and human waste in real time. That's my favorite one. These are all examples of things that for instance, I've been working on, but there's countless others out there. So I sort of think the bottom line is that in additional to the sort of traditional databases that we've all been using, and that I spent most of my career working on, we all know and love for retrospective query and analysis, I think it's important to consider how you can handle the data in motion, as well and react to the events sort of in the digital system.
Jane Norris: Interesting. I think that's something that every organization would really value having. So how we get there? That's the question. Jonathan, I want to ask you, what do citizens want from their interactions with government that they're not now receiving? And should CIOs be considering options like forms modernization and E signature or other capabilities?
Jonathan Schreiber: Yeah, absolutely. So when it comes to the citizen engagement, the citizens are unfortunately spoiled by what's available in the in the consumer and enterprise space. And they're looking for that level of ease of use, and engagement. When they go to agencies and government sites, things like for modernization, putting the forms online, instead of having paper copies, making things available to be done on a mobile device, is exactly the kind of experience they're looking to engage with, being able to, you know, have a chat bot style conversation to get to the right form, making sure our forms are easily legible and filled out with help and guidance along the way. These are things that they're looking for, and, and are being implemented across the board with what's really kind of amazing about the last year that we've seen in the space is because of the unfortunate circumstances COVID. And having to shut down a lot of the in person engagements that government agencies have had with a constituent, there's been a force to move to digital. And I think the number I've seen somewhere was something like eight years of progress in eight weeks, which was an amazing thing. But now we need to look at, you know, did we do it? Just do it? Or did we do it? Right? And so we want to make sure that that's done right, that we're giving that right experience. And now that we made things digital, we need to look at it and go okay, but is it the best experience that we can deliver digital? Are we on par with the experience they're getting in the private sector?
Jane Norris: And how we get there is the back end, right, the back end strategy that enable the front end that the consumer see and don't care about? Because all they want is the functionality?
Jonathan Schreiber: Absolutely.
Jane Norris: What has to happen on the back end, in order to make the front end elegant and easy to use? James, let's go to you with this one. State and Local clients are asking you about their operating environments, I'm sure as they transition away from maybe operating in data centers to other hybrid environments. How's that being handled?
James Nykia: Yeah, but they are asking a lot of questions, actually, many of them really being in, I would say roughly four major areas. Right. And again, I want to just keep in mind that the types of questions being asked and on who's being asked, we hear a very different set of questions from the practitioner, the actual operator, versus those who are in a leadership position, and are tasked with actually delivering those business outcomes. You know, with respect to the executives, really the business owner, the questions range from questions about visibility, right, want to be able to see what this is costing me. What is the operational status of all this infrastructure that I'm sort of standing up? And what is it relative to where I was before? Right, so I'm making that transition away? How do I know that I'm being successful as I do it? The second category is, of course, what you had mentioned right at the beginning, that cyber security question, How do I know that I'm not going to be in the news tomorrow? How do I ensure that all my secrets are stored in a, in a vault that is secure and is not going to be breached anytime soon? An interesting question, too, is one around flexibility, they're really concerned about locking into one particular cloud environment. So you know, they are they are moving away from their own data centers. And maybe the first step is to go to one single cloud service provider. But very soon, this question of that flexibility to run and operate in any particular cloud service provider becomes a really important one. And of course, all this has to be wrapped within the cloak of making sure that you're meeting statutes if you're, you know, a state or local government agency. And then finally, the one of the largest ones is really bad question of skill set. How do they get the most out of the existing stacks that they have, and the existing investments that they've made, but they are transitioning away? They are doing so slowly? They're taking it one step at a time and usually the first question on the table is one of consistently being able to stand up infrastructure. And they need many tools and many capabilities to be able to do that. Both human as well as system related capabilities there, so they're not I think they have a mind too. Move to a hybrid environment in the long run. But in the very short term, the initial steps on that journey really involve going to one cloud service provider, maybe two, evaluating that for the outcomes that they're receiving and then taking the necessary steps.
Jane Norris: Thanks, James. That's great information. And Joel, if you could share some information about app development, and how those capabilities can reduce and even eliminate the time it takes for an operations team to provide a full environment for software developers, that's yet another aspect of what needs to be done on the back end.
Joel Krooswyk: Oh, absolutely. And I couldn't agree with James more, right, some of the things he just said, really do tie well into that. But if we take a step back from that, it all comes, it starts with the value stream, right? If you think about a value stream is the end to end visibility from idea to production, do you want to maximize value to citizens, and you need to find a way to maximize the delivery of the valuable service. And the only way you're going to do that and understand the inefficiencies potentially in there is to have the right pieces in place. And so some of the trends that I see supporting that value stream concept are things like centralized data visibility for the developers and the stakeholders. Infrastructure is code sometimes you see called get Ops, the availability of the cloud and the technologies like Kubernetes. So if you think about the idea of code, being committed by a developer, you want to build it, test it, verify it for security, have the stakeholders be able to view it in one place, when we're talking about that level of back end development. It means the tooling has to be available to operate as a platform to bring everybody to one place and see what's happening there. Now, one of the things that I like lately that I'm seeing is the concept of using newer technologies like Kubernetes, especially tied to the cloud giving us that auto scaling infrastructure, just spin up our application before the code is ever formally committed. Right, we are doing a genuine shift left. And I know those terms are getting old. For so many of us, I'm looking for my new words. But the reality is, we are shifting a lot of things back behind that process of deployment. And so the more we can secure our code, the more we can get that code scale ready and verify the UX and verify all the pieces that make it work, the better off we're going to be. And if we take that and pair that with something like infrastructures code, and that may look like terraform, Ansible, saltstack, cloud interactive scripts, whatever that is in enables us to spin up the infrastructure on demand. Again, we're not waiting on servers, procurement, we're not running out of compute in legacy environments, we're simply spinning up what we need when we need it, and reviewing it as early as possible, then moving it into the production environments quickly and efficiently.
Jane Norris: These are all fascinating and groundbreaking new opportunities for states and local governments to consider. So I appreciate the information on that. And I want to move on to other areas of improvement that couldn't be realized by putting in this functionality and these new capabilities. Let's go to you Will, I'm going to ask about the use of analytics for decision making and reporting. The state and local agencies increasingly want to use their data for these purposes. How can they effectively do so?
Will LaForest: I think it's clear that organizations use state and local governments included are recognizing the importance of becoming more data driven. And this can be evidenced by the publishing of data strategies, the hiring of Chief Data officers. But I also think it's obviously really early days in this transition for government. There are great examples of specific projects that are focused on data and acting upon it for specific Citizen Services. For instance, I worked on a project with Fairfax County in Virginia, probably 15 years ago, to fuse lots of different data sources to make better use of property data for decision making. But most of these sorts of efforts have been done in isolation. So I think the trick is really to unlock all of the data that makes up the government process for decision making. And kind of the primary barrier here is that data is pretty independent silos, across countless databases in lots of different departments, many of them running on legacy technologies, like mainframes, and sometimes other parts of the same government not even knowing that they exist. So this actually provides yet another problem. Once we start shifting to the cloud, which is how do we even get the data they're locked away on prem, how do we get the data to the cloud? So we can do this reporting and these fancy analytics. The first thing is that, and I think Joel's said this earlier, it's not a one-time move, right? You can't just dump the data over. There are existing systems that feed those databases, and they're not going to, you know, you can't just point them to some new cloud database that everyone's going to unify upon. To unlock these silos, you kind of need to constantly publish the changes as they occur so that the existing systems can continue to operate while you migrate to the cloud. Or maybe you'll always have a hybrid environment, these streams of changes now can sort of simultaneously be discovered and exposed in a central platform. And this is an approach typically an industry called change, data capture, lots of technologies can assist in doing it, but one important aspect of it is to break the silos down. And it's something that again, I'm actively working with a number of customers that have really expensive on premise databases, they want to save some money as well get better capabilities. And it can be challenging to get into the cloud. So you can use more cost effective measurements, or even potentially do perform some real time analytics on the data as they're coming from on prem.
Jane Norris: Yep, definitely a challenge. But if that can be accomplished, just imagine all the new capabilities that would unlock so thanks, Will, for that. Jonathan, turning to another issue that state and local governments are concerned about the need to assess what citizens want, and what they really need. Should users citizens in this case, or any user be part of the development process? And how do you make that happen?
Jonathan Schreiber: another great question, I think that having citizen or user engagement along the way, is really important. Because otherwise you can get wrapped up in what you think is a process that works versus what's actually going to be used, how you make that happen, is really a question of what agency you're working with, and how often they're engaging, you know, so something that you're kind of one off working with, and I'm thinking like Social Security or Medicare offices where people are walking in and out, you'd have to develop a test group of citizen users to do the testing. But if there's agencies that have more of a constant flow, if you have the same people coming in, it's a little bit easier to do that sort of a b testing is actually really important. Aside from streamlining and having the users and thinking about the experience, from the user perspective, how easy and straightforward it is for everyone to have access, and get what they need to get done. Done. It's also really important that you're actually out there, you can do AV testing, see which one works better than the other. And, you know, really, the biggest hurdle in all of this is forms and documents. Because there's so many that are standardized, so many that we live with as fixed forms that we're going to have to print, fill out, scan, or walk into an office. So being able to convert your forms to a format, that's able to be completed electronically, right there on the site as part of the overall workflow becomes hugely important for those users.
Jane Norris: Yeah, I think that is part of it. And also the, you know, getting not only the users on the on the front end to buy into it and use it, but users on the back end. So Joel will ask you this, how do you empower state or local employees to give them opportunities for collaboration and increase productivity, and therefore, their willingness to use the system and make it develop and grow for the needs of the organization?
Joel Krooswyk: Well, you know, when they see the word empower, I think of everyone having a voice, right. So if I, if I work backwards from there, I mentioned the value stream view before and I find that collaboration and the Illa T's right visibility auditability, those kinds of things are critical to the development process, and to getting us to the end use case. So I mean, if we want productivity, we need the collaboration, we need as much data or information as possible in a singular place or access to it from a singular place to the data in motion concept that we've been discussing today. When we can interact together and efficiently in a single record. That makes life a lot easier. So one of the things I've seen is having access back into the development environments, how are your suddenly remote teams able to work together? Well, well, there's a lot of slack mattermost teams discord usage out there, right? That is certainly one great way to have access from the front end user to the back end developer in a single place. And how do you handle that release structure? I mean, in the last year, the concept of a timely release, it has become quite the question mark hasn't, we can't say that we release every quarter, or every month or every six months, we have to accelerate releases. So when it comes to enabling that automation of some of that documentation can be key. And what we're seeing is one of the trends is, as code is being deployed, a static website will be stood up with the new feature set in it that static website, then being something that the end user can leverage and review. And again, having a feedback channel that goes back into that engineering environment to say, this is or is not working well, at least by representatives of the front end user groups can really help make sure that we're hitting the mark, from the development side of the house.
Jane Norris: Thanks very much for that, Joel. These are all great insights that I'm sure our audience, we could just delve into any one of these concepts for an entire show. But as we get toward the end of this hour, I want to ask all of you, you know, for some additional an important key thoughts and ideas that you want to convey to our state and local CIO. So James, I'd like you to tell the audience today what the most important factors they should be considering in their analysis of all the available solutions that we discussed today, and probably some that we have not
James Nykia: Sure the evaluation of the solutions really should, of course, first start with an understanding of what you want to solve for. I like harping on this message of going back to that business outcome you desire. Is it reduced cost? Is it better and more effective outreach to the digital citizen? Or is it managing scale and operations internally, pick the business challenge you want to solve first? And then the following principles, I think, are the ones that would make sense. The first is the solution. I'm looking at automatable. Is it integratable? So does it tie to Kafka? If I wanted to take an event based approach or into the Adobe digital systems platform or marketing platforms? Can it work with GitLab pipelines to again, do that automation. Second way I think about it is scaling. It has to be able to grow with you and your workforce, because that demand is going to outstrip your ability to properly respond to it. So you need something that can scale with the demand. So is it designed for people to learn easily, if it's complicated technology is probably not going to be as good a solution as some other consideration. And then finally, this question of complexity, which is very hard to clearly articulate and to capture in the head. And that is, does it help me build really large complex infrastructures and deploy large numbers of applications and manage all that with a smaller workforce? I think that's really the key.
Jane Norris: Thank you, James. That's, that's great. Joel, we'll turn to you next and ask about factors that CIOs are looking at. They're obviously looking down the road and seeing not just getting to the technology they need today, but the technology they'll need tomorrow. And that includes things like chatbots and virtual agents and some forms of AI to help the workforce with more mundane tasks. What would state and local governments need to have in place in order to access those kinds of services?
Joel Krooswyk: Well, we are certainly seeing a lot more ask for things like this, right? The definition of a bot and how to leverage that, especially in an online example. Open source is one of my go to answers for something like this. So we just because you mentioned the chat bot thing, I'll start with that though, the open source chat bot basis can be a great place to start. Something like Anna DOD chat, for instance, claims to be able to help you spin up a chat bot in 30 minutes or less. So it at least keeps you from reinventing the wheel. And today's open source does give you a lot better, more leverageable content gives you quick and secure solutions in a faster, faster way than we ever had before. The other thing you mentioned is AI, right the concept of AI and looking down the road. One explosion of interest I'm seeing there as it relates to machine learning, ml Ops, if you will, data science, the way we manage the data and the way we leverage the data in to do great things with it, right, we know so much. But sitting in storage, it doesn't help us moving it to different applications and being able to leverage it correctly is so important. So I will say, though, that what was said earlier about the strategy is key, right? I still think AI is sort of in its infancy, there's so much coming there yet that we're going to be able to do, but you have to understand what that strategy is for your available data. Before we jump in on anything technology wise, the automation is going to be key. But I feel like we're a little ways from being able to just buy a platform and roll out an AI based solution, right? It's a little quicker than that. And I won't take up too much time on that content today. Because I feel like we can talk about this the rest of our time.
Jane Norris: Absolutely. And that's you said a mouthful, Joel, thank you very much for that. Will, he mentioned data. So I'm going to go to you, as we begin to see the era of AI beginning to connect everything which data officers be thinking about as they begin to move to more sophisticated systems that need more and more and more and more data.
Will LaForest: Yeah, I mean, without a doubt, I've worked on a few different AI projects. And the data wrangling and getting the data is the hardest part of it, there's no doubt. So people need to really focus on repeatable, clean ways to create data pipelines to deliver curated data that can actually be applied to machine learning in an effective way. The other thing that I would emphasize, and this speaks to the fact that it is in its infancy totally agree. But we really need to work on specific problems with machine learning, right? Don't go out and try to build some abstract AI platform to boil the ocean and solve all the problems. Start with very real concrete problems that you feel you can be solved with machine learning. So it could be predictive maintenance on city infrastructure or vehicles, for instance, you know, be specific, I know that I'm losing this much productivity with x being broken. So I want to solve that problem. Right. And I hate to admit it, but I've actually seen quite a bit of money being wasted, least specifically on the federal side on, if you build it, they will come central AI project approaches.
Jane Norris: So build for your problem today and scale for your problem tomorrow.
Will LaForest: Amen. Well said, well, thank you.
Jane Norris: You guys are the experts. So I'm learning from you today. And, Jonathan, let's ask you this question. As you move into digital customer services, can you do it quickly? I guess this is the question that everybody would want to know. And are there are tools and resources that can help organizations manage digital experiences that can scale?
Jonathan Schreiber: Yeah, absolutely. You know, and the truth is, can we do it quickly? If I say it's always a funny question, when coming to government, at any level, because the services are out there, and especially when you're looking at cloud based solutions for your digital transformation of your document processes. Can we do it quickly? Yeah, a lot of these products can, you can flip the switch and have them on and ready today. And moving your documents into that digital space is typically streamlined. The one big concern that you want to make sure you take heed of when you're rolling this out to state again, is how these different systems are going to be talking with each other, making sure that if you have a management system for your constituent data, or for your internal processes, that it's streamlined and communicating well, either out of the box or through some orchestration engine with your digital signature, electronic signature, digital forms platform. So how quickly they can be set up, it's always going to be a question of how straightforward or complex the total use case and workflow is that these systems are out there and can be turned on today, with a flick of a switch. Honestly, in most cases, that's part of what makes cloud based solutions so powerful.
Jane Norris: Flick of a switch sounds so easy. And that that is that is the beauty of it right that it is easier than I think many would imagine it to be. So as we get to the end of our hour here, I want to ask you all to please share some final thoughts about the important strategies that you've outlined today. You probably have some top line messages that you share with your clients about whatever transition or journey they're going through to digital monetization. James, I'll start with you what what's the top advice that you give clients when they come to you for solutions in this area?
James Nykia: That's a fantastic question. And you know for me, so the trend is clear, cloud is going to be a part of the future. And here are the three things that I typically say you have to consider. The first is you have to be able to crisply define the business outcome you're seeking. If you can't define what problem you want to solve, you're not really ready to start. It sounds harsh, but that's the reality. Second point is, once you understand the business challenge and outcome that you want to solve for, ask yourself the question how scale distort, or effects that if you have to operate on very large scales, which these types of organizations that we're talking to today in the state and local government, are based in, it is a challenge. And then finally, it's really one around the cost, and cost savings, which is one of the things that is touted about the cloud, the cost savings, don't come in the buying of the tools, cost saving calm in the operation of the tools over the long term. Keep that in mind. I think you'll be well on your way.
Jane Norris: That's great. Thank you, James. Joel asked you the same question. Final thoughts about strategies you would give a prospective client that they were coming to you?
Joel Krooswyk: So yeah, I like James have two thoughts. One is security, security, security, there's a reason it's number one, keep it on top. Don't worry about the speed and the cloud adoption. If your applications aren't secure, right, they have to go secure. But don't push to the cloud unless you're looking for credentials, leaks. And hey, use vault so I don't have to find those things open with GitLab. Okay. scan your containers that you're using check for dynamic security leaks, verify the license library your developers are using as acceptable, because you don't want to accidentally open source your code, the licensing mistakes, I see this right now is the biggest risk to the modernization journey is those jumping ahead without looking at all those other pieces that secure the code. And the second is one that we really haven't talked about today. Your current processes and tools are what help you attract talent to your teams? How do you get new talent and skills to your teams, it's a huge consideration. It's not one I'm hearing discussed a lot. But what I am starting to hear his stories of developers who start and then quit, whether it's the same week or at times as the reason the same day thing that this toolkit, this technology is not going to be good for my career, and they go right back out the door. So those are two of the things that I'm watching really closely when we talk about modernization.
Jane Norris: That's great information too. Will, we have about two minutes left, can you give us your final thoughts about what clients really want to hear?
Will LaForest: I'll give it to you in 20 seconds. Think about how you're going to get your data from your existing systems into the cloud so that you can use it, they're focusing on breaking down those silos and making the data discoverable, accessible, and then exploited to the maximum value of the citizens. It's really incumbent upon all US government to provide maximum value. So that's it.
Jane Norris: I appreciate that and your succinctness, Jonathan, you get the final word.
Jonathan Schreiber: Sure. And I'll try to be just as succinct, because that was a good one. Just if I can leave you all with one thing to think about as you're building out your system, specifically around documents and data movement. It's bringing the tools you need, to where the business is getting done. And of course, documents being the currency of that business. So making sure that whether it's signatures or form filling out are similar, making sure that those systems talk to each other in a way that makes sense for the entire use case, bring the tools you need to where the business is getting done.
Jane Norris: Thank you, Jonathan. And thank you all James Joel, Will. We really appreciate your insight and your contributions today incredibly valuable. I know I learned a lot today and I'm sure our audience did as well.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. If you'd like more information on how Carahsoft can assist your state, municipality or county upgrade their legacy IT systems please visit www.carahsoft.com or email us at countoncarahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.