um by way of introduction I am one of uh the civilian leaders here at service now and my team works with a handful of customers um transportation USDA interior and the postal service so um we're here today to meet these two fine folks that are going to share their transformation efforts um Beyond it so I'm going to let you go ahead and going to introduce yourself Terry and Veronica and then we'll get started I'm Terry Carpenter I'm the CIO and CTO at the National Science Foundation where we distribute money through grants to advance science for the betterment of United States and citizens hello I'm Veronica Brown and I'm the branch chief for the project management office in the food and nutritions services oit department and basically most people know us by the programs that we service which are women infants and children school lunch um snap formerly known as food stamps and so we basically are the nutrition programs for um all of USDA awesome thank you first and foremost for your service we appreciate it and your passion toward transformation um for those in the audience we have a fun starter question so um let's show uh raise of hands for those folks in the room that are part of the IT department okay oh my and then go ahead and put your hands down and who is part of the mission or AO okay so you're both okay you you you cloned yourself that's good um well I love that there's so many here from the it area but um also happy to see a ton of mission folks in here as well the reason for the question is as we uh look at our customers we want to ensure that the platform the now platform can go beyond it especially as it relates to the Enterprise as all of you are here to serve the mission and so what we found is 56% of our customers use our platform Beyond it which is super critical um we're all here to serve the mission and um we want to learn a little bit about how to partner with the mission and go beyond it so that's what we're going to talk about today so um looking at um one of the first questions that a lot of folks ask is what is the right approach so I'd love to hear from you Terry and Veronica about um your approach to modernization as it relates to the mission and how do you engage with the mission uh head first down the Rope um now really it depends right your culture is a big part of that and I think you have to make those risk-based determinations to figure out where you can get a foothold where you can start to really make a difference with that transformation um and and really use the latest guidance coming out from the administration there's a tremendous amount of energy coming out of President Biden's Administration on really advancing some of the policies that we have and telling us get on with it get there remember who we serve we serve the American people and that's the important part of why are we doing the digital experience now it's up to us to figure out how to make that plan happen how to get that foothold how to get people rallied behind it because it's not as simple as well this is the right technology so we're just going to do it it's about getting business and it together and really thinking about what makes a difference what's the right thing to do and then working it together so from um the perspective to build on it I'm given that order like you just told me okay Veronica go ahead and do that then I'm sitting there and saying well how do I do that like what do I implement and how do I go about implementing it so we tend to work as a team you know looking at we need to do modernization um but we need to do it Enterprise because too many times we start going off in a different groups will go in different directions and before you know it you've got like five different tools across a platform and everybody's doing something different and there's no um cost Savings in that and everybody's doing a different process and there's no uniformity and it's just kind of Podge podge and a bit Reckless um so now we have to have somebody be that point of contact of who's going to start initiating the best fit um for us as an Enterprise solution instead of these separate Solutions and how are we going to meet that need and so we have to start talking to like our Enterprise Architects we have to start talking to um the individuals who manage our platform we have to start looking at Cost we have to start looking at support so it's not just this one easy answer of one thing fits all we also have to take into context how do you support this in the out years you know that full um system development life cycle of you know the cost and the maintenance and who's going to manage this and you know once you get it configured whatever your choice is then you have to look at maintaining it and that's uh another challenge that you're dealing with there's so many the other is what tools can we get that people can use that um is at the very least customer friendly and intuitive because nobody likes change um change management is very difficult and getting people to use a tool no matter how awesome um can be very challenging um if they don't see the cost benefit of that tool so that's something that we've been working on um at our agency for a while and we are looking at we have I call it like a glorified paper process where we're a paperless office but we treat our documents like they're still paper we we just use email to send them instead of walking them and dumping them into an inbox right now they're in our our um our digital inbox our email and now they're just in there and I don't know about you but by the end of the day I've lost whatever got to me that morning it's like what I don't know where that document went so how do we manage those taskings how do we um leverage tools so that um everybody will buy into that tool and then you know we can start looking at not just you know having a digital form but managing that form knowing where it is knowing where it's going to go and knowing how it's going to get there I'd love to say that that we're very mature and we've solved all these problems but we haven't we're still working on it well it sounds like you're really considering all those key impactful factors which is a great start so and I know Terry you had shared um a little bit about how you make a really strong focus on cre that partnership between the mission and getting them on board can you give us kind of your journey to modernizing and working with the mission areas to ensure that you all are on the same page and you get them on boarded quickly yeah I I think it's really an interesting Dynamic that's occurred in NSF with you know there's the mission of delivering your service to the constituency of your agency then there's the mission support functions in the in the business world we would call it more the you know business um GNA functions that would be your HR your Contracting your operational activities and and those you know I wonder how many people here didn't raise their hand because maybe they fell into one of those categories of functions and what we're finding is there's tremendous value in those areas of mission support and HR is a classic example you saw the demo today we've been building out as fast as we can in the HR area because let's face it in the federal government HR processes are challenging right I'm on camera um yeah so they're challenging so we're trying to figure out how to use a tool as Veronica said it's not just making the paper happen in the tool but changing the experience for the employee who's trying to do their job and backfill against vacancies that they have or growth opportunities they may have and not making it so hard that they want to just run away screaming right it's they're not a Navy SEAL and why I appreciate what those people have to go through for that mission we shouldn't make every employee have to do that kind of stuff to get simple successes so that partnership was really critical having the lead executive the champion of the HR function want to make those kind of changes and then send the right people to participate in the design in the thinking about how do we configure that experience not just that piece of paper that we were doing last time and get people out of email God I love to hear that yeah email what a disaster bless um I mean and we have tools that are helpful um you know things that allow us to get out of email and at least have a repository for our documents and allow us to collaborate but you know after you've built like for example teams and you've put all your files into teams and everything's working great then where do you put the documents then and how do you get them there so because it's not exactly the easiest thing to drag and drop you know 500 documents um in one afternoon or whatever to to get things properly filed you know so instead of having to go a file cabinet and file everything that's been stacking up on your desk now they're all in your teams folders which is you know great because now people know where they are but the people who really need to get in there can't have access or that's not a place that you want to keep something for the next you know records management required length of time um you got to put it somewhere that will be there um you know 5 years after the the application that you buil is gone you know because those are our record managements requirements um so a teams folder is not it well where do you put it and how do you get it there um because I just spoke to one of my um you know vendors and they're like we're sorry but you know these forms that we have for Access requests there's a lot of them they have some you know they have some pii we need to put them somewhere and that is secure and safe so our people's information isn't released um and we don't want to do it individually because there's a lot of them that could take X number of hours yes time hours and I was like well I don't want to do it I'm like I don't have time to do this so how do we then make that happen um he has a nice Dandy tool I can't wait until he shows it to me next week but you know it's that challenge of how do we use the tools that we have and leverage them in a way that will help us um you know meet our need without having to to change the way we do everything yeah exactly and and let me ask the question to you all how many of you know if you pick up your phone right now which channel and which app to use to reach your family like this right how many of you think your employees in your agency know where to put this file should they go to Team should they go to service now should they go to this oh my God we're overwhelming them we've got to help them got to help them understand what is the right tool for the right purpose that we're using and then make sure that your governance process helps to slot those requirements to teams where it's appropriate and to service now where it's appropriate and to whatever tool we might have yeah or SharePoint yeah yeah that's a great Point there's so many apps out there can you share with us um on your journey to modernize and help the mission side of the house can you give us an example um maybe a project that you're working on right now or a use case that you're looking to modernize with your mission areas well this one's a a it's on the service on platform it's Tasker so what happened is we were looking at you know when you have a um task that needs to be done whether it's the branch chief needs to tell their their staff members okay this is a task I need you to do um how do you know they do it you send them an email and then you know you're like okay you need to tell me when it's done then hopefully they send you an email back that says oh yeah I finished that um you know or say you get a um a data call the infamous data call and it comes from your your ACI and then it has to go down to the directors who send it to the branch Chiefs who send it to their staff and then that information is supposed to be gathered from the staff and then it has to go back up to the acio who then sends it to Department um well that's a series of emails so can you use something that would instead of doing it through email would then have a tasker that would trigger these tasks in this preset sequence and then as it's finished you could monitor how it's being finished because you can see it and then the document or whatever information is then through the system sent back up to the AO and gathered it's a great tool it's amazing um but we're finding that when we share that tool with different Mission areas so that they can manage and monitor the tasks that people have to do some missionaries embrace it and they just run with it they're just they're so happy happy to have this available and done other missions are like we're too busy we have so many tasks that we don't have time to learn how to have less tasks um and sadly to say um oit is one of them so we we got so busy we were like ready to to roll it out and then the AI initiative came in and we're like okay we don't have time for this right now um so and you know other machine areas have said that to us as well so we've got this like dichotomy with in our own agency of those who embrace the technology and this is the best thing since sliced bread and then those who are like you know what get back to me in six months y so that's that's the challenge that we're facing right now so first I'd like to introduce you Jeremy Jeremy love to talk about your task or Co what's the overlay a real life example yeah it's a plag in service now right so tell us Terry a little bit about maybe top projects that I know your team's here that you're focused on delivering for the mission so so back to the point of you got to get traction you got to get the Drone up there and see what it can tell you and then know that you're going to be able to constantly improve it so for us obviously it we wanted to eat our own dog food it was the obvious place to start and then we got the partner in HR and they were all in let's do as much as we can because it's so broken and we want to fix it so badly um so that's been a real win now all of a sudden we're starting to see others see the value in the ability to be adaptable I think there's some interesting dialogue happening in some of the books I've been reading reading about the old days of being efficient think like a factory line we're trying to make the process more efficient make the paper flow faster that isn't the way we need to be anymore today we don't know what these business models are going to evolve to for each agency and we're experiencing that in the grant business we're experimenting with new ways of getting money out to ecosystems to really Advance science for harder problems think climate think alternate power and to do that takes Partnerships International takes Partnerships with industry and academic institutions which means our systems aren't built for that so how do we be more adaptable so that the mission can figure out what that process is so our next step after what we've been successful with in it and HR is understanding how the mission can use this to have a more adaptable front end that can plug into systems of record that exist that you don't have to throw away or break or make them more brittle by trying to cram more changes into them but you can really think about what that new Mission workflow needs to be and then evolve and figure out where you want to go from there but it really comes down to that value Paradigm what is the value that your agency is willing to take on and then that amount of risk that goes with that value that trade space and figuring out how to move quickly into those and shows real success love it thank you so much for sharing that I know Veronica you have a very unique use case talking about sharing you know funding and monitoring it and quality can you share with us a little bit about um the the process that you went through to make sure that you were aligned on the delivery of the qcs system so it's funny you should ask that because the qcs guy is down there um so Alex if I get anything wrong um so we have a system it's a quality control system for for um the program and that one is challenging because it has a lot of Pi in it um and it's not our pii it's state pii so um States gather the personally identifiable information of the customers or the clients who come in to get SNAP benefits you know food stamps um and so they have to gather all this documentation and I once said it's like trying to um you know apply for a mortgage you have to give them your you know documents about your job you what is my income um what are my bank accounts you know what are and it's all very personal of course we also demand their health records but hey whatever um and then um we have to the federal side then looks at their documents and says okay we're going to pull a a um a sub you know group of that and see what is the quality of your um you know your process did you do this timely um did you give them the proper amount of fund you know of of food stamp benefit I keep calling them food stamps it's snap um did they get the right amount of benefit not too much not too little is everything correct what is your quality control number you know error rate you know positive rate all kinds of rates and it's kind of mind-numbing um because I'm not a really a um a statistician but you know we have to share that information from the state system to our system and what we're trying to build right now is a modernized version of that system that will allow us to work more interactively with the States and um allow them to get into our system before we had like a firewall you couldn't get in um you just sent his stuff email and then we put it in now we have a new rule coming out that says not only are they supposed to send us that information and get it into the system no no now they have to actually have an account into the system and um they're going to do their quality control in the one we built not the one that they built we don't trust them we want it in ours right and um we've never done that before and we have all this pii I mean how frightening I mean our hoo I we're gonna have to redo that one um but we have to have a a way of making that happen so what's it called again um the PD I forget what the name of the the plug-in you're going to use for that service now the doc the doc generator doat yeah doc generator so they're working on Doc generator to um allow for that that sharing of information through documents that they can now easily transfer back and forth and they have a lot of very specific documents they have to fill out because you know we're bureaucrats so we have to have our documents right and it has to be on this form filled out this way um in order for it to be you know acceptable so we we're using this doc generator is a way of easily and quickly developing documents that can then be shared back and forth instead of having to separately build in each document into the system um and of course the documents can vary slightly because we allow variance you know because it's 50 states and two territories so we allow them to vary a little bit but that variance H you know that can cause you to have 50 different you know slightly variable documents and I mean talk about the you know the Mayhem that will cause so uh instead of programming each individual document with its variance hard programmed into the system we're using doc generator to give us flexibility to to share back and forth these documents um so that they're autofilled and you know just everything how much time have you saved being able to do that have you Quantified that we haven't Quantified that yet we're not that mature yet it's still it's still being built um we have a year left okay before we have any type of metrics to really share something to help the mission see the outcomes of the work your te it's really huge because poor Alex he started building the system with the vendors and then right when he was building it I think six months in Congress um said all right we need to have a new rule and so now we have an interim rule that is ready to be turned into a final Rule and you know it's always hard when you're building a system and then Congress or you know there's a new law yeah a new rule that happens it changes everything every day right every Terry I know um speaking of rules the president's management agenda there's mandates all around um share with us a little bit about how that has maybe pushed you into quicker modernization or transformation how does that impact how you prioritize and make decisions around those mandates yeah it's it's not easy I mean let's face it there's a lot of inflection points happening today around the world in our United un States in our government and in our agencies and it's all coming together at the same time technology has evolved to this incredible inflection point um so you you're weighing exactly what Veronica was talking about as well as trying to figure out how to incorporate AI into this we have an executive order saying it's time to get on with it figure out the fears manage the risk and get after Ai and do it in a safe fair and open way that you can really support wherever it evolves to so everything we're doing is is trying to do all those same things and figure out how do you create the architecture that gives you that adaptability as well as then connects this data because to really do AI well if you're going to do it behind your firewall you want to have good data sources that are tagged and you can really add them in quickly without having to go do all that work from the unstructured data so these tools I think are important to us because of the embedded capability you know what talk about AI I always talk about it in terms of there's public AI I can go out in the public and I can use chat GPT or like there's private Ai and I can subdivide that into tools that are embedded in so AI is embedded in service now the assist the co-pilot tools they're all great tools but what data are they going after and what do you want to accomplish with that tool is an important part of your thought process and then if you actually have a mission where you might need to do Predictive Analytics or or some sort of real you know simulation think weather think climate think all these kinds of really crazy computational nightmares you need the kind of tools that then allow you to take your own models and and really build out your own algorithms so we're segmenting our use cases against that kind of framework in our governance process and then using a risk-based approach just like in cyber to think about which ones bring the best value not the highest Roi as you heard or earlier because I'm not sure the highest dollar return on investment really is the advantage here and I heard a colleague today talk about the how do you quantify the value and it is hard and somebody said well here's a simple way to do it I thought that is really ingenious look at your total payroll if it touches every employee then take your total payroll and say just a return of 10 hours a year equates to this dollar value that is minimum 10 hours per a year like very very low number just 10 hours right and so it sounds like I mean National Science Foundation I can imagine AI is going to be an incredible tool for all of you is there do you already have a framework set it sounds like you're modeling it after cyber um share with us how did you get started I think a lot of people you know there's so many terms we were talking about earlier Veronica how do you get started because there's RPA ml AI now gen AI um to ensure that not just you all understand it but your C your constituents your you know um customers or employees understand it and how you want it defined yeah so we um being the National Science Foundation you can imagine we have a lot of very smart people in the subject matter of AI in fact we've been gentle well we've got people that have a lot of years in Academia who have actually built the stuff that has now translated to IND industry that is now translating to our ability to deploy it very cool so if you think about this they've been investing I did my work in 1996 and a lot of that work was funded by NSF and here we are today just applying some of that stuff so that was NSF Investments wow so the research side of our mission our core mission is to do that kind of forward look and invest outward so that when we get here today we can say look at what we did 30 years ago 40 years ago in investments in Ai and that how we got here inside of NSF we are doing is incorporating into our governance process where we're thinking about what are the use cases how do we categorize them we did a survey and said okay we're going to go into this custom AI behind the firewalls we're actually going to take a model and build a model against a large language model and some other algorithms to do something Innovative behind the firewall that is not embedded in one of these great data set tools that we have in place and we found 79 use cases without even trying wow from that we narrowed it down and found nine business value propositions and then we narrowed it down to um two that we really liked and one is simply if you want to submit a a proposal to NSF because our motto is we want to hear every idea out there it doesn't matter who you are we want to hear your idea well do you know how to get the idea to the right person to actually get it consider who's in what are we currently investing in what are the areas we're asking for investment in so if we can create an internal chat function that looks against all of the old history of proposals the descriptions that we have for the new request for proposals and you can see where your idea fits we can have that assist really help guide people to where to go and even how to write the proposal how to make sure it follows the guidelines that we publish against writing of proposal requests that's awesome so I think this is a big area for us to think about how do you really implement Beyond making life easier for the employees and people just doing your basic workflows let's get after some of the really cool stuff too I love it for sh we have completely the opposite experience because um when you know we're working our through our stuff and you know we have a a relatively small oit Department um all things considered and our mission is focused on food benefits that's where all of our efforts are um so we have we touch the lives of so many of people in America figure you know every child below the age of five could potentially you know below a certain uh level can get Wick benefits or or all school lunches you know kids who are doing school lunches and also you all the snap beneficiaries which are like 45 million so you know we have a lot of people that we interact with however when it comes to oit you know know we're just starting to do modernization and then you throw AI at us and we're like okay well how do we integrate the two um you know what are we doing um and then you start giving us different definitions of AI and we're like well we do chat GPT we do these things oh that's AI oh okay I mean if that's what you want to call it go for it um you know but you know now we're doing we're focusing on okay where could generative ai go how could we take all this data that we actually touch or we could potentially touch and use it to our benefit in order to more effectively um get out all the benefits that we have for the people in in the US and so we have to partner with our program but we have to first like teach them or help them to understand what we're actually doing because sometimes you know that what they think AI is and what we're we're talking about is it actually what's going on and they start thinking about you know their latest science fiction movie not about okay what is actually feasible and and how can we actually turn that into something productive so not only are we having to switch over from modernization Focus stop um restructure and go into you know AI but then we also have to look at what are our current skill sets and how do we upskill people so that they can then take the lead with AI when they were really more focused on other areas thank you that's impactful and I feel like Terry you have a a pretty good foundation based on what you shared but also with the amount of data at NSF it's got to be um really meticulous how you're going to be using that data and then all the mandates that are going to come around as it relates to how you're using that data and are you following the rules that they're going to you know start continuously adding to the list of rules that they already put out well I was going to say we had we serve a lot of um socially disadvantaged people so when we use Ai and they say okay you need it to be transparent you need it to be you know not have bias that's really critical for us because um if we're not careful then we can put bias in in any USDA program that could have really negative real world consequences for people who don't have ways to protect themselves right so that's why we have to be very very cautious about how we you know leverage Ai and then how we Institute it such a great point I personally didn't think about that because it's an aggregation of similar data that continues so it it starts to create the biases without you even trying so um we do have a few minutes for um audience questions if anybody has a question for Terry and Veronica question no all right well then we will leave with one last question if you were to leave this audience with one advice as it relates to Mission trans information what would it be be flexible um really because once you start going down a path you never know okay do we have to reposition ourselves this action is not getting us where we need to go um maybe it's not even because of something you did but because one of the partners you're working with didn't work out how do we um pull back retrench and then find another path to get to where we have to go things things don't always go as smoothly as you want them to so how do I stay on task even though um you know I didn't get to where I wanted to go and and whatever I wanted delivered by September didn't get to me on time it's now a year later um so how do we stay focused how do we stay flexible um and how do we stay optimistic thank you so much who remembers when the ATM first happened and tellers went away yeah right um be a good partner right I I think it builds on exactly what she's saying which is get involved early with your your customer get involved early on that strategic decision-making process of deciding to do stuff and how to do it and really engage in that thing and don't just wait until the requirement shows up in your doorstep because I think the conversations happen early are really the most important to help us get to a better place as a total ecosystem that will help support what we need in the future of federal agencies in the federal government um and and really lean into that remember we're a service business we're providing a service and just like that ATM your businesses are getting smarter and smarter with technology every one of them has a cell phone every one of them knows how to use the common tools that you're going to find on that cell phone so it's no longer a days of how do I spell programming right and you don't need a computer science degree to do some of this stuff so allow them to take on some responsibility teach them coach them give them the guard s help keep them safe but let them go at the speed they need to go and I think that's where platform in general those capabilities are enabling us to do that at a much different way than we could 10 15 years ago I love that thank you so much Terry that's a great way to end I think in addition to be a good partner find a good partner that's what I would add make sure the partner isn't um one that can do everything great your Niche partners that are really good at delivering on the needs of your organization because sometimes the there's easier paths than others but it's it's very valuable to have a great partner so um for anyone else did you have a question yeah I have a question sure just to add to that conversation about using Service as a platform not just while to market products so just right now my focus is onm more on the project program from so question is about you know how you can help drive drive the information from one product to rest of the platform for example right now I'm managing different city moves that you know means like consolidate Market offices into one I'll move from8 point B then sometimes I got this ideas like you know if I'm doing this to SPN by creating tasks introducing a dashboard am I missing out the rest of the platforms existing people for example know I identify you know there are like facilities Theory or addresses I should be getting from somebody else right versus in creating in my SPN that's one example another example is like I have those travel I'm actually creating like five SPN to to autate quotequote we would love to spend time with you yeah we would love to spend time with you yes so um our session is over I don't want to keep any we're the last session of the day