well good afternoon everybody and welcome to uh today's thursday afternoon uh webinar or part of atark's thursday after lunch webinar series for those of you that don't know me my name is jonathan albaum and i am the principal digital strategist for the federal government at servicenow i'm taking over for tom suiter today and i'm going to be moderating this fireside chat today we're going to cover a framework for dealing with a crisis like we're all dealing with now during the pandemic our federal cio panelists will go in depth about the changes and the innovations they've had to incorporate into their agency and how they plan to make these changes part of their ongoing operations moving forward so i want to welcome everybody to uh to today's session um i want to thank the entire atar team i want to thank connie coleman from servicenow and the entire servicenow team for sponsoring today's event so this afternoon we're gonna hear from uh two um well-established cios uh we're gonna hear from jason gray who is a cio for the department of education and we're going to hear from mark patterson who's the chief information officer at the department of defense education activity as part of dod so i'd like to begin by asking uh jason and mark to introduce themselves and provide a little bit of background on their careers their in their organization so we'll go ahead and we'll start with mark um good afternoon everyone my name is mark patterson as mentioned i'm the chief confirmation officer for department of defense education activity um if you're familiar with us you probably know us as dodea or dodea we like to use those acronyms or previously we would have been called dodds or adidas we operate right now 160 schools and eight districts located in 11 countries seven states and two territories across ten time zones that's a lot uh it is uh it's a very exciting mission um to summarize that what we do is we're the k through 12 school district for military connected children they're about 990 000 military connected children around the world within dodea we support about 70 000 which is around 7 we also have a workforce of about 12 500 again spread around the world about 8 000 of those are our teachers and administrators um wide worldwide great mission love the kids support the kids and a huge.edu network that we support to keep those schools up and operating again as as mentioned previously this has been a challenging time i think we'll talk more in depth in a little bit about some of the challenges we faced and some of the things that we put in place or we'll be putting in place very quickly to adapt um to this evolving environment that that we're in um that's all i have jonathan pretty quick and easy yeah very good thanks mark uh jason uh once go ahead go ahead and introduce yourself a little bit of background on who you are and department of education great uh thank you for the invitation and thank you for having me um i am well aware of the dodea comment uh started my career in the dod uh so this is the the fifth agency i've actually been at uh being at education uh for now a little over four years i as their cio we have a around a little over 800 million dollars from an i.t portfolio standpoint of systems uh and services that we provide which is the full spectrum uh you know nationwide we've got you know i.t operations governance uh cyber security uh when i when i got to the department i know we're here to talk about resilience but when i when i got to the department my focus was really on five key focus areas number one with cyber security which is absolutely critical and continues to be uh number two was governance which is kind of how does everything work and and how do you oversee it and make sure that you're spending tax paying dollars appropriately number three which has been absolutely critical and i plan on talking a little bit about this today uh is it modernization uh number four is user experience because absolutely critical and number five uh organizational health because if you don't have a healthy organization uh the people actually deliver all the services that everyone depends on uh doesn't go very well so uh it's been a great experience in education i love working for government uh i love the mission of education uh i think it's great that uh that mark and his mission align very very well not sure if that was orchestrated correctly but that's beautiful uh so looking forward to the conversation and uh thanks jason and you know what a perfect um you know set of cios to have as people are preparing to go back to school right think about education children and you know it's just an example of how we've all had to sort of reframe our thinking about um just about everything including how we educate our children to how we run our organizations how we interact with our customers so i want to thank mark and jason for kicking things off i'm going to go ahead and share a couple of slides that will help frame out some of the questions that we're going to focus on so let me go ahead and and do that so the uh the concept of this new normal and a road map to the new normals a lot of people are talking about uh when um you know this this happened at servicenow we we all sort of defaulted back to uh some experience we had previously and you know the immediate um ex experience was one of responding to the crisis at hand and as we uh as we get into the conversation you know i really want jason to be able to be able to talk about how his organization responded because i think they did it extremely well but that was the that was the mode we were all in for the first you know five four or five weeks so many organizations just figuring out how to support this you know remote work and support the mission in a remote way what we do want to focus on a little bit more today though is how do you take all those changes and embed them in your organization so you're ready as you move forward and whatever the next crisis is uh if it's a continuation of the pandemic if it's an earthquake if it is a it's a flood it is some other uh catastrophic event you're ready and um the the ability to maintain productivity and time of crisis is there irrespective of your of your organization how you do your work and then lastly is this longer term idea you know real resiliency i like to think about it as a as you know true digital transformation when you get to the point where the organization can operate uh really no matter what's happening you've automated the parts that can be automated you rely less on humans to do certain tasks there's more ai there's more connectivity across systems and you know across agencies and across people so that that's where i think you know this this whole thing is going and um this is a you know a frame for some of the talk that we're going to have today you know and one of the um concepts that i think supports this is this idea of a platform uh you know we talked about platform as a service often um i think it's a strategy that you know a lot of organizations are adopting in order to be better prepared you know platform strategies support this idea of end-to-end workflows and you know empowering people to either create workflows or move data around to get their work done more efficiently core is data integration uh experiences really matter i think in a time like this when there's a lot of uncertainty and the ability to collaborate has you know changed for people in this environment because we don't have the same opportunity to interact that that we used to so bringing that online is is clearly important and you know long term it's about flexibility uh interoperability being able to see into your processes and your organization to understand how how work is going so it's a it's a strategy built around platforms i think is is making a difference in some of the organizations i see and you know very quickly from a servicenow perspective um you know we we've talked about platforms all the time servicenow is a platform company we um we uh built a very robust platform we we refer to as the now platform and everything that you know about servicenow is sort of baked into that platform the the configuration management database uh integration capabilities developer tools mobile components and you know it's on top of that platform that the the iq workflows that you know uh itunes service management or it operations or employee workflows or onboarding off-boarding or customer service workflows or the ability to build custom workflows through uh through the app engine all of those things ride on the now platform which is a platform uh for workflow the core to it really uh is the integration with with data with data in a variety of systems whether they are uh systems that are you know quote legacy or their newer systems it's the core data that an agency uh needs so the integration of that data leveraging that data via workflow to drive mission outcomes is really i think one of the you know calling cards for a platform company like servicenow and uh servicenow likes to think of ourselves as the platform of the platforms you know we can connect the data in very meaningful ways and allow people to interact with it through the the tools that they are most comfortable with web tools uh chat tools uh mobile devices uh and you know that that's part of important part of the servicenow story that ability to connect the the disconnected aspects of an operation and that's become increasingly important in today's uh in today's age the unstructured collaboration we relied on in the past doesn't necessarily work so well any longer so as we as we think about today's uh questions whether it's whether it's platforms or the integration of data is the integration of systems i think a lot of what we'll hear about is increased collaboration and the ability to drive mission outcomes by working together in in different ways so i'm going to go ahead and pause there and we're going to i want to jump into a couple of questions and this one i want to lead off with jason and jason if i can ask you can you talk a little bit about your modern modernization journey at the department of education and how it really sets you up for that that response phase that we talked about in in the in the beginning of these slides yeah absolutely um and i and i love your uh your slide deck and talking about the importance of uh the platform because uh coming into a new organization you know the first thing you want to understand and this is something you learned many many years ago is what am i responsible for you want to do an inventory you want to have an understanding of all of the things that you're responsible for which is you know ideally you have that it's all in a nice little cndb and um ideally um but what we did is we started doing an assessment shortly after getting to the department uh and focused on creating a visualization of our as-is environment and the focus was on connecting a lot of those dots and again i mentioned the five focus areas it was cyber security what do i have governance what do i have i.t modernization what do i have uh and from there which literally took a few months to get that done uh we thought okay well let's talk about some of the things we want to achieve uh going forward and we focused on three real key things when when i saw the as-is environment it was focused on um you know we had a lot of cloud uh fortunately at the department of education we're 100 cloud so while a lot of government is focused on data center optimization consolidation at the department of education we're focused on cloud consolidation uh and optimization uh because we had a lot of cloud and so that was one of the key areas uh we also looked at rationalization uh from an application system standpoint because we realized through the assessment that we had uh some duplicative services that we were paying for and dependent on and we looked at ways to consolidate them and the third key area was automation how can we automate some of these systems with manual process so so so we looked at the as is uh then we created a 2b and then a roadmap to actually get there uh and i will say that our it modernization journey literally kicked off uh last year um the contracts were awarded we made our final transition in may of last year uh and it could not have come at a more perfect time because in the past environment we were working with systems that were really slow uh where now the impact of the pandemic at the department has been rather insignificant so timing is everything in life and information technology right jason when uh when you started down that uh technology modernization um what kind of uh leadership support did you get and how did you make it relevant to uh the mission of the department of education so that's a great question and i definitely uh would attribute a large part of the success to the support that we have had a large part of my career has been working in healthcare i.t although as time goes on it's getting less and less but in healthcare you you need an emergency room and from my experience a lot of it organizations tend to run like an emergency room but to your point when you talk about resiliency it's about creating the uh the more tactical and strategic decisions of which um i t modernization is one of them so it was really about communicating what we're doing and why we're doing it and the impact of what we're doing uh as it related so to give you an example on day two when i got to the department i was given this this long during an all staff or an all hands meeting someone had shared that do you know how much time we waste waiting for our machines to boot up uh what was fascinating is on day three i was like wow what did i get myself into but um that was a key anchor point of listen i know that i can make this faster and we went from a around a 20-minute boot-up time with all of the layers of stuff that we had to less than 42 seconds through modernization and through the strategy that we had and that just from a number standpoint uh returned uh literally over 1500 hours a day in productivity to the department millions of dollars of of lost productivity where people would be waiting to so in terms of getting the support uh having those metrics and having that data and being able to go to my leadership and say you you won't have to hear people complaining about their i.t anymore uh that alone was one thing and then two the cost savings and the return on investment uh is where we got the buy-in so just getting people focused on the day-to-day and taking away some of the complexity of uh the the mundane it's like you're adding you just added people added full-time employees to the organization so yeah i think that's a great start jason thank you well i want to turn to mark and um you know hear your story mark how did you uh you know begin this process of transitioning to remote work and not just remote work you know setting up an environment where where children can be educated in a remote way where necessary we um you know very similar i listen to jason speak and it's like bringing back the pathway that i'm following as well so there's there's a lot of similarities i will say one of the one of the key things i found and i've been at dodea about two years um as we did a lot of that same looking that many of us do when we renewed an organization one of the i the areas i identified to look at was partnerships and begin to develop those partnerships with with our different educational organizations out there externally partnerships with many of the schools under the department of education to understand how really to run i.t not coming from an educational background how to run i.t in an educational environment so i had to learn very quickly because wasn't on board very long and then here comes this thing called covid i call it bc before covet everything was running smooth we were starting to rationalize our applications we'd identify those those different platforms that we were moving to we'd put our foot in the door of cloud migration we already had a number of uh as jason mentioned cloud offerings already up and running out there trying really to pull that together and then right as we hit the middle of school school year last year around february south korea's school started closing and then it became this ripple effect the the problem we found that the challenge it wasn't a problem it was a challenge is that we had to change from a on-prem teacher teaching environment to a fully remote environment and utilize the tools that we had i'm an old army soldier so i'm going to use what i have right now i know that i will get something in the future but we have to use what we had so we had to use those advancements that we made we had to use those partnerships and we also had to use what i i think a big push of innovation so when we finally closed our final school we had 8500 teachers that weren't necessarily used to teaching in a remote environment now they're struggling they're trying to learn just like you mentioned jonathan earlier students are trying to learn you know how does a kindergartner or first grader now operate in an environment that they're not used to they're used to watching cartoons now they have to watch their teacher and they have to learn that way so there was a lot going on from that avenue you know we found that communication was very important collaboration was key to that we had some technical challenges with our vpn we had to do some work arounds we operate our our educational society and g suites for education so we had to quickly expand that environment we weren't necessarily prepared for where we were going we definitely weren't prepared for um google classroom and those other things that now were necessary for that teacher to learn so we actually made that transition in about a four day period we transitioned from brick and mortar learning for all our schools into the google classroom the g suites environment tool sets uh enhanced security in about a four day period was a perfect no i think you always have that kid that's going to try to find ways around and try to google bomb his teacher um we had that but we found ways to prevent that and we kept working and working so as we moved into this environment i gotta give credit to our teachers and teachers around the world and i think jason will probably echo that with me that are facing all these new challenges now as well as the parents and the students because it is a totally different learning environment but from a technology perspective we had already put a number of things in place that allowed that collaboration and communication we were already using our platforms that made change a lot easier that made communication a lot easier that made automation a lot easier where in the past we would have had to code a cold fusion application that would have taken weeks or multiple people we could change code we can modify workflows we can make those changes very quickly in in in hours compared to weeks or or months as it was previously so we were prepared yeah i think that's a great point you know uh this is not to say there's never a time to develop a custom application but most of the time the things we do are similar across organizations it's about workflow to your points about moving data and uh you getting approvals and you know various kinds of uh you know related activities so if you have a platform for workflow and you can use it uh you're at the 50 yard line you know and you can get sprint to the end zone perhaps i i think there was mark there was something in there that you you mentioned that i you know had a reaction to you talk about uh you got the google classroom up and running technically it worked uh but there's that whole change management piece not just for the students to learn but uh you know i come from a family of teachers and i with my sister and her sister-in-law recently and hearing them a lot of anxiety around teaching uh in this upcoming school year and they will be remote in the beginning of the year what uh you know how did they how did teachers adjust culturally to uh that kind of change and um you know was there a role for your organization and supporting them through that oh yes and it so it was a big change for many teachers um you know like i'm struggling with this what we're doing here i'd much rather be in person standing beside you and jason talking same way with a teacher in many instances the way they relate to the students we saw such positive activity from many teachers who used youtube and the kids the kids especially the high school students they they fell right into this this was good for them it was the younger kids that we had to really work with so the teachers the teachers had to learn how to teach differently they had to learn how to teach remotely as well as even our staff you know we were an organization in bc before covid that didn't telework a lot we did not have a lot of telework so now all of a sudden you've got 8500 people trying to telework when they're not even used to how to connect to the vpn how do i report a problem what if i can't connect to the vpn so there were a lot of changes in a very short period of time um you know that's where i think the collaboration and the change management came in um communication was key how do i log into the vpn um what do i do that constant communication helped that teacher i believe um sort of get more comfortable with teaching in an environment that previously they weren't comfortable with um some some people will never get comfortable with this environment it's just not not you know doesn't bode well for some people but these teachers they they overcame i'll continue to give them props hopefully they're not watching this they'll get big heads but they did a great job in in what they've done teachers around the world you know i can't say enough as to how they're doing that so we went to the remote environment um to expand on that a little bit more we are now operating in three environments we're operating in a brick and mortar environment we're operating in a remote environment and we're also operating a virtual school so in a pattern of seven months we've went from one operating environment to now operating in three so congratulations i mean it shows what's possible all right it's a great uh you know it's a great example and if jason just switch back to you for a second um as we've been chatting uh you shared a story which uh hopefully you can you can share with us the audience uh now um you had to make some quick innovations in terms of how you got people pif cards and badges and there's some complexity there that wasn't something as i understand that you were anticipating and you had to react very quickly uh now you have some new capabilities in your environment it sounds like so what can would you please share that story with us yeah absolutely and i just wanted to to add to uh mark's comment though because i absolutely agree the partnership and collaboration is key uh and i know fattara does a lot for that of making sure that the cxo communities work together but the reality is if you don't have those partnerships uh it's a much heavier lift and challenge uh so uh in terms of some of the the challenges yes when we i felt like operationally we were in a really good place we i mean everything was new everything was modern uh we had communicated uh this is how you you know the department had uh uh while the amount of telework was less than where we're at uh today uh everyone was used to teleworking and knew how to telework and knew how to connect to our vpn solution so the lift wasn't uh a lot of that literally and i i know i had shared with you before when the pandemic first hit uh our average speed to answer from a call standpoint went to i think around 55 seconds and within two days it was back down to 14 seconds so everyone was used to the environment but uh one of the challenges that we were not anticipating uh was when people can come in and get pip cards uh you know the multi-factor authentication cac if you're in dod uh that you you couldn't get them uh so we went to uh several of the vendors who are providing the services uh because we're a contractor owned contractor operated uh it organization and it was this is going to take several weeks or months to actually engineer a solution the bottom line is we knew that we had around two weeks because we were going to be having new employees come into the department and we needed to be able to provision them uh equipment that could log in and authenticate to our environment uh and very quickly the teams worked and within five days two of those days being over a weekend they came up with an approved solution that would allow us to provision equipment uh you know send out equipment to people's homes uh so it's it's really changed the way uh but to your point earlier i think having a platform that could manage that was absolutely critical because when you have a bunch of requests coming in and if if you didn't have a centralized uh vehicle to manage all of that and know where your paint points were that would have been a nightmare uh so in the end the fact that we actually do have a solid platform that actually manages it requests or service issues um and provisioning equipment whether it's credentialing or issuing equipment that enables us to to make that a smooth transition uh than if if we hadn't had that so uh but that was just one of the challenges we faced um well now you have a new capability in your environment right and you can bring people uh on board remotely and you can provision them uh remotely uh so some some cios that i that i've spoken with where they've had these kinds of experiences they um they very you know in the rush to get it done they did it in a way that it works but it might might not be sustainable it might not be scalable they have to revisit jason what did you do to make sure that as you implemented those changes very quickly you did it so they become part of your readiness and your organization so you know it's not you know it's not going to break you feel comfortable and confident in it and it's ongoing success so that's a great question i think collaboration is probably the key there is that we yes we did it for education but we also communicated across the cio council what our approach was because we knew other agencies may have similar challenges uh you know we brought in dhs as well to talk about what we were doing uh so it was really the collaboration of government that at least in my mind ensured that it was a scalable solution that was repeatable uh and to your point from a uh a new item in our tool chest if you will in the past if we would had a situation where uh people could not uh perhaps leverage a piv card uh the answer would have been well you wait a couple of days and come into the office and we'll get this for you now we don't have to wait uh we can do it right away uh usually it's next day or faster so it's it has changed the way that we can you know the the speed at which we can deliver service but uh the scalability that was literally through a partnership and collaboration no that's a great story if you get people productive faster they can do their jobs more more quickly mark any any reaction or similar kind of story you'd like to like to share with the audience i think you know um what we built and what we had to innovate and those things we put in place we were always thinking to the future even though the future was unknown we wanted them to be sustainable we have a very as being the department of defense have as jason does as well very robust cyber security requirement we did not want to do anything in our innovative ideas that would affect the data or affect access to the kids those kind of things so we always had to think that as part of our process and we have a great cyber security group that came in everybody back to that partnership collaboration and communication any changes that we made moving forward we wanted to make sure and align them with the with the necessary regulation assess the risks but look at what we were doing for the future just like our google environment we could have built it up and we could have taken it down at the end of the year thinking we're all going back into brick and mortar schools this year but instead we built it up and sustained it and it was very similar to a number of our applications covered reporting is not going away so we have an application to where those things are reported and we're tracking and monitoring that's not going away that was a quick fix but also may be there with us for a number of years and also data retention too isn't very important the collection of the data and the retaining of the data for lessons learned as well as moving forward in the future so we we saw a lot of the same things probably jason did but always continued as as many people do thinking to the future what we build has to endure it has to stay it's either a foundation to build off on in the future but you've got to put effort into that foundation if you don't put the effort in the foundation you'll never be able to build on it so let's begin with the future in mind that's it that's today i just wrote down here and it was challenging because even you don't know the future you you can anticipate and that's a lot i think of what we do as cios anyway knowing that the future's not known from a budgetary and a technology perspective but you have to put that effort into saying okay this isn't probably going to go away we may be working differently for the next two to three years build it so by year two we can relook at it right well you know i think it's it's it's not a overstatement to say that we live in a highly complex world it's very interconnected there are a lot of risks out there and as we're um thinking about running um operations that support complex organizations you need flexibility you need adaptability the interoperability we talked about those are all things you're you're describing here integration of different technologies very quickly to to maintain and achieve uh you know long-term business outcomes mission outcomes so good story so far we're gonna we're gonna pause for just a second and uh we're gonna put up a poll to get uh the some audience input so you're gonna see two questions up here now um so the first is asking the audience what greatest challenges were is your agency moved into uh to become a digital organization and then on a scale of one to five how challenging was the transition to uh remote work as you you know as we made these changes related to coven so please go ahead and answer the poll and we'll share the results back all right so uh as as we move on um i want to uh pivot for just a second and um talk a little bit about the uh the opportunities that come out of this kind of uh situation you know we are we're all very focused on um you know i think uh i think about it as the inside uh you know we have an inside out uh approach sometimes to the way we serve our customers we we know what we need as the government officials or what our programs need and you know we structure systems and approaches so we can get that but we don't always think first about how the customers interact across systems or across the agencies and if we are able to think strategically about the way we have our um we design our systems we build you know we can meet customers where they are i think much more much more efficiently so uh thinking about that idea um working from the outside and working from what the what the your employees need or your students need what kind of opportunities emerge in this new uh in this new paradigm and the new normal and working remotely for an uh unknown period of time what can we do different how can we really change the way our our agencies work uh start with jason any any thoughts or comments we might be able to uh build upon yeah so that's a that's a tricky question because there's a lot of different possible answers but i think um and i think mark hit on this before i think communication is is absolutely critical um in terms of making sure that the people are informed of not the capabilities that you have and the capabilities that they have available to them um so when i think about the use of collaboration tools uh that has been went prior to covid or bc we had around 60 000 uh sessions a month with the department uh and last week we hit over 400 000 sessions in a month so i think from a collaboration tools and making sure that people understand how to use them and just in terms of capability uh outside in i think that's that is really critical uh because it it doesn't matter if you have a great set of services that people don't know they're available or don't know how to use them which goes to the second piece which is education not just communicating but educating and making sure that people are aware of and then of course receiving feedback uh we've got tons of feedback a lot of it extremely positive but some of it is and hey we didn't think of this problem uh and what's fascinating now is because we have thousands of people who are now working remotely uh there's there's other challenges that have come up that you know we didn't think of uh and i'll just just kind of to to give some context here i think one of the things that certainly um maybe we're in people's minds when we first transitioned from a coveted standpoint to where we're at now was how can we ensure that the people are are working and producing uh but what's been fascinating is to watch the this the flip of that where how can we make sure people are not working too much uh and disconnecting uh from work more uh because sometimes people feel like they're now always connected uh so those are just a couple well thanks jason i think the the idea of being a digital organization is really built around that outside approach because you're you've really changed the way you you um go about you know building systems and interacting with customers and employees and you know again i wrote down collaboration and then um education making sure people know what's possible to give them the ability to work how they how they want to mark thinking about the people you support in the the school children the educators what you know what what sort of reaction do you have to that concept of you know digital and tied to uh you know outside in development design user center design maybe sometimes that's how we think about it yeah i think i think it's more good outcomes sort of to go off of what jason said as well you know our director made a good statement a few months ago about we went from working at home to living at work and it really seems like that a lot of times the way we are now but our users you know as we you know with all that we had going on the new technologies the way they were experiencing what we were providing to them um it couldn't be with a lot of training we had to use the kiss method we had to keep it simple we had to roll it out and provide some training it was a much different environment previously we would have had lunch and learns we would have did all these things to support a roll out um the help desk tech used to be able to come to your desk and help you with your laptop that doesn't happen anymore that you know the ability to touch and show people things wasn't available so back to that collaboration and communication how did we do desktop support change totally from that perspective if they were having a problem getting getting an understanding getting that the necessary training down to the user to be able to utilize whatever that application whatever that device was as quickly as possible so they could get it out and moving as well it was a great partnership with us with our education technologists because they're a big part of the education environment as well and they're working on that technology that supports education we're side by side with them working on on the technology from an information perspective and there's a great partnership there that was a big success for us because they're the ones who are are more local to the teachers help the teachers through the technology everything from how do i work my interactive flat panel to how do i use google classroom so there was a lot of partnership um working training in a in a very short time frame looking back now i don't know that we could have done it any differently but i think as we're moving forward in the future we are looking at different ways of developing training we're rolling out different things we've rolled out microsoft teams we've got a much larger platform now than we had previously um which was coming we expedited the roll out of that um to help support the organization uh that good good uh good comments mark i think that's a really you know uh it's a really relevant example for what we're what we're talking about and sets up you know you could you could apply um that approach to a lot of uh challenges an organization has whether it's rolling out new technologies supporting the program pandemic or just the the natural change management that occurs over time in an organization i think that's a really great muscle your organization has it's complex for different different reasons uh we're going to put the uh poll uh results uh back up for a second from uh from the first poll and uh i thought it was interesting that um the biggest challenge was uh virtual capacities uh of everything we we put up there because you know a lot of it has to do with the collaboration tools the ability to to work under um you know in in new con in new ways using uh microsoft teams zoom uh google meet all these different uh capabilities so that that was the biggest challenge for uh for a lot of people in in transition it sounds like and then um just i thought also you know interesting that a lot of organizations 38 according to this uh to our respondents um only had you know and it was either not challenging at all for eight percent or 38 said they only had a few challenges so that transition while it you know may have been a little bit uh unique within uh different organizations the investments that we've been making in itune modernization uh over the past several years you know i work back when when i was in the government just a few years ago uh as vitara rolled out and it modernization was um you know really critical in in the last administration getting started with cloud and moving forward those those investments really paid off now may not have seen seem like it at the time but they're i think core to the difference that you guys are describing having gotten started jason certainly spoke to that and i think that the um you know the respondents here are are noting that their organizations didn't have tremendous challenges in moving so i think it's a great sign and a great story for the federal i.t community about what we can do if we invest wisely and build our organizations well and we're going to put up a second poll that we'll get we'll get the answers back in in a few minutes um you'll you'll see that second poll in just a second uh so here you know how how confident are you in your agency's ability to embrace digital transformation efforts during and then after the pandemic and i think that after is an important part of that question and then um how do you think your agency responded to coving uh we'll get back to uh we'll get back to this uh in a few minutes but we do have a question um that's come in for jason and i'd like to uh see if we can go ahead and uh address that so jason uh and mark feel free to comment this on as well uh jason can you share maybe one or two uh trends that you're seeing in education uh po in the post covet era and um you know how does it support uh these changes going forward yeah so i i think uh one is the as i mentioned briefly before the the use of the collaboration tools that we have from a trend standpoint i would also say supply chain management has been a very fascinating experience because the the just-in-time process that we historically had used uh changed when suddenly everyone was having a challenge uh getting equipment uh and just the example i typically use is uh for a while there it was hard to go to the grocery store and even get toilet paper um let alone any sort of disinfectant or or that sort of thing which is still a challenge so i think from uh from a trend standpoint it certainly allowed us to kind of recalibrate um you know from a supply chain standpoint of you know what are what is the amount of equipment and services to have uh so i think that another area and i've really tried to focus on four key areas which is enhancing our processes or re-looking at our processes because of the pandemic looking at our policies are there policies that we need to change because of how we respond to the the pandemic what sorts of tools out there are we using that have been uh great uh what other types of tools out there are available that could perhaps consolidate or ease and then again how can we better uh educate our team and and i i completely agree with uh with mark's comment about keeping it simple because you don't have a lot of time you got to ramp up very quickly and the the great news about technology today is there's a lot of really simple uh pretty advanced solutions out there that and capabilities out there that that is is open for people that is open for people to use you know jason just a quick note your supply chain comment is i think really on point was it it wasn't just uh you know the toilet paper and things like that when you think about the the public schools in the united states they're um they're a source for many children to receive uh you know healthy food i worked at the usda for a long time i worked at the food and nutrition service an agency there in the school lunch program the school breakfast program those are critical programs for a lot of kids and those schools close making sure that there are uh options for you know children to um you know to eat uh to get the food they they deserve just as just as challenging is what you're describing with the supply chain has really broken down in a lot of ways so being you know thinking about how uh you know goods and services data even is able to move through the the large ecosystem i think that's a sounds like that's a best practice to be prepared for the future uh certainly absolutely and i think mark hit on that when he was talking about as a cio you're you're always trying to predict the future uh supply chain was definitely an area that fortunately things worked out well for us but i think going forward it definitely gave us some some good lessons learned on these are some other things we should be thinking great mark anything you want to add there i do have a question that's just coming for you as well um just real quick on the emerging technology i think that's that's a struggle a lot in education um because we're we always struggle to find the right technology for the right grade for the right at least in the k-12 environment for that student to have in their hand to be able to do what they need to do sometimes curriculum calls out a different piece of a different device than you have on hand back to that supply chain how do i now get because someone in the curricular side ordered this new curriculum that needs 100 100 ipads how do i get that quickly so there's always a fine balance i think and emerging as we move forward as more of that merges and technology uh sort of expands to cover multiple areas i think it'll be much better for us in education i just wanted to add to that but i i did owe everything jason said you know before that so very good now the the question that came to you mark uh i think ties uh into your your your comment you just made uh the question asks um how do you go about evaluating new technology to solve new and existing use cases so that i've had example you just mentioned you know you need 100 ipads to be able to teach class well you haven't had ipads in this kind of environment before how do you evaluate the the tools that support you know that technology capability so we just established in it this was in in process before but we've we've emphasized it now a classroom technology group basically that works in conjunction with i.t et's teachers educators external people from the organization as well where we collaborate and come together look at the curriculum look at the grade level i mean especially for us so you know kindergartner can't remember a 16 character password with uppercase lowercase you know we've got to find different ways of providing um access and capability to the to the younger students to the to the sped students um there's a lot of variety so we couldn't do that in it i mean that's not us to decide that so we're back to the partnership we're pulling together a group that will stay together they're not this is not a one-time thing this is a group that will stay together we're calling them champions program so we have champions out in each school in each region that are part of this group that we're consistently are constantly really identifying new technologies moving forward that align with the curriculum that align with with emerging trends from the educational side of the house as well as we have cyber security in there we have privacy personnel everybody's a part of that group so we can we can lay out a good future plan uh we do an i.t roadmap every year that informs the teachers and everyone of what's coming from a technology perspective but it's that partnership i mean that that group of teachers industry experts um as well as leas and others out outside the organization we're searching we're looking we all believe we can work together to to to fix that problem i mean that sounds like a fantastic capability you've added into the organization a governance process a uh you know a collaboration process that will serve you well to build that readiness for what's going to come in the future we're all thinking about the fact that we're going to have to make change over time and it's going to evolve those changes tend to be better better accepted when they come from that kind of committee i think it's a really smart move mark uh i i applaud your uh you know the organization creating that kind of uh that kind of group um we're gonna put the results from the second poll back on uh put those results up in a second here and you know um i i really uh you know i think it's amazing and i think it's great that 80 percent of our respondents here are confident or moderately confident or you know have added extremely confident at the top 95 that uh will uh continue our digital transformations in our organizations i think you know uh you know we're past the tipping point covet is sped up all of these kinds of changes and evolution i think across all industries value chains have been you know really broken and people have different expectations and i think government really gets it and the digital transformation that we've started is only going to accelerate i think we see that uh that here and you know also very pleased to see that uh you know 85 of our respondents were satisfied or very satisfied with how their agencies responded um you know as a as a former fed i'm very proud to uh you know to see that and understand you know recognize that the government's led the way in a lot of uh in a lot of sense around uh around covert uh we have just we have about 10 minutes left and we have uh another question i want to make sure that we get to some some lessons learned and i'm going to open this question up to jason and mark i'd like you to comment on it too uh how are you handling um accessibility in a virtual remote world i think and i take that to mean both you know not everybody can access these technologies but at the same time what if people don't have access to internet or they don't have the ability to interact in in the way that others can yeah so i'm i will i would say much like we we do normally um meaning that uh if if a user has a requirement uh we have a request process that goes through we have an entire team that's uh dedicated to assistive technology to make sure that we can facilitate any unique requirement for employees as i mentioned briefly earlier we are a contractor-owned contractor operated meaning i have a small around 100 federal employees and then the rest of the staff are supported by contractors uh as an example our help desk is in louisiana uh so uh fortunately on the the far north uh west side of louisiana right now but um so we're handling it just like we would uh even during prior uh to covid um just addressing talking to the employees and getting them what they need to make sure they can do their work very good mark accessibility uh and i i think when you're educating students you have a lot of you have a range of uh ability um how how have you had to deal with this so from an employee perspective we we were in the process of a life cycle program so our employees were covered we had challenges with those that had been authorized departure and were on leave without pay and needed to come back so there were a number of challenges we had to work through really our students were the main groups that we found that there was there was a lack of devices at home lack of internet so we distributed about 7 700 laptops chromebooks to students around the world and about 249 hot spots back to jason's comment about supply and needing things you know we we had that amount based on our ratio within the schools and our high schools were one to one uh middle and elementary we were two to one ratio which we became problematic when you're not a lot of the the schools out you know around our areas are one-to-one ratio we chose not to do that previously from a funding perspective and we're operating fine when we're at brick and mortar but now when we move out not every student not every child has a computer at home you have larger families with four or five children you know how does that work around you know virtual learning with one computer at the home and five kids got to get on there to do their lessons so we were distributing laptops as quickly as we could signing those out um providing the support for those again if they got the laptop home and it didn't work it's back to the et or it to help support from that perspective so we understood that there was a a a general important need and still is even now we're actually seeing some numbers increase as we're working in the three environments just because tommy's in virtual school his sister's in brick and mortar there's a two different requirements there in a single household that we have to meet at this point so that's very complex and mark there's one specific question for you about asking what the response to teams has been is microsoft team something you rolled out as part of this we are we we increased the rollout you know across the department they've done some things as well but ours is a our microsoft for education is what we operate on and we rolled out teams as part of this as part of this we had google meet which the educators were using and teaching for the classroom our goal was to roll out teams in this long rollout period we didn't have that we had to roll it out and are still rolling it out actually down to the regional level but just getting it out there as quickly as possible gave an alternative we were having a lot of problems with our skype link connection um immediately when we all went remote and everybody now began to rely on that capability it wouldn't hold it we didn't have that capability so here we had to roll out teams and expanded the use of of google me for us but we wanted to focus google me specifically on the education and initially microsoft teams just on the business side of the house or the administrative side of the house eventually we'll look at what's the product in the future but right now we have failover if one doesn't work we jump to the other so the failover was really important that wasn't necessarily thought about but now you've got your entire workforce working off of one thing if there's no failover with that thing now your entire workforce is down and your mission is dead and systems go down we all know that having been in in i.t so uh we had we have just a few minutes left and i want to i want to return to jason to get some lessons learned and uh some concluding thoughts and then mark i'll give you the uh you know the last word on that so i think i've covered uh the majority of them i will say that the absolute most important thing is that it modernization is critical uh the collaboration and partnership with uh your leadership and your peers to make sure that they understand the the significance and the value add and or the roi on what you're investing in so that you have buy-in uh is absolutely critical uh supply chain as well i think the continuity and redundancy and in looking for single points of failure to make sure that you shore those up i know when we first started this journey uh our vpn capability uh was was right at around uh where the department a little bit more than what the department needed uh to have all employees working at the same exact time uh and there wasn't a moment that went by where i wasn't thinking well what happens if one of those devices fail uh again we had continuity and we we had a a process built in but it's the sort of thing where now any of the processes we have uh certainly as it relates to vpn could fail or all but one could fail and we'd still be able to provide the services so i think from a lessons learned standpoint uh and then the the communication about everything that's going on is absolutely critical so that because you you have people not sure you know um not just from a technology standpoint but even from uh you know what is the you know how is the new normal going to be for the department and i will say the department of education has been great on this is our plan this is what this means to you uh which we've also leveraged from an i.t standpoint to talk about here's how we're providing support this is what this means to you uh so communicate uh all you know it's been absolutely critical well uh thanks jason mark i think you know um you know we we started school the 24th that was when our biggest opening was and and operating in these three environments um has has been a challenge um but day one of success school is successful and i think it's taking for us it's taking these lessons learned looking as jason mentioned to the future and dod has also given us guidance of what the future might look like and beginning to look at the future and taking what we've done and beginning to work towards what will be the new normal um ac after covid um because it is going to come you know we're working towards that but we always have to keep these lessons learned i think and and the challenges that we faced and overcome um we'll face more but at least in the back of our minds as we're planning forward we've gained knowledge we've gained and jason mentioned about his vpn ours was the same way you know if we weren't in three time zones we would have failed but the fact that we were in three time zones i could watch the numbers and i watched the numbers climbed up and get almost to the top of that vpn you know sweating to say oh no who's going to be the first one to get kicked out hopefully not the director and um you know all of a sudden it would go back down as the time zone so we barely made it we've upgraded we understand i think most organizations are really looking at lessons learned and trying to improve and move forward and move into what this new new is going to be for us is as i t professionals a more remote more technology more different devices you know a lot you know is is going to be changing as we've all worked through this well i mean great uh great comments there and i think the complexity only ratchet ratchets up as we think about a safe return to the workplace a safe return to the classroom uh in schools not just you know um in the in the dod but across the country as we as we understand what that's going to look like the just the the process of understanding how to get people uh and children physically distance as appropriate or understand the management of ppe those are all on the horizon uh for you guys inside of your uh your organizations and your customers so um you know it sounds to me like you have a great start um to to deal with that next set of challenges based on your investments in modernization and the success you've had so far and i i wrote down three words uh that i think you know form the basis of you know some takeaways for everyone communication collaboration and education and you know for doing those things in our organizations irrespective of covid or another crisis we're gonna have stronger more uh resilient organizations that are that are ready for anything that can be productive in a time of crisis that can be digitally uh resilient so um with that i wanna i wanna conclude our our conversation today and i want to invite everybody to join the next atarc webinar next week on thursday september 3rd we're going to have another conversation where we're going to have some subject matter experts focus on the cultural shifts that are happening in the federal devops ecosystem as a result of covet 19 and how agencies are continuing continuing to update their systems despite uh workforce changes so you can see the upcoming webinar here and i hope that you're you're able to join i want to thank everybody again for being here today i especially want to thank jason gray who is the cio for the department of education and mark patterson who is the cio for the defense education activity for their insightful comments their willingness to share their successes and their challenges and provide everybody with some great opportunities for for learning so that's all and hope to see you again next week thanks everybody bye