you um foreign hmm you foreign you [Music] hi thank you all for joining us we're going to begin in about three minutes [Music] to so so hi thank you all for joining we're going to start in about one minute [Music] um so hello everybody um welcome to today's webinar uh my name is jonathan albaum and i am the principal digital strategist for the federal government at servicenow and uh i will be taking over for uh tom suiter today uh for a tart's thursday afternoon uh lunch it webinar series i'm going to get this great opportunity to moderate a fireside chat with some really great panelists we have eric gallagher who is the chief information officer at the national institutes for health national center for comp complementary and integrative health and davarius peoples who's the chief information officer at the u.s army corps of engineers uh they both have great stories to tell about their experience during uh this time during covet 19 and their agency's response i think it's going to be a a great conversation we're going to cover this overall framework for what life has been like for those of us those of us in the technology sphere uh during this time starting with how we uh immediately responded to um the challenges at hand and how we're now taking those uh innovations that were created the different technologies we purchased you know integrating them into our environments in a way that will ensure long-term readiness plus driving this all drives us toward the state of um very uh strong digital resiliency and we're going to talk about the benefits of that how we get there and what comes next so i just want to give a quick background on myself um my uh uh as i said my name is jonathan albaum and i i work at servicenow in a role that cuts across all of our uh federal customers uh i work on digital strategies and the challenges of it modernization and running an it organization i i come to this job after having been a cio in the federal government for a number of years i worked uh largely at usda i was a cio in one of our one of the sub agencies at usda the food and nutrition service i worked at gsa for um for several years and then eventually returned to usda and had a great opportunity to work for the prior secretary of agriculture who appointed me to become the chief information officer for the department and i was in that role uh for a little bit over two years spanning the end of the last administration at the beginning of this one and eventually left government and uh now work at servicenow in this strategy position and i've had a really great time since i've left government i've learned a lot of really interesting unique things and been an offer been able to share the perspective that i've gained during my time as a cio in government with those that i work with and share back my perspective um having it now on the industry side back with my colleagues who are still in government so uh i i feel really good about uh today's webinar we have great uh panelists and i think we're gonna have a really uh wonderful conversation that pulls a lot of what we talked about in the beginning so you know with that i'm going to ask our panelists to introduce themselves uh i'd like to start with devarious uh to give a little background on um on himself and his agency and some initial thoughts as we get started davaris yeah so good afternoon everybody um definitely thanks for the opportunity and i'm looking forward to this the health discussion of most professionals and peers um so again my name is davari's peoples i am the chief information officer for the u.s army corps of engineers we are a dod entity or dod agent um under the army we are the army executing agent for for all construction um and so with that uh with that responsibility we also have several other major critical mission areas and which is that we provide service to the federal as well as the department supporting the nation uh one of those is actually the disaster relief mission where we actually support local area states local with regards to flood management hurricane major disasters even cover 19. we're also as i previously communicated we are the military construction agent for all camp posting stations where we build things such as hospitals and those type of things to support readiness on the uh on the various posts and then we have a huge civil mission um that civil mission where we interact with a lot of the levees the logs the dams uh one of the interesting facts is the army corps of engineers provides a lot of the safe waterways for for a lot of dc so i mean a lot of people don't necessarily know that but that's one of the important aspects of the mission in which it is that we perform from a civil side of the house um and with that being said we're about a 66 billion dollar business which is probably about 99 or 100 on a lot of fortune 500 uh list and that's rather interesting for a federal agency when you begin to look at the power of what the department does because most people believe that's just tailored towards private industry but no the government does have entities that that deal with that type of capital um so we are going through a major transformation inside of the army corps of engineers as we support not just kobe 19 but the the data 25 strategies and many other efforts within the department so definitely looking forward to the discussion and thanks for the opportunity back over to you thank you device um eric why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself uh sure uh i'm eric gallagher i've been uh with nccih for a decade as cio and before that another 10 years at the nih we're working for the various institutes and centers for ncci specifically we research self treatments an awful lot those include physical therapies mind body controls herbal supplements anything you can self-administer pretty much and that's why lately we've done a lot of research on pain because pain is the reason people self-administer so much and it's really come up a lot obviously with opioid addiction actually covid19 infection after effects um the general i say racial and cultural inequities and medical treatments generally uh and cannabinoid research and a bunch of other stuff so pain comes up an awful lot and as it turns out it's given us a little bit of an i.t problem too in that uh aside from all the analysis of brain scans and animal brain scans uh we actually have to store all the data from all those brain scans and all the high resolution images of nerves and other parts and as it turns out we're starting to participate now on nih strides which is an initiative to get data into the cloud and make it really useful and affordable too i'm sure that's really important as you try and share data with different research organizations that are looking at similar things relative to covadine right and so we we absolutely partner up with other parts of the nih all the time you partner up with the fda with other parts of dhhs yes you have to share the data a lot yeah well i think that's a you know great introduction by both of you and you know sets the stage for our um our conversation uh we have a bunch of attendees and uh we are going to have some time for q a as as we get to the end and i just want to thank everybody who's uh joined the webinar for attending um i also want to just quickly uh thank my uh my colleagues at servicenow who helped organize this uh they uh you know we all work very hard to get these these messages and these stories out and create opportunities for people like uh eric and various to to share so um with that why don't we go ahead and get started and um davarius uh why don't you begin and why don't you tell us a little bit about what those early days of um response to covidantine were like at u.s army corps of engineers yeah so the army corps of engineers we are a distributed workforce we're we've been working in a remote capacity for for quite a while however when the i guess the order came down and said hey to protect employee safety we must go to a remote workforce a 100 workforce we met that with with some complexities that uh that was pretty challenging to get over within the core we own two major data centers one in vicksburg mississippi the other in portland oregon and with that being said one of our major service providers that provide telco to a lot of our data centers a fiber got cut that fiber got cut in new orleans so the distance between new orleans and mississippi is rather far however the power of communications and and fibers range far and wide with that being said when that cut happened it wiped out all the columns inside of the court no email no telephone so you can just imagine how our remote workforce took to that i mean we already started off with a with a bad vibe and it was more so hey it can't get anything right you know we had all the hate mail coming our way so we were scrambling trying to trying to just get on the right foot um on a day-to-day basis before kobe 19 we had about five to six hundred users regularly tapping into the vpn um and the vpn could hold about five thousand so when when the pandemic happened we had to scale had to scale aggressively we scaled to about 80 000 users in about four days um currently within a core we have about 36 000 users so you can imagine 5 000 we were maxing out within less than two hours trying to play musical chairs with regards to who got on the network first who didn't get on network uh managing tickets and those type of things so it was just it was a learning experience um from just recovering from everything that has happened but we were able to kind of scale pretty quickly and with our mission partners for cover and be able to provide service good thing is now we've gone to a point we've stabilized a lot of the comms and we've been operating a good posture but definitely when things started it was very rough yeah so that one one i think you know your organization showed great um resiliency to overcome the cut line the uh all the pressure that just existed in those early days because you know people had to work right so uh congratulations to you and your team for you know overcoming you know those immediate immediate challenges you mentioned that you really scaled tremendously what do you what do you think the key to being able to scale like that was well i think it was you know having having strong mission partners uh mission partners to be able to support us as we went forward and then also having the ability to be able to rapidly uh acquire technology we used several methods that assisted us granted we didn't have new hardware um so we use refurbished hardware working with some of our our mission partners one being out of cisco we use we all use a lot of the cisco vpn capabilities but working to get refurbished equipment which provided us a band-aid fix until the new iron came in that was really really key for us because if we hadn't been able to use that refurbished equipment and get it in so quickly we could have been down probably for about at least a month um going through some of the heartburn and as you know with the army corps of engineers we built a lot of the the support hospitals and those type of things especially in new york and places and our employees had to have access to a lot of the mission critical capabilities so being able to use that refurbished equipment was probably a lifesaver for us in the core that we kind of had to adapt to being able to be creative with regards to providing those services and allowed us to be able to do that yeah thanks that's good information um eric uh what was your experience like uh different but there's a real similarity uh i can only mention part of it uh when we switched over 100 telework uh you'll have noticed in the news uh uh there were articles that hhs was under network attack right so that's about all i can say about that except that we were battling that at the same time as we were going to 100 telework uh we did have the hardware we did have to refurbish some hardware but it caught us as a lot of federal people will know it makes a difference where it catches you in the property cycle and this caught us in the right place we had the property on hand we had smartphones ready for senior staff we had plans that we exercised already we rehearsed uh epidemic scenarios for the flu twice um one difference for everybody here is that this is lasting longer than any of the uh rehearsal scenarios we had planned um but we also we had really set up for telework even though we weren't completely ready for 100 and that was the tough part getting over the hump to 100 um we had a very good start we actually had to transition some people's work uh in order to take care of some of our workforce rather than laying them off we actually gave the last few people administrative work that's real and measurable and asked if they would do it and stay on and they they said yes absolutely so we were able to get everybody on and the way we've done it it was a tough first few weeks but we're actually doing very well and picking up pace i'd say we're responding better you mentioned um you mentioned that uh your organization deals with a lot of data and have you seen any challenges in either data sharing or accessing data because people are you know off the main nih network i know nih has a very robust uh network because all the optives deal with all of the institute steal tons of tons of data so i'm at home on my home internet connection with kids playing video games and watching movies and whatnot i have to imagine that creates some challenges so one of the challenges is the amount of data that the researchers want to access is i mean the lh has a fantastic backbone we've got great networking but they want to access terabytes at a time uh and you can't do it to a home very easily so we have researchers who apply to come to campus to do analysis um and where you've had to come to terms with some of them and either allow them to do it or to provide sneaker net for them put a bunch of data onto a drive and let them walk it to their house and uh you know all in federal equipment we've even gone to the extent of allowing monitors and other equipment that we wouldn't have provided normally in this long uh a telework duration we've had to provide it yeah so i think you're you know you're you're both hitting on some interesting challenges around this transition whether it was you had a plan like eric suggested or you had uh or you had some unknown uh you know occurrences like devarious uh referenced you know it doesn't matter things are going to be complicated in this kind of scenario so i i'm going to put up a poll right now we're going where i'm curious what the audience's experience was around transitioning into remote work and being you know this uh moving to this sort of digital kind of organization so hopefully you can all um see that poll curious uh what uh people's experiences were so if you go go ahead and answer we we'd appreciate we can uh ideally share that information back uh before we finish um but you know moving on in terms of our conversation um you know devarious uh you made a uh you made a point that you had a refurbished hardware you had to uh your procurement was very important you were acquiring things and people it sounds like we're doing things very rapidly you were you know building hospitals for uh people in new york right you know that's it's incredible when we you know you could think back in and understand what happened so uh now you have all this new equipment and capability inside the organization how do you um ingest it in a way so uh so it can be well managed and you know you can build um you know a readiness for um for whatever happens next you know we work too fast we can create some blind spots uh we can acquire lots of things very quickly but maybe we failed to secure them so just curious what your your thoughts are there right so our configuration management process it's not as mature as we would like it to be however we do have a pretty good handle on on the configuration management aspects of things when it comes to technology in general our rule of thumb is is that first thing last out something comes in something must go out um and that gives us the ability to be able to manage effectively it's the same when it comes to hardware life cycle refresh if i'm bringing a new server in a new switch a new router i'm bringing it in to either replace something that's faulty or i'm bringing it in to either upgrade something that is either end of life and it needs to be decommissioned so one of the things we tried to do is keep accurate account of what comes in and what comes out and that's kind of helped us out a lot as well too one of the things that we saw with not just our server platform but we even saw this with regards to our collaboration tool suite as well um being at the core is so despair uh so dispersed we work in many districts and divisions inside of the united states so we're at even the lowest of levels from the state and local area and sometimes um unlike some of the other army camp posted station concepts being that we work in some of the downtown areas of the nation some districts have many different requirements that force them to have the need to want a different type of collaboration capability or something like that so being able to understand which tools were out there and be able to effectively converge everyone to a centralized uh centralized capability that was i'm not gonna say so much of a challenge but it did take some intense conversation because everybody likes to at certain times do their own thing or believe that their capability supports the mission the best so some of the configuration management aspects of things the convergence elements we were able to converge on several mission critical capabilities being out of webex and microsoft teams specifically being out of cbr which is the commercial revolt a remote environment that uh that dod has work to push out we were able to have collaborative sessions be able to communicate effectively across the aisle and throughout the department so this is one aspect of how we were able to just consolidate and converge on a tool set which goes back into configuration baseline making it easier to maintain and you had to do that while you're building hospital beds you know so you know uh all the more credit um your organization curious did you have a uh you know out of this are you considering um you know an approach to software asset management or hardware asset management configuration management to make sure as you know we move forward different things are going to happen that you know you have a little uh more control over those changes to your environment right so we've we've worked to i think having a solid cmdb um as well as an itsm capability so within the organization uh we're we're on our modernization journey um so we we have deployed some of the uh the servicenow elements to help us manage and maintain some of these things but one of the things we've also done is we've modernized our requirement gathering process and the life cycle aspects um that's really helped us out throughout the throughout the pandemic because everything moves at lightning speed everybody needs something right then when they need it versus being able to wait weeks and and weeks we had to get it in hours and days so you know that kind of changed how we deliver services on the back end to meet the pandemic that means evaluating your processes making changes to them on a fly and then once you've implemented you assess to see if it worked if it was optimal and then you go back and change it where needed so those are all the things that we did to be able to determine what was successful what wasn't as we began to modernize and change and adapt to the new now versus what some call the new norm yeah so eric from your perspective um were there innovations or changes that you and your team had to make to rapidly support the agency uh support your your institute as um coven 19 was becoming you know so critical to the nation uh a bunch of things we had to change even though we thought we were really well prepared as a general thing and i think everybody would sympathize with this uh sometimes security equipment is also infrastructure equipment and it has to be really robust so uh we discovered you know parts of the security infrastructure uh that that needed to be a little stronger a little bit more capable of handling the load um we almost immediately discovered that we were going to have special problems with distribution getting equipment to people we wanted to keep our it people safe and i think there's a special problem with you know some parts of it those people move around a lot um they're definitely a way coven 19 can be transmitted and they're also vulnerable to it so we had to come up with ways of getting machines to people uh we started out by installing machines putting it in a room uh leaving it for an hour and letting the person come in uh log in and pick it up after you know i've been wiped down and sat for a while right it's a that's a you know a manual process say but it's one of these things that you probably never considered as core to a uh your career as an i.t professional you know and um just you know kind of demonstrates how we've all had to you know evolve and you know do it do it very rapidly uh i i'm curious if you know either one of you can comment here is the um the people you support you know who are doing uh the mission work in your agencies uh their expectations i think are changing um in in how they receive service and how you interact with them have you seen that and if so what um what do those changes look like eric when we start with you okay uh for us the changes have actually been kind of huge because scientists were used to getting together in conferences uh all those conferences that occur several times a month are going virtual uh and it's up to us now i t that's a different i.t expectation uh we are supporting conference after conference just a different part of work that we really hadn't done um other things people who for instance had injuries this gets back to the physical part again um normally we would have equipment for them at work maybe a standing desk so that if they hurt their knee this is from a real case we went to 100 telework and someone immediately injured her knee and needed special equipment um before we hadn't allowed some of that to go into a home and we had to make decisions about how to do it how to get it to them um but we decided absolutely we were going to support whatever we had to devarious what about your experience yeah so the harsh reality is in the army we have demanding customers and the reality is they need it right then i don't care what it is even if it's a pack of pencils or pins they need it right now um so that that's the same with it they always want it up they always want to run it and that's the that is the standard that our customers hold us to and they thank you every day when it when it's when it runs all day right hey we you know my philosophy is is if i'm not getting calls then i'm doing something right right uh but when i start getting calls then that means hey i got something on my hands that i might not be too happy with when i hear what's going on so from our users what we try to do and what the pandemic has done for us it has expedited some of the things that are on our technology road map that may have been in the three to five year column to where now has pushed it out to the six to eight month time frame because of the fact that we need it right now um some of the things that we've done to adapt good example we are on oh 365 right now and we're in that being that you're on o365 depending on the the sensitive level that you are within that environment some individuals have access to owa and some don't and in the environment we were in we didn't necessarily have owa access from the internet um so we had to work with our with our cyber command providers and the rest of the army to enable that functionality for our users which allowed them to be able to access email without having to go through the vpn because one of the things as as we previously stated we saw that going through the vpn was it was slowing down the the the network with traffic um so we had to relieve alleviate that pain that heartburn and owa was one of the main drivers because most people really only get on their computers for one thing and that's to do email so you know how can we help our users out so we were able to bring some different things to our users and now we've started this theme for the 21 fiscal year of untethering the end user from their desktop more so promoting an enhancement of mobility because we want our users to be able to never have to come into the uh the offices if they don't have to but be able to do everything it is they need from their ipad cell phones to include the modernization of applications um so we've done a lot in that space and we've identified what's needed so for fy 21 we've already started that journey we had to pull some of those things to the left so that's a good example of what remote work has done for us as well as for the department we'd be able to talk across the house from there too right so so i've heard that from a lot of people that i've talked to i've seen it firsthand you know schedules are shifting left right you're going to get things done sooner you have to reprioritize um and not every agency is going to have additional funds to do these things uh eric and divorce do you want to talk about any trade-offs that you have to make as you adjust to what new expectations are for you and your teams yes so i mean i could take that from from our side i mean we've we've made a lot from a budgeting standpoint we've kind of changed we're we run as a business really when you look at it from even though we're army entity we are we're funded by our district and division so if they don't pay us then we don't really have a job so we have to show work and value inside of the organization so with that being said we just try to stay on the front end of finding new ways to get things done and satisfy them so from a budgeting standpoint you know the government doesn't have much um it's hard going to especially how we uh scope and identify our funds for the out years so pandemics like this has has really changed some of some of the ways in which as we go about doing business and we've made a lot of trade-offs with regards to pushing some to the right some to the left and really focusing on the modernization of collaboration tools and and really enhancing the virtual remote aspects of doing work so there's been significant tradeoffs on our end yeah how about you eric um aside from the fact that the nih made the same 0365 call to allow wa absolutely had to be done uh we've had to make some different trade-offs as far as what what our director thought of as privacy so our institute did not put cameras in laptops we bought them separately uh each time i came to the senior staff of the proposal to buy uh laptops with cameras in them there was some security incident where students were spied on by the school board or something it just always seemed like bad timing this time i came and said we need cameras and they said of course and so we made that that trade-off now is the time when everybody really does want to me like this and see faces and we don't see enough as we are already so that was an easy trade-off but very different last year at this time it was still a no-go interesting that it's a pretty rapid change right you know and uh shift and shift and thinking just one of one of many but you know we're going to put up another poll now um about this idea of digital transformation and and get a little retrospect on how organizations responded so if if we could put that poll up let's see what the audience thinks about the transition to digital transformation in their in their organizations and as we do that you know i'll just begin sort of our next you know uh build on what we what we just uh what we just described discussed we have um too many uh you know too many times we talk about these great activities in uh the federal government the opportunity to uh digitally transform or news data and these things these are great conversations um but then you look at the timeline for when they're going to get done there's three years five years out but you're both describing uh this idea of shifting things left and having a real focus on uh using technology to drive the mission forward and doing so in a way that supports this disconnected physical distancing this disconnection we have from our from our offices so you know i think the opportunity to [Music] have a digitally transformed government over the next few years is really high and you know the the question uh asks you know what's the uh process uh where's your agency um going and i think if you can see the poll results just a very small percentage five percent um doesn't feel like we're like they're thinking about it everybody else is either planning or working through changes uh maybe even they're transformed so um you know it's uh i think it's very encouraging um and so i'd like to turn you know back to back to the two of you and um you know davarius if you could share with us digital transformation plans that that you're considering at the at the army corps of engineers uh either because of covet 19 or what you've learned or other things that are now really apparent opportunities for you and your colleagues yeah so so within the court before the pandemic we actually started our digital transformation journey before the pandemic happened um the core we from an i.t standpoint we put heavy emphasis in two areas one being that of uh mobility and then the other being out of data data modernization data strategy data transformation and and then our mobility aspects so when those two worlds collide the the underlying uh equivalent there we be digital transformation it leverages an equinex facility um and that this facility gives us distributed services with with a powerful connection regardless of where we are because as as previously communicated we were once or we currently operated in a construct of two disparate data centers that weren't necessarily uh with an active active type of architecture meaning that a proper fill over and those type of things so now we're moving towards the equinix facility located one in ashburn virginia the other we're looking at out in california and we're also experimenting with several others in chicago and texas but we're looking for that true triple active architecture and also how do we connect to the cloud leveraging some type of vcap type of connection um as well because one of the things we've realized is that in order to access data which is the key uh key underlying thing how to access data and make more informed decisions with data through some type of data strategy you have to be able to properly store those things so we begin to explore other areas such as as a service being out of storage and all those various components to enhance the meet me point uh for the digital transformation concept that we're putting in place through leveraging the equinex facility so there is a lot on this digital transformation journey with cloud baked in um from a hybrid approach because we have a good balance between on-prem as well as in the cloud so we've been able to find what that sweet spot looks like and working with our providers we've started down that digital transformation journey that has definitely helped us evolve as an organization so we're hoping to have that complete here you know within maybe the next four to six months because it does take time as well as funds to be able to work through those things and not to mention the contractual processes right federal government so you know we had to bake all those things in but the journey has started and uh and we're well on our way to really aftermath well that is a great story and you know i think um you know it's it's uh it's proof that in a terrible situation like this some good things can come out of it you guys are moving forward and you're doing so in a way that's going to provide long-term value so eric turning to you what's uh what's the digital transformation plan at your institute look like and has it evolved because of kobe 19. it has evolved it's evolved a lot and improved and modernized but actually we're also dealing with process improvement too so for the nih we have a problem very different from the army we have to authorize people coming from overseas constantly you know a decent percentage maybe 20 of the nih is foreign doctors coming in to do research or learn how to do research um that's been very different when you can't make physical contact or you have different rules for physical contact um and so we're really restructuring parts of the system upgrading technologies but also uh upgrading the process itself i would say so you both talked about process and i think that's really you know one of the you know key elements for this idea of digital transformation because so often you know we have these very manual processes in our organization we have uh and they or their processes that we've created to fit the way systems work and they're maybe not ideal so you know you have this chance to rethink and redesign how things can and should work as you invest in in new technologies and you know that most of the time in my experience when i build systems and worked in government was so much of what we're trying to um trying to do is take these manual workflows and and digitize them so we can have a better tracking of where things are we know status we provide better experience and service so you know if you guys want to talk for a second about those aspects of your organizations and you know have you seen the manual workflows that you that you rely on be challenged by the physical distancing and the difficulties with um not being in an office or not being in your normal settings i will say that we roll out an app really quickly uh for property tracking it's a property that the nih doesn't track very much that ncch wanted to track uh and really quickly went into sharepoint and had an app up in a week or two and it's needed modification sense uh but we had to had to make that automatic and paperless and non-contact and get it done well uh yeah that's right you know you have different drivers um focused on it and the fact you got something up quickly even if it wasn't perfect you know i think that's very much in the spirit of how we want to develop and publish uh allegations um especially now as we have brand new you know requirements um davarius what about yourself uh how do you guys feel about this the the workflow piece yeah so when you when we talk process processes at times can either hinder progress or either or either it'll be an enabler one of the things that we've looked at from a process improvement side of the house you can't forget about the human element throughout the course the pandemic because we are we as people we are used to that human interaction the touch to feel those type of things so with that being said we've now been forced to be confined more into our restricted space and one of the areas that we've seen from a process improvement and leveraging technology to enhance that is our own boarding process um within the organization as with any with most organizations when you first get into an organization the first thing they do is give you a lot of either paper or they give you a system to log into where you can start putting in your a lot of your information and you can work with the hr person to help you get through it not so much in this type of setting now you're doing everything either by telephone or through video and and that's with meetings that's with onboarding or whatever the case may be so one of the things we've had to do we had to modify how we did our onboard process that means the the escalation and elevation of of getting a security authorization form all the way to getting network access we automated the entire process to be able to do that however we also brought in an automation to the human element of interacting virtually with with your own boring counselor to ensure that employees that come on board same look and feel to where they wouldn't miss anything even though you weren't there to literally hold their hand in a physical sense but virtually we were able to walk through those processes and that's something that i believe we will continue to use even once the pandemic is over as a part of the new work norm right that that's a that's a great example of where you know this has forced us to change the way we do business looking at the processes like you're describing and being able to take those innovations and integrate them into a way of doing business and i got to imagine the uh you talked about onboarding but offboarding is also very challenging under normal circumstances whether it's contractors or employees that collect the equipment and turn p turn off people's access and whatnot and having um automated workflows around onboarding and off boarding uh you know make life a lot easier generally irrespective of where people were are working but certainly when you have to collect equipment and uh you know turn people's access off knowing that it's happening and having it done for you or in a in a way that you get a very intelligent uh push that you have to take action it can make a huge difference um so uh we have a couple of questions that have come in and uh i wanna i wanna read these and and get your your take on them we're uh we had about 20 minutes left so we have some time for additional discussion uh as well so the first first question um with the armed corps of engineers environment uh davaris this is just to you um with the u.s army corps of engineers environment how are you addressing uh the management of encryption for data relative to key management and ensuring uh and countering any possibilities of breaches yeah so we are we we have begin to evolve our eye damn um identity access management capability um we're also leveraging various aspects of zero trust going through the zero trust methodology um because again that's a conceptual thing but the i damn identity access management capabilities more so the execution and the enforcer good example of some of those things we are inside of the o365 environment leveraging the capabilities that microsoft has whether that's through their e3 the or the intune capability um that provides a lot of the the eye damn aspects of things um and we are working to modernize our current uh iodine platform right now as we speak um so from a data standpoint uh not just looking at it from a zero trust uh methodology perspective but also being able to understand from a a virtual viewing aspects of things so we begin to partition our data restrict access deny all allow by exception we also begin to look at data from uh repositories um being able to take that data the authoritative data from repositories um you utilizing or leveraging an etl-like capability we're at that etl level looking at the security aspects of things and then being able to physically show that data to senior leaders to be able to make more informed decisions so we are putting even more tighter controls around the data elements um of things because right now data is the it's the golden key um and that's what we're really ultimately trying to protect so the more controls we have we we implement however there is a sweet spot between the security as well as the mission aspects of things because you can lock yourself down two tights where you can't use it so we've been we've been working to find that sweet spot i think we've we've been doing a good job but you know it continues to keep us up at night and we continue to fight that good fight to make sure we're totally secure but those are some of the elements and aspects we've put in place at the core to kind of enhance some of the things we're doing around the security of our data eric you want to talk about data security data data is clearly critical in your in your mission space it is but actually i'm probably even more concerned about the access to the data i came up through security and yet um security tools can prevent you access in an emergency too uh recently um while this was going on we did a resiliency review of some of our data and i we have encrypted backups and i asked them to recover in a different silo and it turned out uh this is part of the key management which is the bugaboo of all the encryption the only place that encryption key was kept was in the original tape silo uh so it really couldn't be recovered anywhere else until we did the resiliency test and discovered that um you know encryption key management is the bugaboo and we rely on unfortunately a multiple of methods you know we use ad for some of our encryption key management um we use vendor supplied tools um you gotta track that really carefully and test it pretty often well yeah good good insight from uh from both of you there um i'm gonna turn now to what comes next with our uh with the next question we have about the concept of returning into the workplace so um what are your agencies thinking about relative to people continuing to remote work remotely uh or you know possibly coming back into the workplace obviously you had to ensure people safety you have to make sure that there's ppe you have to make sure there's you know appropriate physical distancing so on and so forth i think this is all a lot harder than it sounds um what what kinds of discussions are going on inside your agencies yeah so davarius once you start go ahead well from our side i mean it is really unpredictable if someone tells me today i know what tomorrow will look like then then i'd definitely like to understand and know what will tomorrow look like so with that being said i know one of the things that general crawford continues to reiterate to us within the cio community and the army is that you know i t has to be an enabler it has to be always up and running because we are in what we call the new now not so much the new norm because tomorrow what is normal today may not be it may be something different so from the army standpoint the number one the number one emphasis that they continue to emphasize is that it's people first people first and the safety of the employees so not necessarily saying there's a rush to come back but what we're trying to do is ensure that when that time comes for users to come back we can probably ensure that they are safe um i think i was reading in several other news articles uh the other day that the workforce will never be a hundred percent and new employees will never know every individual that they work with um going forward because max capacity will be between 50 and 70 so with that being operating in a remote environment will will be how we operate for even the foreseeable i mean google and and not just google but facebook and so many others are exploring how do they ensure that their workers can work remote for the long haul without maybe ever going back into the office so we have to prepare for that to be the the new operating procedure or even the current operating procedure so from an army standpoint we haven't seen especially within a core we haven't seen a degradation in mission productivity so that is a that is a good thing so to be able to continue to keep that going that's the main goal and objective because we never know when we might get back into the office so the main thing is people first and we continue to reiterate that and when that time comes we'll be ready to support whatever from an i.t standpoint yeah eric what are you thank you eric what are you guys talking about at nih well as you can imagine for the nih uh we're having a lot of very public discussions too so even just this monday on july 6th uh dr fauci and dr collins had a public uh web chat video cast uh about how the nih would or wouldn't come back and what rules how how people should follow the research and how the nih is going to follow the research too in returning so we're looking at social distancing rules for the office it's very much along the lines of what devarious was saying we're going to be very distant even in the office even as we come back so the simple act of taking an elevator is complicated you know elevators uh you know they're packed in the morning and everyone arrives you know between 8 30 and 9 or whatnot and now it's going to be two people per per elevator you know you could spend all morning waiting for your turn to get to your cube just to go back down for lunch so you know i i think those those little you know nuances to um return to work you know are things people are beginning to think about and how do we accommodate uh you know for that so there's a lot there's a lot of challenge here so we're we're internally at servicenow we're starting to have these same kinds of conversations and you know i i think just some uh things that i've observed is that uh people want to hear what their organizations are doing just like you referenced eric you you had a a webcast with senior leadership and we had something similar uh you know at our company um you know so that communicates something that can't be over communicated perhaps so i think we have a uh another question um so uh davarius again this is for you very popular um so uh it says when etl how do you manage the automatic connection to allow the data flow in and out and for both davaris and eric how do you um how do you have declassified and no id data in a sandbox or outside teams to test and and uh to test data process tools so uh devarious once you begin yes so we are so we're still working through some of those concepts now um because one size doesn't fit all and when you begin to look at the many different areas to to retrieve data you have to be able to have a process that's enterprise encompassing and not just looking at one certain subset um understanding from a department we we leverage classification of data from unclass all the way up to ts and even higher so when you begin to look at those various uh classifications of data you have to have a process that will prevent data from crossing over to different domains but also be able to ensure that it's viewable at the end so we've taken some of those use cases and beginning to look at those things again our our capability hasn't evolved to a maturity level five yet from an etl standpoint but we are identifying the use cases and identifying what's needed to get to that point now so as we go through and work through this thing we were going through to identify what's really needed so at this point i don't have an exact answer for you because we're still working through them but here probably in the next three months or so i think we'll have an even better handle on on all of those things but it's in the works now so we're discovering and recovering learning as we go eric anything that you'd like to add there uh the nih data very different really the nih clinical center is the world's largest research hospital so it's patient data that's really a lot of our focus yes there's classified research data but we concentrate a whole lot on patient data which we've been de-identifying since the 1970s really so it's kind of 50 years of de-identifying data uh so that we can do things with it including uh like it says here in the question putting a sandbox and actually testing our developers are actually approved there everybody's got a public trust clearance at the least so they can actually handle the data even when it isn't de-identified but uh most of the work is done with the identified data actually uh lots of iterations of that well very good um another question uh for for the for the two of you uh will will your organizations be looking more closely at robotic process automation rpa or other technologies to replace uh some labor-intensive tasks as we move into the quote-unquote new normal yeah that's going to be very tough because we thought we were relying on robotic prosthesis already but as it turns out you kind of need a human right next to the robot almost every time right now what kinds of processes had you um you used rpa for gene sequencing um actually lab experiments mice uh just everywhere a lot of things are automated but they often require someone writing a program right there or adjusting the program there's a lot of robotic interface but by golly a lot of humans interfacing with those robots so i think you're talking about in a lab with you know real robot technology um touching things and doing things and you know uh that that that's different than you know maybe some some of us have the you know had exposure to uh you know sometimes rpa is used to take the mundane tasks you know and uh simplify the data entry or uh other aspects of uh interaction with you know the routine and uh i i do automatically think of a lab robot or medical robot but no that's not what everybody is thinking of yeah so uh but so curious if there are any rpa implementations in either of your organizations or are you considering it for i said for us we we're we're considering everything is on the table here on whether you look at robot robots for construction or whether you look at rpas from the aspects of ai and artificial intelligence um to be able to make more sense of of data trends analysis and those type of things so we are looking at all of those aspects um with our research arm because we do have the the which is the development center within the core and they actually uh look at those things for us so the challenge for us becomes now how do we apply the research element aspects and operationalize it so that's where we are running into some of our complex challenges but we are looking at it and uh and it is on our technology radar to incorporate those things so for fy21 we uh we will be doing a lot of that within the core very good so um we're getting a little bit short on time i think we have about uh five or six minutes left so i want to give you guys a chance to share some uh lessons learned and final thoughts you know we started with this conversation with thinking about or you know recalling those immediate days after the pandemic struck and you know how we were very focused on responding and we talked a little bit then about how we and how your organizations are taking these changes you made and integrating them into uh how you operate um to to ensure that you're going to be ready for whatever comes next which all you know sort of creates this great foundation for really digital organizations both describe the great steps you're taking towards digitizing the work in your organization so um you've experienced a lot in the last four months you know what are what are the key lessons you learned and uh what are the what are some some things you want to make sure our audience takes away from this conversation yeah i can start off uh i would say key things we've learned is one workforce people um that the organization won't run unless the people are trained well equipped and can do their job so one of the things that we begin to do is we start on our campaign of the what does the workforce of the future concept look like um and we've worked with with big army at the headquarters level from a cio standpoint to really address that that means addressing the the workforce in a remote capacity ensuring that we can send them to the proper virtual training uh certifications that's needed to be able to do the job um because one of the things you'll see from a professional standpoint we can become stagnant in our jobs and with that being said the technology so many times from a federal side of the house passes us by so what we're trying to do is ensure that as we introduce new terms uh data etl uh equinix uh facilities uh two fact authentication and all these other things that our federal civilian workforce can actually keep up with the change in pace of technology so we've seen that if you don't invest in the people then a lot of times the mission won't go and then the last thing i'll say is ensuring that we can properly articulate the financial resources required to be able to move the mission forward because a lot of times in i.t one of the things you'll find out is that uh the i.t budget that's one of the first things that gets slashed um and with that being said it prevents you from being able to modernize because now a budget becomes more about o m and sustainment versus the modernization and the movement of technology so being able to properly articulate to the stakeholders why modernization is critical and key and what we need to do in order to achieve the success in which it is that we're looking for those are the things that we've learned because the money will drive everything the requirements also driving and having the people to be able to do the work equals mission success on all fronts yeah it really becomes this uh change you know you have to be able to change the conversation from it as a commodity to it as a strategic asset and invest you can't do what your organizations were able to do in a short period of time if you hadn't been making technology investments along the way um having the opportunity to look at a number of different agencies in their their response some struggled more than others and we saw that in the poll that we asked and i i would i would guess uh that the agencies that had more challenges were not forward leaning when it came to technology and investing you can't scale up in architecture like like you did to various in a week if you don't have a good foundation as eric described you can't rapidly acquire new technology and deploy it if you don't have a good foundation so i applaud both the both of you and your organizations for showing good leadership you know along the way and you know you were able to respond better than than others i think um so congratulations and you know share that back certainly with your teams now eric um i'd like to hear your uh your lessons learned some and the wisdom you want to pass on to the audience i would emphasize again uh you want to plan for the robustness of your infrastructure every element of it uh gotta keep going and keep reliable for all your staff uh like devera said it is about the people they have to feel that your their i.t is dependable um well this is not gonna happen to many people often but um long ago in a job at the nih my boss pulled me in for a yearly review and said i've hardly heard anything about you all year it must have been really good oh so he was someone who understood and actually it had been very good uh we've done tons of great things uh and had no real significant failures it but he understood that he hadn't heard and there you know and that's the way a lot of us will have to deal with it i think um like devarious we have actually emphasized some training we've held zoom training we're gonna hold uh teams training as well um one thing that's been a little different um how do you handle blue screens on computers over a distance uh that's something as security patches roll out that actually do conflict with each other we have run into uh and so we're still still working on the right methods for that except we have to be fast yeah so service management's taken to a whole new level when you can't provide service in the way that you're used to providing it you used to be able to walk over to that person's desk and fix their computer well is what you're just describing eric is the new reality i have to have other ways of interacting with you and help and telling you where to what keys to click and um how to how to get things resolved that's a change for for all of us from the person providing the service and especially the person receiving the service so this concept of service management you know is is here to stay the idea of workflow i think is is here to stay that's where you know we're seeing i think a lot of the innovation and change especially when i don't i might not have access to all the systems i have access to normally i might not have access to all the data i have normally you know how do we how do we leverage the data in our legacy systems some of the older technologies we have and share it via workflow or use it via workflow to achieve an outcome i think that's where a lot of our conversation has been um has been heading and it got there again very quickly over this uh this past um this past period um so with that i think we're going to go ahead and conclude um this was a great conversation i learned a lot from both of you uh you know eric i'm gonna i'm gonna go back and think about all of the data that that you have and the way um the way you need to use it and share it and the sneaker in it you described give it to somebody on government equipment so they can have it to to do their do their work and i'm sure that's had an impact during this time that we um you know where we've had this response and and davarius i'm going to uh when i think about this conversation think about the moment that you heard that your network uh connections were severed by by a third party and how you uh you not just how you must have felt but how you and your team responded it got back to um you know the focus on people who were sick people who were sick in new york who needed those hospital beds stood up at the javits center and you know the tremendous impact you and your team had uh during a time of national crisis i mean i hope you you uh you and everybody at the core you know has a lot of pride in what you're able to help our our country it's uh you know great story and um you know one that i i'm happy that i had a chance to help uh tell today so uh i also want to thank everyone at uh atarc for um helping organize our panel um we're going to uh the you know atarc is uh going to be planning for uh our next webinar on thursday july 16th we're going to have subject matter matter experts talk about how they are reevaluating technology needs during the pandemics i think it will be a nice uh follow-on to the conversation that we've had today we're going to i think be talking about this topic for some some time to come additionally atarc is going to be hosting a it acquisition summit july 14th to 16th and you have the ability to register now uh to hear uh from speakers about devops cloud cloud security artificial intelligence um we're going to be focusing on best practices and in the i.t category management sphere i think that's going to be a very interesting day i look forward to participating so there's a lot of great stuff coming from from atarch i'm glad to be associated with this organization be on the board uh have ongoing conversations with uh tom suiter and the team so thanks again for joining us we hope to see at the next webinar and july 14th at our virtual summit so i hope you all have a great rest of your day thank you so much bye everybody