Across the entire federal government, agencies are investing in two very important programs – IT modernization and improving experiences for stakeholders and constituents as they interact with what has been an unwieldly bureaucracy. While the push to modernize IT systems began nearly 30 years ago, the drive to improve on stakeholder and constituent experiences, often referred to as total experience or TX, has been a focus for agencies since the Biden Administration issued an Executive Order on December 13, 2021. While many agencies treat modernization and TX as separate activities, agencies that put total experience at the heart of their modernization efforts see different, and more notably, better outcomes.
In the latest episode of the Clickthrough podcast, brought to you by Government Technology Insider and Maximus, host, Hillary Fredrick, and guests Donna Settle, Vice President for the Federal Defense Market at Maximus and Chris Doty, Senior Practice Manager for the Department of the Air Force at AWS discussed how defense agencies like the United States Air Force are leaning into IT modernization by putting TX at the center and delivering exceptional results for their stakeholders and constituents.
For those of you who can’t listen to podcasts during the workday or prefer to read, we’ve recapped their conversation here. Of course, if you prefer podcasts, you can listen here – and don’t forget to subscribe to Clickthrough at the end of the episode.
Hillary Fredrick (HF): How have you seen IT modernization efforts improve day-to-day experiences for the Defense and Air Force space?
Chris Doty (CD): We need to look at TX and modernization from two different angles. One is, how can we improve the customer experience of our direct customer? And then secondly, how do we help our customers improve their customers’ experience?
Take a DevOps perspective. There’s a lot of challenges at times for Department of Defense customers to acquire net new hardware or acquire net new software. From an AWS standpoint, we try to make that as seamless and easy as possible for, say, a DevOps team to launch net new compute or to install net new software so it reduces the burden of acquisition, of day to day administration, and addresses those mundane tasks so it makes their life easier, frees up their time to then focus more on how do they develop net new capabilities for their customer base.
Donna Settle (DS): Cloud adoption and AI implementation alone don’t necessarily solve a lot of the day-to-day experience problems. It’s about empowering those customers and stakeholders to perform their mission more effectively.
We do know that cloud adoption enables faster access to the mission critical data from anywhere and that as long as there’s access, whether airmen are in a deployed environment or at a home station. We also look at AI from an implementation point to eliminate those boring, repetitive tasks. The goal overall is to free up the time of the airmen so that they can focus more strategically. This could mean streamlining maintenance schedules or performing real time data analysis during multi domain exercises or deployments. It really does allow for reducing frustration and improving the overall mission outcomes. In other words we look at how we use cloud and AI to make sure that we are meeting the mission of the airmen and supporting their day-to-day operational experience to make it more effective and efficient.
HF: There have to be some challenges?
DS: Well, here at Maximus, we have a large federal customer base, and we pride ourselves on enabling agencies to deliver an exemplary customer experience.
Our total experience management (TXM) offering involves us working in close partnership with our customers to map their workflows and their processes in order to identify where the technology can alleviate pain points and create automation to make their lives more effective and efficient.
What we’re doing is really keeping the workforce in mind, looking at those user personas and ensuring that we’re providing intuitive approaches to accomplishing their tasks; this really minimizes the time that they need to spend navigating the complex platform. Our goal is always to deliver solutions that align with the overall mission and enhance that daily experience for those who use it.
CD: From an AWS standpoint, we try to work backwards, from what our customer wants to achieve to how do we get there. We host a working backwards session to identify important milestones, key goals and missions, and what are the challenges we could anticipate and how could we avoid them. At that point we also want to understand any acquisition challenges and to ensure that we have the best contract vehicle that’s available and, importantly, we want to address concerns about security.
HF: AI is really changing the customer, employee, and user experience; from your experiences working with customers, what impact is it having?
CD:
The last 18 to 24 months have been revolutionary. Initially, the AI piece was really more automation. For example, how can I take a voice and transcribe it into words? How can I automate text recognition or image recognition to remove some of that labor and then generative AI or Gen AI burst onto the scene.
Gen AI has managed to democratize that technology, and it makes it a lot easier for users to consume. You know, even internally here at AWS, we have a lot of tools that allow me to summarize documents quickly, author documents or emails, and that’s what you’re talking about.
The Air Force Research Lab has been using NIPRGPT, an AI chatbot to help airmen build skills in AI so they can propel the Air Force further and more quickly into integrating AI. These include some of the use cases that Donna talked about earlier with predictive maintenance and planning. NIPRGPT is able to help them find that data and make it easier for them to make these decisions in a quick and easy format. I think you’re going to see a lot of that starting to take place now over the next, say, six to 12 to 18 months.
DS: I see a lot of advancement coming down the pike in that area. That’s something that we are moving towards within the Air Force, and like Chris had mentioned, the real-time decision-making AI allows a vast amount of data to be analyzed in real time analysis, co-mingling data from disparate data sets and bringing it together so that insights can be provided.
There’s a lot of good work that is bringing together data from the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and Space Force to support exercises and AI is helping that data move between domains and platforms into a centralized environment to support better decision making. What was mentioned earlier about upscaling and training personnel, that is, that’s here, that’s real!
We’re even seeing that within our own Maximus enterprise today, where we’re taking a look at everything that we need to do to upskill our staff and a lot of that is being brought together by some internal AI tools. I can see the military and the services taking advantage of similar skills because it’s important to them to have a ready workforce, just as important as it is to have a ready, ready war fighter systems available in making sure that they’re available for operational needs.
HF: Donna, you mentioned data sets and the vast amount of data that’s required to power AI tools that improve TX, which naturally leads to cloud. But you don’t associate cloud technology with customer or user experience, but you should right, because that’s what’s making it all possible, right?
CD: Data is important, but security is job zero; it’s not only important to secure the data and the systems, but it’s about building trust with the team. Only then can we start talking about how to move, manage, and merge data.
DS: That’s super important, because one of the things that everyone was so worried about in the very beginning with cloud adoption was where’s my data and who can see it. Looking at the Air Force, they’re adopting a Zero Trust architecture and by implementing this security model, it really is going to have that surety that the users, whether they’re inside the network or outside the network, are authenticated, that they’re authorized and that they’re continuously validated before they’re granted access to either the applications or the data, and that Zero Trust architecture is going to minimize the risk of security breaches.
From there you start working on a layered security approach that has network segmentation, advanced encryption, access controls, and continuous monitoring that’s necessary to make sure that there are no holes in the system. Along with regular security audits for access authentication, good security practices provide the foundation for IT modernization and being able to deliver on the promise of TX.
Many of our customers bake security in with DevSecOps practices where continuous integration, continuous deployment ensures constant testing of apps, software etc. as it moves through the pipeline. When we‘re moving monolithic applications to the cloud, it’s so important to ensure that security is baked in and that there’s continuous awareness and training so that risks to the app are understood from the perspective of different users. There are different aspects to consider from the user of the network, the user of the system, to make sure that they can identify any threat, but also to ensure that there are rapid mitigation measures in place.
Today and in the, any breach that happens or any patch that needs to be updated, is where AI will play a crucial role. We call it a self-healing, where, if there’s something that needs to be shut down, ports, protocol, those things can be automated and then investigated to ensure that the problem is remediated before a real-time incident can occur.
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