you uh hi thank you for joining us we're going to start in seven minutes hi thank you so much for joining us today we're going to start in five minutes [Music] me hi thank you so much for joining us today we're going to start in three minutes [Music] um [Music] you hi thank you so much for joining us today we're going to start in two minutes hi thank you so much for joining us we're going to start in one minute uh so welcome to atarc's thursday after lunch it webinar series for those of you who do not know me my name is jonathan albaum and i am the principal digital strategist for the federal government at servicenow today i'm going to be taking over for tom suiter and moderating this afternoon's panel this afternoon we're going to cover a framework for dealing with a crisis very much like what we're all experiencing with covid19 we have two great cios to share their perspectives and experiences with us keith bluestein from the u.s small business administration and michael anthony from the national transfer transportation safety board michael and keith are going to go in depth about the changes and innovations that they've incorporated into their agencies and how they plan to make the actions that they've taken part of their way of doing business going forward they're also going to dive into some lessons learned some challenges that they faced and you know what they see next for the future of work so welcome to all of our attendees i also want to as we get started i want to thank the atar team and connie coleman uh my servicenow colleague for making today's event possible so uh just for a format we're going to um have a brief introduction by our panelists and then we're going to talk uh together about these topics and followed by some q a from our audience so i hope you have some good questions please share them if you do we're gonna have some poll questions in there to spur the dialogue as well i'm going to begin by sharing just a couple of slides to frame the conversation so when the pandemic hit i think a lot of organizations that i worked with and that i uh were it was interacting with at the time they were very much in a response mode everything was happening at once and there was really a need to be able to keep employees working make sure they were safe and continue the mission in the best way possible and it was a very uh rapid kind of change we were working very quickly to make things happen overnight we built bought a lot of hardware we bought a lot of software we did what we needed to do to keep things going and it was um maybe a bumpy uh four or five weeks for some uh implementing new technologies and new program requirements but things stabilized over time and a lot of organizations and cios that i've interacted with they've taken these new technologies they purchased the changes that were introduced the innovations and they're really focused on baking them into their organizations uh so there's a long-term uh state of readiness so what whatever happens next whatever that next crisis is we're able to react uh well we're not focused on just reacting we're not focused on responding we're ready for what comes we can maintain our productivity in a time of crisis which leads to this idea of very long-term digital resilient digitally resilient organizations organizations that are unimpacted by external changes like a pandemic a hurricane some other kind of uh unique event that causes outages for some those digitally resilient organizations because they've truly embraced digital transformation are able to continue to operate and you know that's where a lot of these conversations are are leading us following the pandemic we've had a a clarion call for digital transformation i believe and we're seeing that in a lot of ways and and michael and keith are going to share some interesting stories um during our presentation today i think and you know as we as we hear their stories and we think about our own experiences um the the concept of uh platforms i think always seems to come back and this idea of platform as a service was something that you know i dealt with a lot and built when um i was a cio myself in government for for for a number of years but you know as i've left government and interact with more and more organizations i really think about platform as a strategy for long-term success and it really applies in this case as we implement platforms uh especially as we think about you know disruptions we're we're positioning ourselves to think about our business as end-to-end digital workflows where the work and the data flow irrespective of what's happening which really empowers the whole organization to be successful to think about work and data flows and drive to great experiences that means there's automation by default there has to be data integration because so many times we're working across systems the consistent experiences the ability to collaborate effectively you know those um those are core components of modern uh user experiences technologies expectations following covet and you know overall i think the environment you know drives greater interoperability greater flexibility more visibility uh as we adopt platforms and think about our organizations as these very interconnected things and for just uh for a moment i just want to talk about workflow and how we think about it at servicenow we we think that behind every great experience is a great workflow and for for service now that always begins with the servicenow platform the servicenow platform is the core to everything that we do um at servicenow the workflows that uh you know servicenow for it workflows or nit service management or i.t operations management hr workflows for employee experiences or customer workflows or even the ability to build custom workflows you know they all reside on top of the servicenow platform that is uh the the core of this company at its heart servicenow is a platform company a platform for workflow we just happen to be very successful building it workflows in the in the beginning of our company's history and sometimes we're known as an i.t company but there's so much more there and you know what makes the the servicenow platform unique in a lot of ways it's is it's uh it's one database it's one architecture it's it's one thing all of the capabilities that we're known for exist in that one place in addition there's very strong integration capabilities across all of the core systems an agency uses the core data an agency uses is you know typically locked away in these sometimes legacy systems systems of record the ability to integrate that data and leverage that data via workflow to drive mission outcomes is something that you know servicenow really excels at and you know results in us thinking about servicenow as the platform of platforms for digital workflows you know in addition servicenow integrates very nicely with the the tools people use to interact um in their in their day-to-day work the conversational tools the web tools mobile devices and oftentimes people are interacting with servicenow they don't even know it they're just interacting through a web browser or email and um they're getting they're getting service so those uh i find in my experience that that really cuts down on the unstructured collaboration and the silos and organizations and you know we've made um you know big investments as a company over the past several years to do all this in our government community cloud that's at a fedramp level high uh fedramp high impact level four uh in the dod space so you know we care about the security of that data and we understand it's it's important inside an agency so it's the idea that moving from that response quick response that we had when covet hit to being ready for what comes next and long-term digital resiliency requires platforms uh servicenow is you know perfectly positioned and you know many organizations to serve as that foundational platform to drive that integrated experience that you know we need as um there's more and more uncertainty in our in our environment so you know that that was a little bit of framing for uh today's conversation i want to give both keith and michael a chance to introduce themselves now and a little bit of you know their initial perspective and then we'll get into some uh some q a so i'm going to turn to keith first and keith if you can go ahead and talk a little bit about your background your experience with covid and how things are going at sba i know our audience would love to hear that well thanks for that intro uh jonathan uh keith bluestein i'm currently the cio at the small business administration uh i joined here just uh a few months after uh we started going through the covet 19 response in june uh prior to that i spent three and a half years at nasa uh delivering services uh overseeing their service delivery at nasa prior to that i was actually back at the small business administration as the deputy cio and prior to that i was the cio for a lot of the classified community within department of navy so come through a variety of different backgrounds in there and the opportunity to come into sba was was tremendous at the time there's a great deal of focus on what sba was delivering to main street america through the paycheck protection program through the economic injury disaster loan assistance program so uh it was a vital assistance that we were delivered to mainstream we were already in a posture where we were trying to deliver mobility i think that's one of the things that we've been trying to do all across government for a period of time is give people the opportunity to work where they want to work when they want to work so um jonathan brought up a great uh discussion about you know what we do as cios and how we plan for those kinds of things and a lot of times we have this this long horizon out there we want to do things in a logical fashion so that we don't interfere with the operations of our customers and then every once while you have something that comes up that suddenly that horizon gets pulled in very very tight you need to do that now and so that's kind of where we are with sba we were already making the transition to do a lot of online collaboration we were switching from a skype platform to a teams platform to do collaboration so i joined right when we were in the middle of that so it was kind of half and half and uh my challenge was to sit there and try to make that a little bit more homogeneous so that our agency could collaborate better and the big thing through all of this uh the the pandemic and our response to it has been uh collaboration and cooperation across the not just our agency but with other agencies as well so that's a brief introduction to me and uh keep you joined uh post pandemic yeah you know it started right uh msba had a lot of um responsibility in those early days and i know you'll talk about that in a moment uh uh let's turn to michael now michael you joined the day of the pandemic was that right uh yeah the day we sent everybody home was your first day at ntsb correct so please introduce yourself and give us a little bit of your background hey thanks for that jonathan and good afternoon everyone i am mike anthony really happy to be here i look forward to today's dialogue i am the cio of the national transportation safety board we're a small independent federal agency charged with improving the public safety of commercial transportation and uh for those who are not aware what does that mean well if there's a major accident involving aviation which includes space maritime rail highway even hazardous materials and pipeline there's a good chance we'll be investigating it before moving forward like keith i'd like to share a little bit of my background from 2015 to 2020 i was with the irs i served in several executive roles most recently leading a data solutions organization in the large business and international division uh without being too specific so i'll just say we leverage data to identify where we would uh focus our limited resources um part of that i spent um a certain amount of time leading our external facing identity access and management program and uh what does that mean for each and every one of you if you have an irs.gov account about 20 million businesses and individuals have these high assurance level accounts most likely you went through one of the systems i had an opportunity to manage and deploy prior to working for treasurer i was with dod and spent the bulk of my career in the army's research and development community so i had an opportunity to spend six months in both iraq and six months in afghanistan really gave me an opportunity to uh make an impact um you know closer to the field and um you know i want to share share that with you because um most my experience has been in large complex organizations servicing millions of individuals and uh and that brings us back to the ntsb um i did join on march 16th so that was the same day we gave everybody the uh pretty much orders to uh implement max telework um and i've been reflecting over the last six months and my biggest adjustment hasn't been max telework it hasn't been managing and delivering on commitments in a virtual environment it hasn't been engaging with our leadership my peers my staff or even external stakeholders i think it's been adjusting to a small organization and while that could be a topic uh for a future date i'll just share one example um well i have all the traditional cio roles i also have the responsibility for managing our privacy our records management and our uh foia programs all of which uh could have potentially been impacted by the max telework environment um so once you're a couple of positive things um that occurred before i joined the organization but really i want to take my head off to the folks who really worked hard um the ntsb had planned and implemented a major uh i'll say improvement to their network um not only do we significantly increase the bandwidth reduce single points of failure we also implemented a zero trust network access capability or software defined perimeter uh that that replaced our vpn and while i don't have data at my fingertips i suspect that that network improvement alone probably reduce our trouble tickets by 50 and probably customers has probably improved customer satisfaction by 100 um we did have collaboration tools like teams uh the go-to meeting go to webinar suite but but right after the pandemic hit there was uh our customers really wanted to so we were able to pivot pretty quickly and acquire zoom for external engagement uh in less than a month so i think that's another example of just listening to customers and um being able to act uh quickly and it probably is easier in a smaller agency than in a much larger uh environment so um you know you really have to have to balance that expectations i should say um we also expanded service desk hours uh having max telework more flexible work schedules we expanded the hours by about two hours in the morning and two hours and evening so it could really you know support our customers um um and we you know we have folks from alaska to to the east coast so i think that really helped um i'll turn it back to you jonathan i know we're going to go through some stuff and yeah some experience well i think that's been a you know it's a great um intro um from both michael and keith and you know thanks for setting helping to you know further set the uh set the tone for this conversation you know what what i find really interesting is you both uh inherited you know operations uh during a period of great external change and you know you you um sometimes you uh you don't get to choose you know your team you don't get to choose the situation and you know this is the case and for each of you so when you look at the environment and you know i think you both inherited pretty good environments from what i what i understand what changes um do you feel like you need to make going forward in order to make the max telework to make the expectations around you know customer service that jury learn to like work under any circumstance because i i know in both your agencies so a lot was done very quickly to keep things moving well how do you make that those changes stick really embed them in the organization and then sometimes when you work really fast you know you can create some blind spots or you can you know put something that'll work under initial uh conditions but over time it might not be scalable or stable how do you ensure you're ready for what comes next because we don't know what's coming next but it's going to be challenging i could expect that so um keith and michael michael why don't why don't you um just uh you know add on to that and keith please jump in after yeah i'll say you know as we procure you know hardware like laptops um i think we're thinking much more about cameras docking stations port replicators monitors how do we enable our employees to work you know physically in an office and at home and be productive um i think at the end of the day i'm not sure if we'll go back to the same nine-to-five environment for for all employees so how do we you know enable our employees with devices and for those employees that are back in the office how do we ensure our like conference rooms and collaboration environments are set up so that they can be in person and virtual some sort of hybrid environment so that we can be as productive as possible i mean i'm personally a fan of whiteboards and marking things up and i'm not 100 sure um i think the tools might be there but i'm not i'm sure people are comfortable yet working in that environment and uh maybe that requires some training and familiarization and and just you know time to get there i think uh i think those are the things that jump you know how about you keith it's kind of interesting i want to go back to uh you know explain a little bit of one of the things that happened in our agency as well because we were responsible for some of the major uh things that came out of covet 19 such as the expansion of business loans to main street america and other businesses out there we expanded the size of our agency expanded almost by a factor of four almost overnight so what would be normal processes suddenly to your point expanded quite rapidly and we were very fortunate to get white house support that reached into industry and said hey support sba in any way you can to get these resources in there so we got you know laptops and other devices that were able to uh expand and we were able to bring people on board rapidly but uh the thing you brought up about okay now you've expanded this is almost like you pulled on a on a rubber band we've expanded and everything's under tension what happens when you relax that or what do we do to sustain that in the long term and that's of course the challenge that uh we have when we come in here is uh okay so what are we gonna do now that we've expanded by a factor of four at some point ostensibly that's going to re uh you know contract a little bit and it really kind of pushes us for those of us that we're kind of more physical or logical at that point in time getting to the point where you can do these things digitally to expand and come back which is you know one of the things talking about the the advantages of a platform can you actually have that capability so what we're trying to do right now is almost like backfill now that we know we're here how do you backfill to make sure that you have that infrastructure that is elastic and resilient so that okay when this comes down if we do have some major event like a hurricane or something in the future how do you expand rapidly again so that we're not kind of going through a lot of the lessons learned in here so yeah platforms are a way to do that because they do you know you're starting um at the 50-yard line you're not building from scratch so you can theoretically bring things up faster scale down that's a great thing you know so platform is something you jump off of right if you have a really solid platform and i will tell you i don't have that i'm looking to build that in sba but previously we had used service now as a platform you can build a lot of stuff off of that very quickly because you already have the foundation well um yeah we're you know irrespective of the platform you choose i think the concepts are really important that you know you don't have to start from scratch and you know in a time of a crisis and you have to you know rapidly do something uh or you have to automate um in a way because you know suddenly people can't go into an office you know you don't have time to do the nuts and bolts core uh development for a new application why not use something that's already built but you have to have these things pre-positioned you can't stand up the platform uh so it now is a time i think to do a lot of a lot of planning uh you know in a related sense uh michael i wanna i wanna ask you about um you know your perspective on the on the future of work you know we were chatting a little bit uh before you had indicated um you know telework is here to stay but maybe not full-time telework in perpetuity i think um how do you how do you see that evolving at your agency yeah let me a couple of quick things i want to add keith love to hear how you manage property effectively in a virtual environment especially a lot of new property but uh something else i want to say you know we've been able to maintain our really important operations like these congressionally mandated board meetings we review major accidents we propose safety recommendations i think i think we may have been one of the first agencies to hold hearings like this virtually i'm kind of interested to see how how we move forward when we return into the office because you know we realize cost savings not having to fly a certain amount of individuals into dc for a meeting so that those might be some sort of you know virtual uh in-person and hybrid events um i also think about you know if i've had uh staff and others inquire you know since folks have been relatively productive during the pandemic you know is there need to go back into the office and uh while we'll certainly follow you know agency guidance um you know i think first of all i don't know if this is a perfect uh example because there's not a lot of other things individuals have been able to do outside of work but um i also you know i wonder about the camaraderie spirit decor onboarding new employees how do you kind of build that environment uh as successfully in a virtual culture environment right you know um yeah and you know i'm actually interested in what some of the folks uh who are tuning in today think about that because at the end of the day i don't know if there's a right or wrong i think it's a what's the best we can do given given the circumstances and then approach it and uh you know i'll say a logical fashion now keith you've been going into the office i think i've seen you in your office a couple of times uh and you have such a cool looking office i thought it was a zoom background the first time i saw it but uh what what does the future work look like at sba well you know you bring up a great point in that in the past i think we were we were moving towards mobile or being more mobile and you know allowing people the flexibility for remote and of course koben kind of forced that function right not can you do it now we know we can do it and so i think to michael's point now we're starting to have a discussion is okay how do we want to do that so when you go back i think for sba it's certainly highlighted in a lot of cases that look we can still uh function you know certainly the the agency functions we can still do but one of the things that we've seen uh especially in our la regional office and other large regional offices is that a lot of small businesses still came into our offices there to have that one-on-one conversation so even though our agency functions uh remotely they still have to go out and touch main street america and the business owners out there so how that changes that's that's an opportunity i think for us to sit there and okay can you have a digital storefront more like a not that you would be able to do an amazon like storefront for sba but i think that we are taking a look at okay what is that mix we've got people in our denver office that have not been in the office in six months everything has been functioning like almost like nothing ever changed but uh going forward do we really need to sit there and have that office space or can we determine which functions yeah so you both bring up excellent points uh michael on culture and camaraderie and you know i i personally like going into an office um it i liked interacting with my colleagues i learned a lot you know when i went to grab a cup of coffee and hear from people especially you know when i first joined servicenow and that's how i learned a lot about the company so you know you do miss that in bringing people on in this remote uh remote way you know really is a call for some sort of automation around onboarding or and also upboarding uh i think important you know functions to digitize but at the same time uh you know we pay a lot for that office space a lot for that uh ability to have uh grab a cup of coffee with your colleagues so you know i think there are some tough questions coming up but uh we'll get those and you know they'll be agency guidance as you alluded to mike but um where i want to kind of turn the conversation then we'll do a poll question after is uh building up what ketchus keith you just stated you have a kind of retail like business at times where you have people coming in and they want to transact one one-on-one with the person and i'm not surprised that there are some people that still want to do that because that's what you know they're most accustomed to but i think a lot of us are getting um our thought patterns are changing and our experiences are changing that we expect everything to be digital and on our terms and i should be able to do that work with the sba or if i used to work at usda that farmers should be able to do the work with usda on their terms at their time when they want to do it and that's not just a microsoft teams uh front end to a conversation with the federal employee and docusign for a signature but let me do it when i'm free when it makes so what's the what's the changing expectation for how your agencies you know maybe uh for sba more so how you deliver service but also for you know as michael as mike stated you know providing information to the public and having in-person meetings so if you have to predict you know six months a year two years from now what does that look like for you guys well i'll jump in there first i certainly without a doubt believe there'll be more digital engagement um and quite frankly i hope there'll be more you know policies federal regulations that enable that um and you know i really encourage uh not only federal employees and industry but you know also for citizens to be open to change um i think you know as you alluded to jonathan there's gonna be probably more flexibility and uh i think that's an opportunity we should really embrace um certainly not in the same position with as um is keith uh with the service centers throughout the country i was with the irs but uh i would just ask people to manage your expectations too and as i said earlier for a large organization it's gonna it's gonna take a little bit longer to really change both process policies and culture than maybe a smaller organization that can pivot you know have a little bit more agility so kind of from my perspective and shinkie's thoughts i think it's pretty uh fascinating when you you know nobody gets enamored by laws but we passed the idea act a couple of years ago and the the real intent behind that at the time was that okay let's let's do better engagement let's improve the engagement between the citizen and their government and so part of the whole thing when you sit there and kind of decompose that down was into okay how do we you know have a better digital experience and how do we sit there and make that experience better so when you sit there and start taking a look at that yeah i think a lot of us like myself when that was passed was like oh here are the things that i need to do here's what the law mandates but i haven't necessarily taken a look at it from if you will the citizens standpoint or even from how do i engage from a government standpoint with the citizen and i think that's what this has really helped us do as michael's alluding to there is that look there's kind of something in between and there's probably no one-size-fits-all but we do need to sit there and come up with how do you better engage with the citizens is that a digital thing or are you going to continue to have some retail contact i think you are into jonathan's point i think that you know there's a reason that amazon has bought some office space recently i can't remember one of the other large organizations that people are still going to be going into office spaces because i believe even if you can't quantify it that people do have uh there is some benefit to having interaction one-on-one so as much as this has been great and kind of pushing us to think about how do you sit there and deliver these things especially in a technology age i think we still have to include that human element and how much of that is that personal contact uh in i don't know that there's a bright line between that and what we do digitally or with technology so um there's a lot to chew on there we're gonna i'm gonna come back to that in a second i'm gonna ask um we could put up our first poll because it ties really uh directly to how people are thinking about returning into an office at some point and or continuing uh telework so alyssa if you can put up our poll so if you've been working remotely how do you feel how effective do you think you've been and what's the right amount of remote work um i i'm interested to see what what people say here and you know we'll get the poll results in a couple of minutes i do want to i want to just build on what keith was just uh uh noting there that um i i i think in my experience you have to be able to meet people where they are which means you have to understand your customer and you have to understand your work in your agency your organization you have to understand how the work flows and how the data flows and once you understand that there's probably a couple of approaches and you know in in the olden days which you know was six months ago uh sometimes we talk about you know we we have to keep that office open we want to build something that's online but we've got to keep that office open because that's the that's the minimum expectation and i think that uh to serve people i think you know we're kind of evolving as your state of keith where you know we're going to have to be able to provide a digital option for every service core service everything that you could do in person well there has to be a digital option now because not having a digital option means well that individual's got to go into that office and there's risk with that you know what if they have a pre-existing condition or they can't go because of you know their externalities so uh curious what you guys think about the need uh to have a digital alternative for every process and um you know if if that comes to pass how do you get there so uh keith um why don't you do that and we'll we can uh talk about poll results well it kind of goes to and this may not sound too uh too exciting but sometimes you really kind of have to understand what are you doing what are your processes and what is what is the business that you're actually transacting and is that even possible that you could uh do that digitally so use an example if i'm gonna make a pasta dinner i could sit there and talk about making the pasta dinner but it's not gonna taste very good if i'm just trying to do that digitally so there are certain things that i'm going to have to continue to do a certain way but part of this again is taking a look at that and one of the things we do with cios a lot of times take a look at what are we doing overall and how do we break that down and are there areas that we can either find efficiencies that we can convert to uh digital how would we sit there do we do all digital or to your point do we sit there and continue to offer some uh you know analog options for that as well because there's always going to be a portion of the population that that wants to do things kind of the old school way and if you listen to simon sinek when he talks about the people that are the on the trailing edge of technology adoption there's people out there that if they hadn't been forced to get off a dial telephone they would have never gotten off the dial telephone so yeah i keep just because you could go 100 digital doesn't mean you should um but i think we need to enable our processes so that they can be accomplished from anywhere and perhaps on any device i've been taking just an example internally quite frankly we hadn't fully implemented electronic signatures and then we sent everybody home and people like how they're going to sign things and they don't have printers and fax machines and it's like why don't we just use the tools we already have and it was just a matter of it was a forcing function for us to do something that you know enabled our workforce to to do things now they can continue that on whether they're in person or at home so i i kind of agree completely what you said yeah so uh let's let's take a look at the poll result that we just got and you know the first question was how effective do you think it's been working in the office uh working at home rather than the office and um only uh only six percent said less and about 20 said it was the same which means the vast majority of our audience thinks they're more much more effective at home and you know that's interesting because these are these are people who work in your organizations and they might not want to come back or you know there there may be some uh degradation in their productivity possibly you know returning uh i think the second question is even more um illuminating um what's the right percentage of in person and uh in office and at home 75 seems to be the winner so that's uh that's interesting i i would have said 50 50 myself but you know with that you know three uh three four days a week at home uh some organizations are going to that and uh curious your reactions and how you you know you guys are both managers and supervisors leaders in your organizations can you can you envision a time where it's that kind of uh workforce yeah you know you know i've heard a few people say so coming into the organization um and and really enabling everybody to use uh the technologies we had everyone joined every meeting with the cameras on there there were no concerns no issues i heard some managers say they've seen their employees more now than they did back in the you know environment where everybody was in the office so i think some agencies haven't even turned their cameras on yet so i mean i think it all depends on the environment but uh quite frankly i don't know if you really need to be in person to have the interaction i personally prefer and i'm starting to think i'm a dinosaur i like to read body language and you can't always read it from from here up but uh i think at the end of the day um i i i kind of kind of pull results interesting and i'm gonna take this back to my leadership and share with them because at the end of the day i think it's more about getting the job done and doing doing quality work and perhaps less about where you're doing it yeah work is what you do not where you are i've heard that you know i i i i appreciate that mostly i'll say um keith what do you think yeah i think it's kind of the poland results are kind of interesting i think to me as of course the senior manager managers in government one of the things that makes you do is really kind of check your assumptions you know i came into the job with certain sets of assumptions and and even with the polls like okay well here's the assumption i'm making here's what i think i'm seeing but when you start talking to your employees you find out they're looking at things a lot differently and i think that's part of the challenge going forward is if we have that dialogue there's gonna i think there's just gonna be some mix and i think maybe it's almost like a shifting of a tectonic plate where people had a certain approach to what are we going to do for remote covid forced us to sit there and rethink that a little bit now and i think that going forward i think maybe we'll have a little more open mind about that but i think that you do have to sit there and if you are taking a position one size fits all a policy or whatever that you kind of ask what are the underlying assumptions in there and is that something that the majority of your workforce is really subscribing to so um we're getting some questions we're in terms of those in a moment um i i want to just get your perspective on uh let's assume that we head back even at 25 you know per the poll uh how how do you bring back those workers in a safe way you know it was easy to send people home it's uh not so easy i think to bring it back in safely what are your organizations thinking about to say from a safe return to work perspective so so go ahead i was going to say for because of the number of offices we had we had a whole rolling plan they had to clean spaces to cdc guidelines and they went through all that and okay here's your inventory and it's done but the challenge with that is that as people have come and we're up to 25 percent can come back and we're not forcing anyone to come back is that if somebody goes in and then suddenly um they get flagged as possibly exposed now you're going through that process again so part of this is just having a level of assurance for the employees coming back that the the environment has been prepared appropriately but then also making sure that people have to have to operate in a way that look you're not coming in and creating super spreader events or something in in your office space that that's a challenge michael yeah i would agree i think most federal agencies if not all of them that kind of a phased approach to returning um uh you know obviously the appropriate you know cleaning of facilities and sanitizer you know masks all the things that are recommended i actually think this would be a good topic in a couple of months to talk about as more and more individuals go back to the workforce and i think it's keith's loop to one size doesn't fit all there are going to be certain cases where we're going to take special precautions um i don't you know i think as we start to reintegrate uh it'll only be a portion of the workforce per day it's not going to be everybody on that day and that's why i talked a little bit about hybrid conference rooms because really maybe not going to have that entire opportunity when everyone's in the same room to really brainstorm through something so how do we maximize the in-person and the remote and i'm not sure if i have a solution for that but if anyone's tuning in does i'd be happy to hear about it well we're gonna we're gonna turn to the questions in a moment so maybe we can get some comments on on that too i i think that you're you're both bringing up good you know points and you know underlying all that you have to maintain now this uh mike to your point a um digital infrastructure that supports this hybrid uh approach to conference rooms to brainstorming uh which it you know might be new certainly different but it's going to be um something you have to pay for in addition to the office space that the people are in so you know there's there is more as federal agencies you're paying for from either digital infrastructure or uh physical infrastructure perspective than you than you did before and so you have some increased costs there the hardware software all these all these things so that's gonna have to be part of this conversation at some point too so the management tools for those things are are obviously very important um and you know similarly it strikes me that uh you know something you said might i think uh like uh that you know you have it's not one size fits all and certainly isn't that way for employees uh some people have children at home because daycare is closed some people have a pre-existing condition perhaps and they can't just come in so i've seen um and certainly been an advocate for doing some kind of employee sentiment survey to understand where people are so you can treat them respectfully and bring them you know keep them you know engaged someone who's worried about going to the office because they're going to get sick probably isn't going to do their best work in in the office so i i hope you guys can you know our your agencies are considering you know those things the soft stuff in addition to the health screening the ppe management you might have to do or you know maintaining a physical system so if i can piggyback on that it's kind of interesting because several years ago people started talking about the whole person concept and you know traditionally we've looked at it i'm an employer you're an employee here's what i'm going to tell you to do and i expect you to kind of do that but i think that we've evolved where you really have to look at each individual in totality what is their total situation and we've done that even with bringing back up to 25 percent of the people we recognize people that have compromised uh people in their household etc you have to take all that into account yeah again it's very easy to send them home it's hard to bring them back and i i just don't i just hope that as you're uh you're both advocates uh inside your agencies that you know we um we don't rush uh to to do it in a way that creates you know more more risk for our federal employees and others so um you know you have a it's a it's a big responsibility you all have on top of everything else that you're that you're doing so um yeah go ahead looking at one other thing yeah you know as we as an agency uh have to launch to certain accidents major accidents if you will you know we developed a an assessment tool leveraging some of the data sets by cdc and others um as a data point for an area we might have to launch to what is our risk tolerance level and are the employees comfortable with the investigators comfortable with it so it's kind of one factor in the equation uh but at the end of the day uh you know what i mean i i think there's some maybe other tools we can use to assess risk now from a technical perspective more from a health and safety perspective and um you know and i like your idea the employee sentiment survey yeah no i i think it's uh you know it one one thing that i uh you know when i share that i think about people remember how they're treated in a situation like this and you know the fact that you care about them is going to go a long way to their uh long-term uh desire to state your agencies or your organizations because not just government this is uh you know employee employee relationship in general so um i think it's an interesting idea for people to chew on we do have a couple interesting questions about 15 minutes left i want to uh pivot here so uh one question we have is on network security have you had to rethink any aspects of how you secure your networks do you do you foresee having to make any changes in the future i'll say still being relatively new to the organization i'll just say the area that and it's probably true in almost any federal organization but but uh we'll see um i was a little bit surprised uh we we have a ways to go to really document everything and keep it up to date and as we add a new uh capability of the environment update our system security plans and and the entire you know trail associated with that so i guess i guess what i'm attempting to do is really baseline where we're at so i can really uh assess the progress we're making you know against our own identified deficiencies and perhaps uh others identified by outsiders but um that's kind of where i'm at we're certainly not in an environment uh where we're dealing in a you know a multi-level classified environment so we certainly don't have some of those challenges other agencies might have but quite frankly as we have more and more cloud uh based capabilities just ensuring we have the appropriate records management policies up to date you know people are carrying everything we go through everything in the cloud now it's backed up but it's not on the hard drives or maybe it's in both if there's a freedom information act request how do we access that information and make sure we can uh you know do what we need to do understanding what and where your data is is hard under the best of circumstances let alone in the chat very changing environment um keep security uh it's got to be on your mind at sba you have a lot of personal information about business employers employees employers yeah it's it's been an interesting challenge so to michael's point yeah we had actually moved a lot of our security into if you will uh virtual or cloud-based uh capabilities so we were able to scale when it came to your kind of your everyday operations the challenge that we had was as we expanded our footprint especially to do these large loan programs we were bringing in other vendors to assist with that workload and to your point you know it's one thing for us to have done all the homework and figured out okay here's where our data is you know here's the boundaries we're putting on there so that we know where it is and who can come in and get it but when we sit there and go to other cloud vendors and they've provisioned especially in the commercial space things that are they're going to be able to deliver quickly and reliably and they don't necessarily always have the same concerns that we had so when all of a sudden you're introducing that into your environment it's posed some challenges for us in working in these relationships with them that when we find out that well we don't really want to have that posture if you're transacting our data for us here's the posture we need and so kind of brokering some of that with some of our third-party vendors has been a challenge well and you know by third-party vendors maybe you mean uh the banks too right because you know when the uh payroll protection plan started you were relying on commercial banks to interact with sba systems and people there's a lot of data that flows there's fraud concerns you know that happened overnight you know this this change so you know it's not it's not simple so being ready for the whatever that next one is or you know congress can enact a new uh program you have to manage so taking the time to develop those relationships and nurture them when you don't need them is also you know i think part of the story is a great point and of course we were talking earlier where that's one of the things we're kind of catching up recognizing that okay maybe we didn't we're we weren't where we wanted to be at the start but kind of developing that relationship so that going forward in any future thing that you've got that there and even the conversations we had with with congress about that they recognize that that's a risk we're asking you to do this overnight but um you know they expect us to work towards a better posture yeah um you know uh related um your to these changes uh you you talked about having to uh scale up very fast maybe some of that a little bit happen before you arrive but you know the um there's an elastic nature to to the work now what do you think sva needs to do to become sufficiently elastic uh what features do you need in a in your platform technologies that you want to see what does that look like well so of course the first answer is always oh go go to the cloud right it offers all of those things but omb came back you know originally they had cloud first and then they said well cloud smart and part of that's what we're looking at is like look i think that we've learned a lot of lessons on how you expand and now we're taking a look at okay how can we sit there and make that something that's like an accordion where it's supposed to expand and contract and expand and contract and so we're kind of learning some lessons here that i think will set us up for the future and then additionally one of the things that i i've done or we're in the process of doing right now is really taking an end to end look in the agency of you know how do you do your business and are there ways to sit there and harmonize all of these things because we have different kind of siloed activities that we're not optimized so if you're really trying to expand rapidly having something that's kind of going back to the platform discussion having something that's uniform across the board that really enables you to to expand and contract uh realistically mike what would you like to add there yeah i think i think we should leverage this as a forcing function and opportunity uh you know simple things like uh you know we would get mobile devices and laptops in and we do work on them we provision them uh how do we just work with our vendors and have them drop shipped right to the employee's house and then they use that box and we give them a prepaid label and they ship the old whole device back to us so we have accountability of everything you know that reduces a lot of touch labor on our part but it just maybe took the event to have us think shift our thinking a little bit you know there's other things as well like uh you know we've been working towards implementing a complete you know software-based voip environment well now we're already in that environment people aren't used to using their phones anymore and it's gonna be a lot easier to to continue on with that right as we reintegrate so i mean cost savings you know to pay for new requirements perhaps yeah so i think it's kind of like using this and building upon it building upon momentum there was one thing i was going to share with everybody so there's been a lot less travel so there's been less accidents uh what our investigators have been able to do is pivot towards older cases that they had had the time to work through so now that's kind of increased the amount of dockets and other things we're releasing and pushing out to the public but at the end of the day you know during that poll question you know i think we've been the same or even more productive uh it's just kind of almost rethinking what are our priorities and what do we need to get done and again it's going to be different for every organization um so uh but i've been pretty impressed with our workforce and how they've been able to pivot to other work that is just as meaningful um it just hadn't been as much of a priority so you know that is um i think that's a really uh fascinating outcome there's a lot of unexpected uh you know unintended consequences from uh this positive things at times so you know you're sharing one that uh i i had not thought of and you know perhaps others um hadn't uh hadn't considered so you know there's um there's a silver lining i guess in some ways if you know good data comes out of those investigations that makes us safer overall as things return to normal uh there there's one you know additional question that uh you know we have and i wanna you know expand on it a little bit uh it's around uh rpa technology and you know do you see uh rpa technology playing a role as we begin to rethink what um you know how we do our work and you know i wouldn't expect just say are there other emerging technologies new capabilities that momentum you've both described uh you know we're now ready to venture and try and do something with the new new new technology set and an emerging technology that maybe we would not have otherwise michael or keith be interested i observed a lot more rpa activity in over in the treasury department and some of the different bureaus including the irs i think from you know from an ntsb perspective we were already along our way on a journey on an enterprise case management environment and and now we're finally bringing in the last group so we've pretty much aligned across the board on one enterprise case management environment which i think for any agency is a big big endeavor if they've been historically using multiple different things so my hope is that we we can take this opportunity and build on that and you know hook in where possible build upon it but um continue to leverage that so our investigators can do their jobs wherever they're at and i know we have the network in place i know we have the virtual collaboration tools i think focusing on data and how we really exploit the data um but that's probably gonna be the the challenge for for myself and and our organization over the next few years keith what do you think yeah for us you know there's a couple of elements on there you know one of the first things we're taking a look at is like hey is there something you can do with rpa to alleviate some of the workload if you will for your workforce uh this became very very evident in the areas of disaster assistance who were handling all the economic injury uh disaster loan requests that expanded significantly and so we we threw a lot of humans at that we had the luxury of being able to bring humans into the process but going forward a lot of the activity that's in there especially if we have the processes mapped out that lends itself to chat bots and some other technologies that people are using out there so that if you have to expand up i don't necessarily have to bring the human component to that i can sit there and use technology but you do need to do the work to understand how the data flows how the work flows through the organization the different systems you touch different organizations role in something and you know my experience through uh my it careers it's always a little more complicated than people think you know it is if you don't take the time to really think out that process that's where you go wrong it's rarely the technology uh that's the hard part it's the process and then the change management that comes in the new process so uh i think those are you know big big challenges for um you know for all of us as as we move forward um i'm gonna ask uh we have about five and four five minutes left i'm going to ask for um our second poll question come up and we're going to use that as a way to conclude here so um how confident are you in your agency's ability to embrace digital modernization efforts going forward and then how are you satisfied are you with your agency's kovid 19 response if we can have those poll uh answer uh the results up in in a moment um i i'd like to you know use those as a way to way to close and um uh you know mike if you can you can begin uh sharing your your perspective on you know those those questions your ability to keep the momentum and then you know your coven 19 response and you know how do you move forward to improve and thinking about bringing people back and eventually you know being in in truly uh you know a new normal yeah listen i am uh very confident that we'll be able to continue on this journey um i i honestly i've been really impressed with the organization's response to covet i mean we're a safety organization so i think that goes without saying um you know i think there's some unknowns out there uh you know quite frankly we're in the election year uh we'll be under continuing resolutions uh the federal budget very large i'm not sure what that's going to mean for federal agencies moving forward so there might be um you know the intent to want to to move faster and forward digitally but i'm not home century they'll be funding to do that you know i mean so i think there's a lot of unknowns so we're just going to have to manage people's expectations here we can move only as fast as uh or you know with the velocity uh as the resources allow us to yeah and you know if you see the poll results people are fifty percent are extremely confident or very confident that their agency will push forward uh with their modernization efforts and be successful and you know most are satisfied or very satisfied with covet 19 response so at least that you know i see that i think well the work you're doing has you know the momentum is there and you have a good great foundation to build on to um you know to be successful so uh you know keith what what are your final thoughts as we um as we conclude if you can you can go ahead and bring us home here yeah well i i think that this all does you know the whole discussion today talks about you know we there are many of us that wanted to do certain things or we had a vision for the future and um you know they always say don't let a crisis go to waste well we had a crisis that really forced us to do a lot of things maybe faster than we'd like to do but it gave us a great opportunity and to michael's point i think it's it's one of those things there's an intensity right now to get some of this stuff done and and we want to seize that and try to move uh some of this stuff forward but as we all know especially for those of us that have kind of worked in the washington dc environment depending on what's going on there's a lot of things that are going on in the entire ecosystem that you know could suddenly shift focus onto certain other things you know if a vaccine comes out and suddenly you know the focus on the pandemic actually subsides and then we have some other activity going on this is going to be kind of an ephemeral moment that i think most of us need to seize and to try to to make those big moves so that you have momentum going forward so that people do keep that intensity regardless of what happens with um you know the external environment i think we're in good shape that we have great leadership that is really pushing us hard to realize that it's more than just a legacy it's it's what we owe the american taxpayer and the small business owner out there but um you know where we do that across the government i think it's a great opportunity right now well keith you have my vote if you were running it great great way to to conclude it i don't uh i can't imagine anybody uh doesn't agree that you know these things have a huge importance because they do affect our citizens and our our country's ability to be successful uh now and well into the future so that's a great way to um to conclude our session and to everybody thank you for joining our presentation today you know we're we're at our end but i do want to invite you to join a tarp next week september 22nd for an informative zero trust summit now this summit is going to consist of three panels that explore zero trust security uh focuses on policy realignment and identity management uh it's gonna be great i hope you can join us and just wanna conclude again by saying thank you for being here today and uh we hope to see you next week have a great rest your day bye thank you