Empowering innovators in the workforce

As we learned all too well this past year, technology is vital to the mission. And this requires that technology be democratized and accessible across the agency. Democratized technology means that everyone — not just the IT department — must appreciate technology’s vast potential and be empowered and proficient in deploying it to achieve new levels of capability to advance the government’s varied missions and businesses.

This has already begun. We see federal employees of all stripes employing a wide variety of emerging, mostly cloud-based platforms and tools to create custom dashboards, run data analytics, launch low-code or no-code applications, and even introduce automation and AI into their workstreams. Going forward, these technologies will empower individual employees to determine their own individual requirements for fixing problems and improving processes, select the right technologies and tools, for the task, and then address those requirements as a self-service.

But this trend brings with it sweeping implications for agency leaders to think through. A big one is that the role and function of IT will have to adjust accordingly. No longer can IT be the gatekeeper for all things IT. Rather, it must shift to becoming more of an enabler, a governor, a collaborator, and an advisor to the mission and business sides of the agency as they assert greater autonomy in deploying technology. Increasingly, successful IT departments will need to make this shift core to their missions and strategies.

Another implication when technology is democratized is that, even as our day-to-day work platforms and tools get easier for everyone to use, there remains a great need for federal agencies to educate their workforces to be savvy users and consumers of the technologies available to them. Whether they are advancing the agency’s mission out in the field or tending to the back-end business side of things, all employees will need a foundational level of technical and data literacy going forward.

In the longer term, expect “I, Technologist” to evolve the agency’s culture. As employees grow more comfortable and competent with employing technology tools and re-engineering their work processes, they will foster a culture that is far more adaptable, nimble, and confident in meeting the challenges of the future.

In July 2020, OpenAI asked for help exploring the capabilities of GPT-3, the third generation of the organization’s deep learning language model which can generate human-like text. Using a private beta version of the model, developers got to work, discovering and experimenting with its ability to write short stories, songs, guitar tabs, an article about itself, and even software code. Each new discovery and demonstration sent waves of excitement and awe across tech workers, reporters, and business leaders alike. When one developer testing the model was able to tweak it to produce code, demonstrating that he could create webpage layouts by giving the model written prompts like “the Google logo” or “a blue button that says Subscribe,” many wondered if this was an opportunity to make programming more accessible. With the help of a tool like GPT-3, could anyone become a developer?

They weren’t far off. An undeniable shift is underway: Powerful technology capabilities are being put into people’s hands, usable without highly specialized skills. It’s not about a single tool or service, but the culmination of an array of democratizing technologies. Natural language processing, low-code platforms, and robotic process automation (RPA) are just a few of the capabilities and services making technology more accessible. They each have different and unique applications, but all are bringing the innovative power of machines into the hands of people with as little friction as possible.

Democratized technology lets people optimize their work or fix pain points on their own. Without needing to request major IT projects, people can create a custom dashboard for a group’s finances, build an app to approve and automatically fulfill purchase orders, and much more. Suddenly, the power to create technology solutions is entering the hands of people across the enterprise.

This doesn’t remove IT from the equation. IT will still lead big implementations, scaling successful programs, and refreshing technology used by the agency. But this does require a shift in the role of IT departments. More than ever, they will need to collaborate with business and mission teams to identify and integrate innovative new technologies and ensure they are using and developing new tools and platforms securely and efficiently.

This shift is every agency’s opportunity to make their employees a core part of their digital transformation effort. But to do so successfully, leaders will need to extend the innovation imperative across every business unit. It’s not just about giving people access to new tools; agencies must actively teach their people to think like technologists. This doesn’t mean turning everyone into an engineer, but rather enabling them to solve problems with technology. By empowering everyone, those closest to a problem can be the ones to create solutions, keeping the agency in lockstep with rapidly changing needs.

Regardless of what your federal job title is, consider yourself a GS-2210! (That’s an “IT specialist” for readers who are not federal employees.)

Technology is simply so pervasive and so fundamental to getting the government’s work done that every federal employee may soon have technology in their job description. Take Alex Measure, for example. Measure is an economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics whose job was to manually classify data to help statisticians figure out things such as what are the most dangerous occupations and what are the most common injuries in those occupations. Measure decided he could save countless hours of time by automating the analysis and classification of hundreds of thousands of Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses filings annually — so with the approval and support of his managers he went ahead and did it!

“Well, I got started out of personal interest as a new economist,” he shared on the Exploring AI in Government podcast. “It was my job to review some of this data by hand and to classify it by hand and it's not the most glamorous thing to do. So that got me interested in machine learning and then that got me interested in learning about these techniques and applying these techniques. And so, it sort of went from there.”

It helped that there was a pretty solid business case driving him to think like a technologist. “In the case of the survey of occupational injuries and illnesses, each year we're collecting 300,000 written descriptions. We have dozens of people around the country that are manually reading through each of these descriptions. And obviously that takes a lot of effort. We estimate it takes about 20,000 hours of labor. Each year is equivalent to about 10 full time employees working on nothing else. So, you know, clearly there was a very real resource cost there,” he said.

But what made the task of automating this part of his job possible was the ease of the available tools, he said. “The advances in the tools have been amazing over the last 10 years. And I think if you went back 15 to 20 years, it was actually very hard to implement these systems. And now you have libraries like the scikit-learn library and Google TensorFlow, AWS Pytorch, that make a lot of these things much easier to build and implement. So, one of the things I spend a lot of time on in my current role is actually teaching my colleagues how to implement these systems and many of them have gone on to implement various successful systems.”

Not bad for an economist. But the power of Measure’s story is that similar examples of grass-roots tech creation are happening all over and becoming the new norm. A tectonic shift is occurring today in the way enterprises develop and deploy applications that run the business, modernize operations, and serve customers. And this shift arises out of an unabated appetite for new software by people who are trying to keep pace with their growing mission and business demands by harnessing data analytics, AI, and automation tools. That appetite has now far outstripped the capacity of traditional code-based programming approaches. Traditional code-writing simply takes too long, is too expensive, requires qualified programmers that are in short supply, and yields products that too often fail to satisfy specific end users’ needs. Conversely, low-code tools, robotic process automation (RPA), and other democratized technologies are proliferating rapidly, offer enterprises a more compelling option for building powerful capabilities than traditional software development because they solve the problems of scale, speed, equity, and customized requirements at the individual level.

Most things are in place for democratized tech development to become commonplace in government: the demand, the tools, the business cases. What’s not yet in place, however — largely because this is moving so quickly — is the consistent leadership, planning, skilling, and governance needed for agencies to capitalize on it.

This is where agency leaders need to strike a careful balance. What’s most attractive about democratized tech is that it enables the agency to dramatically improve productivity, mission performance, and business performance despite existing challenges around large-scale IT modernization and shortages of IT talent in the ranks. But there’s a threatening aspect to this as well: agencies must ensure that all this grassroots activity is adequately secured, understood, and integrated into an enterprise framework set forth by the agency’s IT leaders.

For agency leaders, there’s urgency in figuring this out. Just as apps like Excel and SharePoint empowered employees to more effectively collaborate, track and manage data, and share and convey information, so too are today’s development tools allowing them to automate, streamline, analyze, and accelerate their job tasks for improved performance and service delivery. There are valid and serious concerns that must be addressed, but simply saying no to grassroots tech is not really an option — employee expectations are shifting rapidly and people won’t remain where they’re not enabled to succeed.

Specifically, we see three big implications of “I, Technologist” that agency leaders will need to give careful thought to:

1. Do-it-yourself IT will accelerate as business and mission units become more comfortable with building their own applications.
2. The role of IT will shift as business and mission units assume more control over their own IT provisioning and development.
3. Tech skilling will take on higher importance so employees can be smarter about how they employ these new tools and capabilities.

Shadow IT — that is, hardware and software that is not sanctioned or provisioned formally by the agency — has long been a challenge to agency IT departments. Mission and business team members install shadow IT because it helps them meet specific work-related needs that their agency-sanctioned hardware and software does not. And IT departments understandably guard against shadow IT because it can pose significant cybersecurity and other risks to the enterprise.

So unsurprisingly, the concept of democratized technology poses big, vexing questions for agency IT shops: people now have an increasing temptation to circumvent their IT departments by downloading cloud-based, drag-and-drop tools that allow anyone to custom-build whatever business capability they might need, whether it’s to analyze data, automate a process, or infuse artificial intelligence into a business task. Many agencies are still trying to understand what these new tools mean for them and have yet to formulate guidelines for their use.

If “I, Technologist” is managed well, agencies can minimize their shadow IT problems by enabling their business and mission teams to develop needed capabilities using agency-approved platforms and tools, all with the aid and support of their IT departments. To accomplish this, agencies leaders must balance and harmonize these two powerful and valid competing interests within their enterprises. IT departments must work more in tandem with their mission and business colleagues to ensure they have the tools and platforms they need to get their work done. And mission and business teams must work within the confines outlined by their IT departments.

Many agency IT departments have multiyear plans in place to modernize their infrastructures and processes, to streamline and automate and tear down silos, and, eventually, to become more agile and responsive. “I, Technologist” now allows IT’s customers to avoid some of this wait and go it alone, using IT-sanctioned tools and platforms. It augurs a new era in which the business and mission customers of IT have the wherewithal to quickly spin up DIY tech solutions that address their specific needs and pain points.

Where does this leave IT? At its core, this challenge is about re-inventing how IT and non-IT employees work together to embrace secure, agile innovation at all levels that advances the mission and the business. This can happen, in part, if IT departments put guardrails in place to ensure a safe zone for the business and mission units to experiment and create. This will require some strategic stacking (see Trend 1), such as creating data lakes that people can access to extract insights that will help them succeed or secure enclaves where employees can experiment safely. Other guardrails could include:

• Pre-vetted tools, technologies, and platforms that business units can use to design, build, test, and deploy prototypes. These should include open-source tools, DevSecOps platforms, and low-code/no-code solutions. Because these tools, technologies, and platforms are always advancing and changing, the task of vetting and approving is continuous.
• Responsive technical security assessments to ensure new products are compliant with security, ethical AI, and other policies. Authorities to Operate (ATOs) will need to be re-evaluated, streamlined, and accelerated, and we are seeing some progress with this in the Army, Air Force, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Intelligence Community, and the General Services Administration.
• Concept-of-operations documents and other needed guidance and policies. This could include, for example, frameworks, best practices, reusable patterns, and qualifying criteria and training for people to create their own capabilities.

Because platforms and technologies are constantly changing, those guardrails will need to change at pace and be well communicated to maintain transparency with the technology user community.

Another way some agencies are promoting greater collaboration and alignment between IT and business teams is by shifting from a project-based mindset to more of a product-based mindset focused on product development and lifecycle management. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, for example, organizes its IT projects across four product lines — patents, trademarks, enterprise, and infrastructure — and they range from new software for internal use to products for patent and trademark applicants. The way some organizations are doing this is by emphasizing different performance metrics for IT — for example, putting less focus on things like IT throughput and efficiency and more on business outcomes.

For years, many government agencies have had great ambitions for their digital transformations, but they’ve struggled to recruit and keep the highly technical workers needed to bring those plans to life. Seven in 10 IT leaders surveyed from the federal government and industry say that continuing IT skills gaps have a high or medium impact on their agencies’ ability to execute missions, one recent report found. Among the skills that survey respondents said were most needed over the next two to three years: cloud application development (53 percent) artificial intelligence (49 percent), and data analysis (47 percent), software development (32 percent), and RPA (22 percent). The demand for rapid digitization in response to the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to push those numbers even higher.

Many government agencies and companies may have been looking at this problem too narrowly. Even as specialized technical skills remain in high demand, enterprises can increasingly lean on technology democratization to circumvent the skills gap in many areas, including all of the skill areas mentioned above. It’s a parallel strategy that will further close the disconnect between workforces and the technologies needed to deliver the most creative solutions in today’s market.

Fortify: Is your enterprise poised to take advantage of technology’s growing democratization?

• Pick one area of the enterprise to begin experimenting with technology democratizing solutions. For instance, give your resource management functions the tools needed to design their own apps and automate workflows.
• Evaluate your existing access to democratized technology. Many cloud providers are beginning to include RPA or low-code solutions as part of their services. Identify what tools the enterprise may already have access to, or what additional investments need to be made, to power grassroots innovation.

Extend: How are you training your workforce to think like technologists?

• Establish skilling programs that help workforces become digitally fluent so they understand the basics of cybersecurity, data literacy, cloud value optimization, and more. The more they understand these concepts, the more they will be able to use democratized technologies to their full potential.
• Ensure plans to adopt democratized technologies are accompanied by checks and balances that allow for easy identification of risks in low-code software, Office 365, RPA, and other tools.

Reinvent: How can democratized technologies make IT groups more effective — and vice versa?

• Establish teams to support and guide the use of democratized technologies across your organization. Update IT policies to give employees flexibility to explore the use of new technologies, but have IT play a role in establishing guardrails.
• Bridge the gap. IT will still be leaned on to scale and iterate on innovative solutions. Try using technologies like low-code and RPA to bridge the gap between the business and technical sides of your organization during prototyping and design stages. Also, try aligning IT efforts more with business objectives — such as through shared KPIs — to improve productivity and business outcomes.