welcome everyone thank you for coming over to our session around aligning Federal operations to get to outcomes faster and improve employee experience my name is Pamela grck and I'm a solution consultant manager for our public sector uh for the employee workflows line of business and today we've got a nice fireside chat for you with three great speakers ERS who we've been working with over the years and so I'll let them introduce themselves Bill start good morning Bill Daniels I'm the acting director of application development Digital Services and the office of secretary at the Department of Commerce hi I'm Liz pcel I'm the Director of Human Resources information systems at the development uh Finance Corporation and my name is Steve Krauss it's nice to see so many familiar and friendly faces in the audience um I work at the office of personnel management where I lead the HR quality services management office and the HR line of business office thanks so having that role Bill or Bill Steve starting already um having that role in your past experience I'm I know that gives you a different lens across looking at different HR systems and processes across the government can you talk to us a little bit about you know what you're seeing and maybe what the data tells you sure so um you know I mentioned that I lead the HR CMO and the HR line in business and um our primary role is we work across the agencies to help them modernize their HR it ecosystems and a big part of what we're trying to do from an OPM perspective and a government-wide perspective is to help agencies not just modernize but to share what they're doing and to be able to share platforms share processes and so on so to put that in context the HR line of business office at OPM Works across the agencies to Define standards that the agencies agree to converge on in terms of how they're going to manage human Capital Management functions and the hrq sm's job is to stand up a Marketplace of sort of defined and vetted solutions that meet those standards and that can help agencies to operationalize those standards so as you can tell standards is a very important aspect of what we're doing and we're doing it we we in effect are using the standards to work with agencies to define a common set of requirements when it comes to modernizing their their systems and their processes and we use those standards then with our industry Partners to help them understand what it really means to federalize the the products that they operate now we do have a unique lens on this as you pointed out Pamela because we have a birdy view of what's going on across the entire federal government in fact since 2022 we have executed an annual hrit inventory where we work across all of the CFO act agencies to understand what systems they're running as well as what their modernization plans are and so um you know first of all what that tells us is there's a lot of modernization uh going on out there there's a lot of modernization needs uh and I think uh we we'll get into that further as we y we talk here yeah so you mentioned a little bit about you know standardizing some of those processes and working with vendors to federalize things we've been working together over the last what 9 to 12 months on what I'll call side project to help government agencies get to those outcomes Faster by having those standards or those elements that are needed can you talk a little bit about the project that we're working on and some insights around it yeah and you know you refer to it as a side project but it's actually it's a really good example of what we're trying to do in the use of standards uh it's a good example of standards in in action so one of the things that we found when we started talking about how to help agencies modernize and to kind of do it together is we realized starting a few years ago that a lot of agencies are using service now to modernize their HR workflows um in some cases agencies are doing that so they can get more life out of some of their legacy systems like PeopleSoft 75% of uh civilian uh federal agencies run their HR their core HR is uh people soft as as a system um in other cases uh agencies are using service now to build and automate whole new HR workflows that that didn't exist before but there's a lot of use of service now and the more that service now is being used in various agencies the more that other agencies want to be able to use it and so we started looking at this idea of well how could we help agencies share these workflows from one agency to another um initially our thought was oh well you know maybe we could just actually sort of lift and shift and you know that the code that one agency uses could be used by by other agencies and we built a community of practice of U couple of dozen federal agencies that are either using service now or want to use service now and started exploring that what we found frankly is it's not quite that simple uh for a variety of reasons including you know techn tecal aspects of different agencies environments and the choices they've made it it's just not that easy for agencies to share Snippets of code and go back and forth like that what we found was instead the way to look at this is to kind of draw back and look at guiding principles and look at the standards so if agencies are standardizing the data if they're standardizing the business rules and the workflows that's almost like giving them the recipe to the workflows that they want as opposed to being able to to just share the workflows you know Al together um and so we started a pilot project uh with service now to to think about how we could do a better job uh standardizing and and sharing those things and where we um where we started was with the data itself because one of the things that we found across agencies that were implementing service now is they told us hey you know when we implemented service now we didn't find all of the data elements that we need in order to do federal HR so we had to customize well so what you end up with is a number of agencies who are all customizing service now similarly but slightly differently which means you know ultimately they call things different names they Define things differently and the data becomes you know in non-interoperable which is what we're trying to avoid so we started a project with service now directly um to actually take our data standards which we call the human capital information model model and to embed them into service now as a product this is a great example of what we mean when we talk about our industry Partners working to federalize their products and um I am pleased as punched to say that with the Washington release which was released just last week for the first time we actually have uh a a significant batch of those data standards embedded in the product the the core uh data elements associated with personnel management and things of that nature in the fall release the xanadoo release we have another batch those related to Talent acquisition because what we're seeing is that a lot of the agencies that are implementing service now for HR workflows are doing it around those uh workflows associated with recruiting hiring and onboarding talent our goal is to make it easier for agencies to deploy this and for them to do it in a standardized manner so that we can both share our knowledge and expertise and ultimately share the data share the data that we have uh across the federal Workforce yeah thanks I mean it the collaboration that we've seen with the community of practice has been so helpful just we've kind of gone back and forth and really defined what that looks like so it's it's a great uh project to work on with you I'll move over to Liz So speaking of workflows um you've deployed service now to a variety of different areas including different departments like HR it facilities can you talk to us a little bit about the beginnings of how you got everyone to collaborate because I know sometimes that could be complex and difficult sure um so for those of you who don't know who the development Finance Corporation is we are a I call us small But Mighty organization um when I arrived there two and a half years ago um we were uh rebuilding HR rebuilding it uh we were the overseas private Investment corporation of about 198 employees I got there in 21 we were about 350 employees and we're now 660 employees so what we found um as people were coming in from other uh HR shops um and and in particular myself it was was interesting because there were processes but no processes so maybe we did something one way one week and then the following pay period we did it another way because this was an agency that maybe 10 years ago onboarded 20 people in the in an entire year and we were now onboarding people 20 people in a pay period um and as the person who was in charge of new employee orientation and who had worked um with people like bill um and Z Bower over there I learned uh as an HR specialist uh working with these wonderful it people that you can automate this stuff and so when I got here uh I and found found out that we had service now um I had done some work with it and they said hey guess what we're um we're going to deploy an onboarding solution and I was like oh that that's great who's doing that and they said we don't know um and you you are because that that's HR and I said no it's not um onboarding is about provisioning an employee to make sure they have a PFF card and a computer and and a phone and a desk and that's not HR um and so what uh as I was kind of fighting this uh and running new employee orientation and running around in circles in the building um there's a little voice in the back of my head that reminded me of when I used to go to HR forums like this that Employee Engagement starts the day a person applies to your agency and it goes all the way through to the day they start at the agency and um as somebody who has worked at nine different federal agencies I know how important it is to have a good I've been through good onboarding experiences and I've been through bad onboarding experiences and as the face of new employee orientation I wanted our DFC employees to have an amazing uh first day uh and we had all sort of the pieces in place to do that but it was a matter of collaborating with with the oit shop and the service desk and our folks who do the PIV cards and the folks who assign offices and so we started to come together and and and outline what are all those tasks that need to happen day one or really before day one right because we want people to come on board that day and have that experience so we um we met with every sort of stakeholder in all of the the different uh parts of the organization we standardize a process and um the thing that's unique not necessarily unique but what we started to do too is um we looked at every type of um employee that we have at DFC we have five different employment types we have federal employees we have contractors we have personal service contractors we have detailes and we have unpaid interns what we're able to do in service now is customize an onboarding process for all of those different employment types not everybody needs um a computer the unpaid interns don't get a computer right so we were able to to really get down to um almost the n's eyelash to say th if it's this employment type these are the tasks that are going to kick off the other problem we were having is that um there was this idea that you know if you were a contractor deta you could start any day you wanted um and so we worked um among the team and we said no Mondays Mondays maybe not the the first pay period if you're of a of the federal pay period for contractors but Mondays and so now the service desk is always ready Monday morning at 8 o'clock to help people on board the PIV card team is there to issue the PIV and um I tell you what if it wasn't for human beings this thing would run super super smooth but uh but uh inevitably uh our humans uh make things complex but we send out a notification um seven days before the person on boards to over a hundred people at this 660 person organization well F 660 federal employees 901 uh total employee Workforce um a 100 people know this is how many people are starting next week this is where they're going to be sitting and we we we hit the ground running at 8:00 in the morning and people are blown away they can't believe at the end of the day that they're fully provisioned um and I I love watching their faces when they first put the PIV card in type in the um the uh password and their email comes up and they have 130 emails um 20 of which are notifications from um from our boarding tool that tells them this is what you need to do over the next two weeks and then we reverse engineered that for our offboarding process right because we have we had sort of we had a we had a different problem um that people were leaving and people didn't know um they weren't returning laptops to the to the vein of my cio's existence over there so now we have um that tool in place as well and the thing that I'm really the most proud of if if you've switched federal agencies raise your hand if you have um and they hand you the piece of paper right and they say fill this checklist out and you read it and you go but I don't get Metro subsidy no no no you have to get that signature um I didn't borrow anything from the library too bad go go find the library and go get that signed we reverse engineered the process where those again those stakeholders get the email and it says do they have any borrowed materials yes or no no signed done do do they park at the agency nope well then they don't need to return a parking transponder and so we now have such a high I think we have a much higher level of confidence that we're getting people off um of our of our systems um the and then the facilities team I'm kind of leaving them out of this but they also I think the the greatest thing that happens in the process too is that on your first day if you if you're not a remote work worker you have a name plate outside your office on on your first day and I think all of that put together um just really has made that day one experience for our new employees um something that they've never experienced they can't believe they're like this is the federal agency I'm like yes it is so that's what we that's what we've been able to do but it is um it is a team effort it's it's it's it's been the the IT people in the back end helping me build it it's the people on the front end embracing the process um and it's really just been an amazing um it's been an amazing accomplishment I think for all of us so how long has it been so we deployed June of 2022 with one uh person um in the oit shop we expect we had a new employee starting that day so we made him the guinea pig and then we started expanding it and we went um we went live with onboarding October of 2022 and um we from all the lessons we learned from doing onboarding we were able to build offboard we started offboarding in August of 22 and fully deployed it by November nice of 22 are there other things that maybe you are looking at to continue the effectiveness As you move forward um yeah I mean we're we're continuously fine-tuning um you know our on our onboarding form our offboarding form we're adding tasks we're we constantly I'm an English major so I'm constantly tweaking the notifications um I can't help myself if I see a typo we got to fix it rightly um so we we do that um and now I'm trying to get my friends in the HR shop to embrace more workflows so a telework form you know that go that goes from one PDF to another PDF and then gets lost somewhere we're work working on automating that or not just automating it but building a workflow um uh remote work forms um and and then really what I want to make sure that because we're not doing enough of this um and I again my CIO over there is always asking how many people work here I'm getting her a dashboard she is getting a dashboard so she never has to IM me that question again you talked a little bit about forms expanding those forms and doing those kind of ties back to the the project that we've been working on on those data elements to to give you some of those fields that are now going to be necessary as you continue to exactly expand yep the other tie in I would say you know so it's taken you a year and a half or two years to to get to where you're at but you know so Liz has come and uh demoed the things that you've done for our community of practice and so we've got literally a dozen agencies that are like I want that how do I get that and you know our goal is not to have them spend a year and a half to two years like how do we get them to be able to deploy it in three months six months right and the only way you can do that is to make sure that everybody is you know using you know these standards essentially but that's that's really where we want to get that sounds very powerful so Bill talking a little bit about these workflow Journeys um tell me a little bit about how you're looking at it at the office of secretary at doc from a service management digital experiences perspective so I think you the key word there is a journey so I started with Commerce about four years ago and our Enterprise services division um have moved up to the office of secretary at the headquarters component um when I was with Enterprise Services we deployed hrsd and and we had the first instance that covered and touched every employee inside of the Department of Commerce so about 60,000 users um we servic about 22,000 of those for HR Serv services and what we soon started to realize is okay yes we can create all these great digital Journeys then our secretary came out inside of our mission statement and says yes we're going to digitize and about that time I started transitioning up to the office secretary at a headquarters component looked at all the service now instances that were out there as well as some of the other Tech that we had and this is kind of where the journey kind of comes in is we realized we had a lot of Technology we were digitizing processes but we were digitizing those processes in silos so we were creating digital Journeys but just for HR just for finance acquisition just for it um so last year we we we did a great experiment let's let's consolidate one of those Standalone instances into our Enterprise Services instance and it worked out we Consolidated about three months or so went live it was a lift and shift um got great value out of that um started looking at the data coming back and then actually started realizing okay we can do more right and so we we started this journey kind of at a Grassroots level and said hey we can do that out of the product we can do it pretty quickly we can do it pretty inexpensively continue kind of the Federated approach on that it's just because of contracts and money how it is right now um but now we're now we kind of realized hey it's time we can do more we can do another consolidation so we've got two more instances we're trying to consolidate we have a goal by the end of this year to bring an integrated employee portal to the front that will have hrit acquisition and Facilities um that's kind of our first phase let's bring that that portal together you know get folks to kind of come in get these dispar experiences together and now let's create those integrated Journeys so it's going to take time right we have to unline some contracts we got people to believe in it um but we we've got good folks that are helping us out with that we've got um a Workforce that is eager to digitize and automate um but we constantly keep going back to the guiding star of what is this experience going to look like right and so we're taking our time but we have a we have a good guidepost and this year will be an interesting year once we kind of start bringing those dispar experiences together putting everybody in a single framework um hopefully saving a little bit of money creating a little bit less confusion um but then we want to kind of all tie those together um in in 25 and 26 I heard you say something else in there tying the journeys together I that's key the workflows but also data like understanding what the data kind of where we started with you Steve around it all kind of goes back to the data in order to make those workflows really really flow absolutely and I think one of the nice things is our our chief data officer has recognized that right and we have a big push when we talk about AI right now now when we start consolidating these platforms we kind of know where that data is it's really easy to to you know in bring AI into processes and all of those aspects awesome great I thought maybe we could open it up for any questions um if anyone in the audience had any questions for any one of our speakers yes sir depart sear process and AER separ because always and how we get that yeah so I I would say from that stpoint that process is is a bit dis desperate um so but again we have the advantage of being small um so we can kind of control some of that but basically it's standard operating procedure for onboarding you don't start until the security office says you've cleared security right that was a problem um again people would kind of show up and then uh and so we make sure we go through that process and then when you're leaving our standardized operating process is that you do fill out an offboarding form so again everybody is notified um we did have an example actually this past week where somebody submitted that offboarding form and everybody was surprised nobody knew that person was leaving uh not the HR person not the manager but he knew that he needed to fill out that offboarding form so that was good um so we don't we don't interconnect all of those processes together but people have enough information then that they can they can take with it take that information and do what they need to do right so again there's a task that goes out to the people um who give them network access okay I have to turn off their access on such and such a date I have to collect these materials the HR person knows that they need to especially if it was a surprise get on the get on the phone with that person to say you know what's your reason for leaving I got I've got to fill out your um you know your your SF 52 to do that Personnel transaction so I think the fact that we have these notifications um works out really well and then the one thing that we did do to kind of fine-tune it a bit was um if we don't get the equipment back um we put something into into place to autoclose um the offboarding case after like 90 days but unless the IT department has checked off that they've received the equipment that that case stays open and a report gets run every week to notify them that we're still waiting on that equipment so that's kind of what we've been able to do from that standpoint that's the next step that's the next step right so now we need to start making the decision if you've um not paid off your travel credit card bill if you have not um returned that government equipment can we start to work together to say don't don't issue the the final the final paycheck and I think that's that's a goal of ours in the next year to see if we can start to implement something like that yeah yes ma'am do you have like an external not external no yeah they have to come on board to do it we do is that what you said we to connect you to sure not actually what I want to talk about because um small Federal agency wear a lot of C we don't have a COO so I'm doing that as well and so my question was about data data specifically um I'm looking to create our first data catalog been around for a long time tools you guys usan um I I will say we're kind of new in that we actually don't have a a really robust data catalog either and you know we do have a CDO that is one of his goals um but I think we in application development Digital Services you know we we realized early on on that we are creating the data right so it was natural for us to create a good partnership with our with our CDO right um so through that they've been able to help along with our our CTO of going okay we have a lot of tech at the Department of Commerce we're we're very Federated um budgets give every Bureau their own it I mean if you're at the keynote with the Air Force this morning very much um very much our same scenario at Doc um but what we realize now is we can we can start procuring at least the same technology try to share the things that we're doing stand up centers of Engagement or centers of excellence right synergize around certain Technologies for certain use cases and then that's how we're going to help our journey right in in those areas it is it it it's going to take years right um and at the the pace that our Bureau grow and and just the the nature of the Department of Commerce we do stuff from patents all the way to to Noah and you know there's different types of data including grants management so yeah it is there's there's no right answer but we what we did realize is it it takes the team takes application development team takes the data team and then the CTO to really kind of help orchestrate this and and really kind of bring people to the table and create those relationships with which will ultimately end up giving us better data great because we want to change data inside of the organization so which agency are you with [Laughter] tict you're somebody who we all want to be friends with though um you know I I would say like so at an agency like OPM where we have a lot of data and we have a chief data officer and so on I I would just say I think all agencies are on the same journey and so you're not you're not as far behind as as you might think you are at at OPM we've got a lot of work going on uh to um standardize our own Data Systems and uh so we've been building these cataloges and things uh recently as well I I would say you know as it relates to whatever HR or human capital data you have um the human capital information model that we' built is is a good is a great starting point and um we we can connect offline we'd be happy to make sure that you're up to speed on that so that you can use that as opposed to having to reinvent it yourself yeah all right well we need to wrap this up and I want to thank our oh I'm sorry one more sure we love you and we know but for those of that what Happ hasard coming onr data so this is kind of a warning hey when you hear about these models it's really a good idea to start adapting because eventually you're going to have to report and they report on your data quality how you're that model fair fair enough so with that said I want to thank our speakers Bill Liz Steve if there's any other final thoughts that you want to provide for us today um you to have an old boss that said don't automate uh bad processes I say I say automate a bad process get it together then how else you're going to figure out how to fix it if you don't if you don't bring it together and digitize it so you know go automate go digitize but remember keep it simple for the folks that you need the information from right keep the experience and the journey as simple as possible for the enduser because you ultimately want them to go and do it and not have some back office staff doing it on their behalf yeah I I can't I can't say any thing other than if you're living in a world of thirdparty spreadsheets I feel your pain um and teaching somebody what a system of record is and its reporting tools we're on that same Journey too so um I think there's a lot to be shared and and and grateful for OPM for continuing to take that take that lead well thank you I I would say my my final word is anybody here who's working on automating HR workflows we do have this HR workflow automation community of practice for feds would gladly you know have more people in that community of practice uh we also um to Don's Point there's a lot on us to helping make sure that you all understand the standards that we're writing and able to use them so uh we do offer education on that and I'm happy to connect with anybody offline to to continue that process all right well thank you Steve well thank you for joining us today appreciate it and have a good rest of your day