One of the reasons people can never be entirely sure about what is going on at Area 51 is that it is a highly classified secret military facility. It was not until 2013 that the U.S. government even acknowledged the existence and name “Area 51.”

This information came out as part of a broader set of documents released through a Freedom of Information Act request, which is something regular citizens and groups can do to ask the U.S. government to provide details about government activities. In this case, the request made public formerly classified CIA information regarding the historical development and testing of the U-2 spy plane. The information also revealed where it was tested: Area 51!

As a national security historian, I know there’s a long history of secrets at Area 51. I also know that none of those secrets have anything to do with space aliens.

The place

The base commonly referred to as Area 51 is located in a remote area of southern Nevada, roughly 100 miles (161 kilometers) from Las Vegas. It is in the middle of a federally protected area of the U.S. Air Force’s Nevada Test and Training Range, now known as the Nevada National Security Site, which is inside the larger Nellis Air Force Range.

Area 51 is the secret code name for the site. The airfield at Area 51 is called Homey Airport, and the overall facility is often referred to as Groom Lake. Groom Lake is a salt flat, or dried-out lake, adjacent to the airport.

The history

In the early years of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, both nations sought new technological developments that might give one country more power than the other. A great amount of information about scientific achievements, such as on rockets or weapons – but also even on ways to grow more food or make fuel more efficient – was kept secret as an issue of national security.

A key part of not fighting another world war was, and still is, developing technologies to see what the other side is doing — that is, surveillance technologies that can spy on the enemy. The information gathered by new and improved surveillance technologies about new innovations with planes and weapons was very important to governments.

This meant that both the surveillance information and the technology to get it were closely held national security secrets. Very few people in the governments of the U.S. and Soviet Union knew about the secrets from the 1940s all the way up until the end of the Cold War in 1991.

Central to all this was the U.S.’s U-2 spy plane. It could fly higher and faster than other airplanes and was made to travel over targets all around the world to take high-resolution photographs and measurements. Area 51 was selected in 1955 to test the U-2 in part because its remote location could help keep the plane secret.

Area 51 became the test site for other secret new aircraft. This included the A-12, which, like the U-2, was a fast-flying reconnaissance plane. The A-12 was first test flown at Homey Airport in 1962. It had a bulging disc-like center to carry additional fuel. Its shape and shiny titanium body could well have been responsible for some people’s reports about seeing spherical ships, also known as flying saucers.

Another important — and odd-shaped — aircraft first tested at Area 51 was the stealth fighter known as the F-117. It first flew at Homey Airport in 1981.

Secrets and speculation

“More Flying Objects Seen in Clark Sky,” read the June 17, 1959, headline in the Reno Evening Gazette newspaper. Reports like this of unidentified flying objects in the 1950s and 1960s fueled controversy and attention for Area 51. This was for three main reasons:

• Area 51 was highly secret and not publicly accessible.
• The area was home to test flights of secret new airplanes that moved fast and in different ways than expected.
• The Cold War was an era of political tension, and there were many movies and TV shows about space aliens at the time.

When the government does not tell the public the full truth, no matter the reasons, secrets can lead to wild speculation. Secrecy can leave room for conspiracy theories to develop.

Area 51 remains off-limits to civilian and regular military air traffic, a decade after the government acknowledged its existence. The 68 years of government secrecy has helped to amplify suspicions, speculation and conspiracy theories. These conspiracy theories include crashed alien spaceships, space aliens being experimented on, and even space aliens working at Area 51.

There are much simpler explanations for what witnesses have seen near Area 51. After all, the public now knows about what was being tested at Area 51, and when. For example, as U-2 and A-12 flights increased in the 1950s and 1960s, so did local sightings of UFOs. As balloons and planes crashed, and secret testing of new technologies as well as captured Soviet equipment continued, so did reports of UFO crashes and landings.

In fact, many UFO sightings match almost exactly with dates and times of flights of then-classified experimental aircraft. We also know that prototype drones and more recent versions have been tested at the site.

In the end, there is no reason to think that anything other than earthly technologies have been behind the strange sights and sounds at Area 51.

Christopher McKnight Nichols is Professor of History and Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security Studies, Mershon Center for International Security Studies, at The Ohio State University.

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With the Trump administration’s focus on upgrading federal agencies’ information technology and overhauling its organization, shared services is seen as the vehicle to help accomplish both goals, putting USSM in the driver’s seat.

With she and her team tapped as finalists for the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals, Angerman talks to Senior Staff Reporter Carten Cordell about USSM’s path and the future of shared services.

You and the Unified Shared Services Management Team were recently nominated for a Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal. Talk about how the new administration has embraced shared services as a solution?

The Trump administration has sent so many important signals that running an efficient government is really important, and shared services has become one of what I think is a series of different tools in a toolbox that really could achieve those outcomes.

Can you talk about what the process of standing up USSM from 2015 to now has been like?

We’re still working really closely with the federal agencies to understand: what are the real opportunities for shared services? There’s a lot that’s common across government today. I think it’s important that we identify the right priorities, the low-hanging fruit, if you will, where we actually see the most demand and where are the pain points of agencies today so that we can start to show the value of shared services in a new way that will only build more demand as time goes on. And build the confidence that shared services can actually work in the federal government in a new model going forward.

Have the developments of both agency reorganization and IT modernization put a brighter spotlight on the potential of shared services?

Focusing on IT is a really critical first step in helping us leverage the great benefits of technology today. Traditionally, the government has been in this business of buying software and then installing it somewhere in our agency and then customizing it. And then five years later, we’re faced with the cost and the burden to be able to maintain it and keep it relevant and keep it secure and keep it updated. And that cycle has become one that’s not sustainable going forward.

We also have a challenge today with shared services that current agencies who offer a solution to other agencies are very wed to their system and the way that they offered that service, so buying the service is dependent on also buying the technology. And if the technology is already a legacy technology, we’re not actually fixing a problem or perpetuating history.

We want to leapfrog over the way that we do it today and move to a model where we can actually buy that technology as a service from industry. We put that stake in the ground and we say, ‘We believe there isn’t enough common about what we do in government similar to the way that Fortune 500 companies run their business, but let’s leverage that IT to get real scale for the government so that we can provide services on any modern IT platform. So that we can lean on companies whose mission it is and whose business it is to do the work of keeping that system modern, so I don’t have to worry anymore about security patches and upgrades and legislative requirements because someone else is doing all that for me.’

I fundamentally think that there is no agency in this government whose mission it really is to make sure that our finance systems are secure. And I think this is a great opportunity for us to free ourselves from that legacy technology, to leverage commercial technology and really double down on the services that do make us uniquely government.

Can you talk about USSM’s current initiatives — like Data Driven Performance Management and the M3 Framework — and what you are working on for 2018?

We’ve successfully run our second year of a data collection effort of the current shared service providers so that we can understand more about the current ecosystem of shared service providers, where customer pain points are with those current solutions and services and where honestly provider pain points are.

Shared services has been a successful strategy in the private sector for some time. How does that process scale to government?

It’s very difficult to be a shared service provider in government, because the first problem is we don’t actually have access to capital in government like they do when you’re running a system or a service in a private company. So that alone is actually a real inhibitor to being able to keep our IT modern and continue to evolve what services that providers offer today.

So there’s a whole series of challenges that exist in our current marketplace that now we have some insight into that we never had before because we’ve successfully collected data, both in performance, but also in customer satisfaction of the current shared service model. That data has been a really important source for helping the new administration figure out what the future of shared services may look like.

And we’re looking forward to — hopefully in the next upcoming months — [what] will be very telling as to just what stamp for this administration puts on the future of shared services.

When USSM was established, it received a lot of praise for the potential and efficiency it could bring to the federal government. Do you look back at the scope of what USSM has achieved so far since its inception and measure how far it has come?

Not yet, because I think there’s still so much more work to be done. I’m very personally motivated by the mission of our office.

I think about how the government has 108 time and attendance systems today. We spend more money running learning administration systems, $1.2 billion dollars just running systems that allow us to sign up for training.

And I think that that’s a really important mission that we have to make that work be more efficient. To stop allowing customizations, to stop allowing differences where differences aren’t truly driven by a regulation or law so that we can actually add more value to taxpayers.

We have a taxpayer dollar and we have a really important job in government to figure out how that dollar spent. And do we want it to go to having 108 different time and attendance systems or do you want to create more opportunity? I think about my other Sammy finalists and some of the amazing work that they’ve been able to do.

What I kind of see is what the work that we do in USSM is creating more resources — whether it’s human resources or financial resources — to do more of the work that those other finalists do that is really driving the value back to the taxpayer.

And so yeah it’s a hard time because we’re seeing across government the message of the hiring freeze, reduction of resources, reduction of budget. So I think we actually have, within our control in government today, the opportunity to make some really important decisions about how government will run in the future so that we can maximize our value to the taxpayer.

Though it has its roots in the Department of Commerce, do you feel like this is a process that can scale up to broader use in the government?

The roots of the Joint Venture Partnership is in the statutory authority that is within Commerce

.

And the intent of

t

hat is really to help leverage a lot of the foundational data that comes out of the Department of Commerce and then connect that data with data from other federal agencies. It’s really in the connection of the data that we are deriving value.

What we found out in some of the initial conversations is that it’s a two-pronged approach. One aspect of connecting that data is to really help democratize this information and drive economic growth, but another area that really seems to resonate is driving internal operational excellence within federal agencies by helping them achieve their mission in a more efficient way of driving operational excellence.

So to your point, it’s interesting to note that as we’re looking at economic growth, many of the agencies that we’re working with — such as the FDA and HHS — are really looking to achieve their mission, but by driving internal operational excellence of how they do their work.

So while the original intent is very much to work with Commerce and be a publisher of data, we are beginning to see broad-based demand from other federal agencies. Because ultimately the value of this data is when it’s connected among all these other agencies.

So, it’s driving culture

within those agencies?

Correct, it’s driving culture in the way that you can’t have a project for operational excellence. You can’t have a project for economic growth or a project for innovation. You really need to have a catalyst for change, and we believe that data is this renewable resource that keeps on giving if it’s applied correctly and understood within federal agencies to affect internal change

.

The program is growing, but where would you like to see it go from here?

I think we’re going to end this fiscal year with a few high visibility organizations that we’re supporting on a multitude of data analytic type capabilities

.

We will take a slight pause and see then how we need to further scale this process. We’re working with 30 Joint Venture Partners. I think for the time it’s sufficient, but I really think we need to understand how we can continue to scale this business model should the demand from the federal government and the private sector increase.

We have a business plan in place, we’re executing against that and then after about a year or so, we will pause and see what have we learned and then how do we take this to the next level. Because ultimately, what we’re promising here is time to market and helping agencies achieve capacity to scale. And our business model needs to be operationalized in such a way that it provides specifically those attributes

.

In talking about Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, he has voiced support for NTIS. Are there certain policies, like IT modernization and data analytics, that just make good governance sense across party lines?

So, we’ve seen great support from the administration. As you know, Secretary Ross keynoted our Federal Data Meeting

back at the

beginning of April

.

The

Department of Commerce is truly a Big Data agency. We have organizations such as the

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Census Bureau and the release of economic indicators that we have. But as I mentioned before, it’s really the power of our data and connecting it to our other datasets.

So we see that is a continued growth industry and data is playing a very important role. You don’t have to look very far as to what’s happening in the private sector, where you have large organizations whether it’s the Googles, the Facebooks, the Amazons and many, many other big players. If you look at their businesses, on the surface it seems that they are doing totally different things, but the innovation engine within each one of them appears to be data and there’s no reason why data can’t be the innovation engine within the federal government

.

When was the AESMS office first stood up?

The office was stood up in October 2016, and that was a result of our efforts in implementing a task management solution to the headquarters department of the Army. And in our efforts with HQDA, a lot of the other Army commands and organizations subordinate to HQDA started coming to us seeking similar solutions to what we’re providing, and as a result we had to establish a project office to manage all those requirements.

When you set out, what was the problem you were looking to solve?

HQDA identified a capability gap with task management. Prior to us implementing the task management tool for them, they were leveraging a technology-based tracking system; however, they were still using the blue folders to manage all their correspondence, as they were routing them through office to office for the various levels of edits, reviews and concurrences. The capability we’re providing them digitizes the entire process from the version control of the documents, editing of the documents, to including digital signatures for the final product.

It eliminates the personnel walking down the hallways and eliminates the stacks of papers. And it provides real-time feedback on exactly where the document is in the process and who actually has it at that time. Senior leaders can look and query that at any time and figure out where things are.

Do the blue folders still exist?

In the end, the blue folders will be phased out. Right now, the plan is for HQDA to be fully operational using the new task management tool by June.

Why didn’t you just go with the Pentagon’s system?

The product that we’re using to meet HQDA’s requirements is the task management tool, which is a product of the Accenture Federal Services. We came to that solution based on the requirement that we had to be able to interact with OSD’s staff management solution. That was a specified requirement that we had to meet; we couldn’t fold on that.

As we were doing our market research at the time, the task management tool was the only commercial off-the-shelf system that was able to interact with CATMS [Correspondence and Task Management System] out of the box.

What functionality will the system have when it reaches full operating capability in July?

By July, the vision end-state on how HQDA staff will be running is that you won’t see the folders with the staff action summary sheets on people’s desks. It’ll all be virtual in their computer and on the network.

So, first, the elimination of all those staffing folders. Secondly, I’m expecting the senior leaders to see efficiencies in the timeliness of actions being processed. Where normally you would have a policy memorandum or a revision to an Army regulation or a memorandum for record being staffed through – that would take several days to a couple weeks for it to go through three different offices – we’re hoping to be able to measure that in the number of hours or maybe even the number of days.

And then, obviously, we’re going to eliminate a lot of waste, with using a lot of paper and printing out things and whatnot. And, lastly, we’ll be able to have a concise archiving process because anything that goes into the system will be archived.

Paperwork management isn’t always sexy. How important is this tool?

For me, it’s that I can go to bed at night saying, I’m saving the taxpayer and the government money.

At a minimum, it provides a capability, at least right now, within the Army that makes everybody’s job more efficient and in some aspects easier to do. Whether that be a simple policy letter or whether it be an Army regulation or revision to doctrine, in some way that has a direct impact to the war fighter.

What is the future of AESMS?

A year from now, I see HQDA running self-sustained as far as working with AESMS and the task management tool. But I also see our interactions with other Army agencies increasing.

Supporting HQDA was just the start of the evolution. I would say that we’re going to probably have ten or so additional customers this time next year. Then, five years from now, I see this, hopefully, as a formal enterprise solution for the Army and maybe DoD; maybe not being hosted at ALTESS [Acquisition, Logistics and Technology Enterprise Systems and Services] but maybe one of the DoD clouds or in the commercial cloud environment.

What advice do you have for other project managers thinking of starting a new program office?

If you’re thinking about it within DoD, as far as trying to develop a solution set to fill in a capability gap, I would say definitely foster relationships with your industry partners because they either already have a solution or they’re already thinking about the same solution that you’re trying to do. … And, two, when you’re dealing with information technology, things are continually evolving, things are always changing, whether it be in the cybersecurity arena or whether it be in computing capacity, computing power or whether it be in software code. … The more you can leverage your relationship with industry, the more you can be in step with them and in step with the modernization.

Q. The private sector has often been able to work with government on innovative solutions, but it seems like the partnership has gotten stronger of late. Can you talk about its role in working with the VA?

A.

I think a couple things we’re doing is, one, OI&T is bringing best practices. So we’re bringing in the [Information Technology Infrastructure Library]. We are going to be an ITIL shop from our service side. With the [Enterprise Program Management Office] stand-up, we’re going to be agile. So we’re going to be putting out releases as we go in sprints so that we make sure that we’re delivering innovative solutions that the customer can see, the customer can feel and then make sure that we’re actually delivering what they ask for.

Q. Can you talk about the transformation efforts you have going on at OI&T right now?

A.

There were five main offices that were created for the OI&T transformation. … The [Enterprise Program Management Office] is going to be the control tower and is going to be using agile methodology that will make sure that we’re delivering fast release sprints as we deliver the programs to the customer.

The Account Management Office is going to make sure that each customer has a strategic partner in OI&T to plan for the future. The Strategic Sourcing Office is to make sure we’re getting the right industry partners with the right skill sets to bring innovation. Quality & Compliance is making sure that we’re bringing in quality solutions, but also complying with any mandates that we may have. And then finally is the Data Management office, which is going to make sure that we have a centralized authoritative data source for our veterans, but also our line of business is to use.

Q. You mentioned strategic sourcing. That’s something that’s really big in government right now. How does it specifically benefit VA?

A.

Strategic sourcing is going to help us bring in an industry partner in the innovation that we’re looking for. If we can’t bring in those innovative minds from the outside in the industry, then it’s going to be very hard in the VA to be innovative. As well as HR in bringing in the new, fresh blood talent that has those innovative ideas and pairing them with folks that have been in the VA, know how to operate and know how to navigate the organization. Those are going to be key. Strategic sourcing is just one of those major things that we have to nail down and be very good at and bring in the right industry partners on board to help us get there.

Q. Another popular trend in government is the utility of open data and IT modernization. As a customer service-based agency, what are the possibilities for VA that you see in both of those arenas?

A.

Legacy modernization is going to be a huge drive across federal government. I think it was the FCC CIO that said the other day that we’re already behind the curve if we have legacy systems. We’re taking a look at all legacy systems and seeing where modernization efforts can happen quickly and when those need to happen so that we can drive that performance to have the platforms needed to sustain the future. As well as the Office of Data Management, which I mentioned, that is going to help bring all of our data together and have an authoritative source that is reliable for our line of businesses. Then our veterans will be able to look at things across the way and not have to change their address every time they go to one of the administrations, but also our lines of businesses will be able to look at the data and be able to use it and have accurate data. Right now we have a lot of silos of data, and we’re bringing that all together.

Q. Talking about customer service, what kind of inspirations have you derived from the private sector and how does that best apply to what you’re trying to achieve at VA?

A.

VA wants to make sure that we deliver on Abraham Lincoln’s promise to the veteran, and that’s our first priority, but we also want to make sure that we’ll make it as quality experience as they come. You know my favorite [inspiration] if the Disney Company were in your hospital and many of the Disney philosophies, I believe in those. As we look at the private sector in my field as health care, a lot of hospitals are closing, are merging and yet Disney has a 70 percent return rate. So hopefully when a veteran comes in, they have access. We want to make sure they get there. We want to make sure the system supports what we need to support, but also we want to make sure that that is a very high-quality experience when they come to our facilities.

Q. Is Disney an inspiration because of its large customer base? What about that company really stands out to you?

A.

To me it’s that every fiber of every employee in Disney believes in making sure that it’s a magical experience. I believe that every employee in the Veterans Administration believes in and cares about our veterans. We want to make sure that they get what they need and they’re happy when they leave; that’s who we are.

Ms. Council did a great job of ensuring that when IT — because we’re behind the scenes and are a support element — when we thought about a customer, we don’t think that the lines of business are our customer. If we go straight through, we know our veteran is our customers, and in the VA, we believe it’s “My veteran.” Every veteran is “My veteran.” So that is where we want to be, when they walk into our facility, they’re “My veteran.” We want to make sure that they’re cared for and every piece and everything we do is there to support them.

Q. During your tenure at OPM, you put a big emphasis on metrics and their use to improve employee engagement. Talk about the use of metrics as an engagement tool and its importance moving forward.

A.

Well, as I say in many forums, I’m a big believer in metrics. I am a data geek at heart because I think they are a really great way of giving us insight into how we’re operating. What’s working, what’s not working and how we can make improvements. You know, we’ve used the metrics from the [Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey] over a number of years around employee engagement and not just creating metrics, but creating tools like Unlocktalent.gov that make that data accessible — accessible to leaders and participants throughout an organization, so they can understand what’s happening and how they can do better. If you’re in one part of a larger agency, you can see the other parts and see what’s working for you, what’s not and what can you do.

They give leaders, managers, supervisors, employees a way of frankly understanding their own performance and a way of seeing where they’re making progress. We spent a lot of time since I arrived, even in my days at the Office of Management and Budget, focused on employee engagement. We know engaged employees deliver better results. And so working with agency leadership, in partnership with front-line employees, in partnership with [the Department of] Labor, say: “How can we make employee engagement better?”

I’m really pleased that we’ve been able to turn around the overall government trend after a number of years of decline to get those scores back up. … I think data holds us accountable and helps us stay accountable in the future. It gives us momentum. It gives us all a way of saying: “Where do we need to focus, what can we do next and how are we doing?”

Q. In talking about the challenges you faced stepping into the OPM director role, how did they inform your leadership and how might they inform your successor?

A.

When I arrived, getting our hands around where we were in our cybersecurity was Job One. And so I spent a great deal of time working on that. We had a whole-of-government problem, and so one of the things we did was have a whole-of-government response. We had folks from [the Department of Homeland Security] and [the Department of Defense] and every other agency that we could find helping us work our way to strengthen our systems and deliver services to those who’ve been impacted by the breach.

At the same time, we had to continue the rest of the important work of OPM. So it was a real challenge for me thinking about how do you have this intense focus on addressing the cyber issues, but not let the momentum slow on the rest of the work that we were doing.

I was fortunate, we are fortunate, that the team here was able to actually drive the rest of that work forward while certainly, initially, my core focus was on addressing cyber issues. Hopefully the person coming in, I know they’ll have a little more balance against those different issues and so can actually focus more evenly across them.

Q. When you came into OPM in 2015, there were several heavy lifts going on: standing up the metrics, improving employee engagement and recovering from the cyber breach. What advice would you give your successor about this job?

A. So I’d probably start with saying: ‘You know this job is about helping the workforce deliver for the American people

.”

And it is really important to get a firsthand appreciation of the work that goes on every day. Fighting forest fires, helping our vets, working in labs discovering new diseases, helping people get disability benefits

.

People make a difference every single day

.

So the first piece of advice I’d say is to really understand and appreciate the wealth of work the federal workforce does.

The diversity of that work — 85 percent of the federal workforce is not here in Washington, D.C. — and the commitment and the passion that those individuals bring, that’s the first piece

.

The second would be to think about the multiple parts of the OPM mission … from ensuring we have a trusted workforce through what we do in background investigations to helping agencies hire talent; to focus on engagement, to help deliver employee benefits to annuitants and current employees

.

There’s a wealth of work that goes on around here, and focusing on making sure that that level of operational excellence, of innovation, of creative problem-solving around that work continues

.

And finally, I couldn’t go without mentioning it, continuing the work we’re doing to modernize and make our systems even more secure

.

That work needs to continue

.

That’s going to be a focus. It was a key focus for me, it’s going to be a focus for my successor

.

Q. We’re in the midst of a presidential transition. For you, as an outgoing OPM director, what does that mean in terms of the process? What are you working on to assist that process?

A. So OPM plays sort of two roles in the transition

.

We provide support to the overall governmentwide transition through things like the publication of the Plum Book, through the work we do in creating a transition guide for federal agencies

—

an employee handbook there — through the work we do in supporting our reporting requirements to Congress on

c

onversion of political appointees and a number of things like that

.

So we have a cross-government role that’s being really well-led by our team here

.

We also have work on transition inside the agency itself

b

eing led by a terrific career executive, Jozie Robinson, who leads our executive secretary office. She’s been working with our

associate directors and our office heads to make sure that there are a set of clear transition materials available for the team

.

She’s been part of the [Agency Transition [Directors] Council. So we’re kind of working on both of those things simultaneously to continue and do as the president’s committed we all are going to do work on: delivering a super-high-quality transition experience in the tradition of American democracy

.

Q. What is your hope for the future of OPM? What would you say to federal employees as your tenure winds down?

A. What I’d say to federal employees is what a privilege it has been to be one of them for the last three and a half years

.

I joined the federal government from the private sector. I hadn’t worked in government at all and it has been an absolutely fantastic experience

.

I see the dedication they bring every day, I see the talent that they have, I see when we’re at our best how we reflect the richness of America

.

I see folks coming to work every day, thinking about how they can deliver for the constituency they’re trying to serve. It’s really been an honor at OPM to think about what we can do to bring in more talent, to develop the talent that’s here, to help them be recognized for the great work they do and to think about how to enable them to do their jobs better. Because that’s what everybody wants to do, they want to come to work

.

They want to make a difference, and for me being part of that has been an absolutely rewarding experience

.

Q. If you had to pick your proudest achievement while at OPM, what would it be?

A. Oh my gosh, it’s so hard to pick

.

I came from an institution that focused on three, so I’m going to pick three

.

One of the three was being one of the first

a

gencies to install the [

Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation]

capability in Einstein 3A

.

[It’s] sort of emblematic of the work we’ve done to get cyber in place

.

Another great moment was the conference we had just a couple weeks back

celebrating our achievement of hiring 100,000 individuals with disabilities into the federal workforce so we can take advantage of their talents. Having that meeting, not just to focus on that, but to think about what’s the next step

.

How do we do more to capitalize and leverage on those talents?

I guess

number

three

is just the interactions I have with our partners across agencies and helping solve each of their specific problems about some kind of talent that they needed or the work that needs to be done

. And w

atching our team think about what they can do, whether it was

figuring out

how to get direct hire authority to the State Department, the [United States Agency for International Development], and [the Department of Health and Human Services] to respond to [the] Zika [virus] in an incredibly fast way. Watching those skills come together makes me really proud

.

As I go around the organization to talk to each program office and region — we have a formal review every year with each program office and region — as I’m going through that, I’m finding now regions and program offices that have taken their portfolio of 200 applications down to five or six that they want to migrate. So we’re really going to look at a couple hundred across the agency and that couple hundred, what we’re looking at not only is agile development processes, but also collaborating across the agency.

The only way we can truly collaborate across the agency in fact is to be agile. Because if I try and say, “OK everyone needs a fleet manager system. We can’t buy commercial off-the-shelf systems.” This is probably a bad example, but imagine we can’t. We’re going to build one. And we’re going to gather requirements for the entire agency and we’re going to build that. It’s going to take me years. However, if I say, “Region 4 is going to build it. And they’re going to build their requirements in and then they’re going to share it with the rest the agency, then Region 6 and Region 9. The headquarters folks are going to add in their requirements, and in future sprints, we’re going to bring those requirements in.” I could deliver that in three to six months because we’re not trying to boil the ocean. We’re not trying to everything at once. We build that minimum viable product and then we add into it. So that’s how we’re building products that serve our productivity need across the agency.

We’re also applying those principles to helping our HR and our business systems when they go in to make changes to upgrade the systems. We’re using lean. So we’re backing out a lot of the customizations we did to commercial products, leaning them and making our business processes meet those products’ design so that we don’t have so much customization so we don’t get stuck again. We get orphaned on an older version of a product because we’ve done so much customization and we can’t afford that, particularly the security issues we have in the world now.

But even so, just from a user experience standpoint, we can’t afford to get orphaned on old version of, say, PeopleSoft. We’ve got to stay up with the program. So we’re leaning those processes, and then we’re using agile practices where we can do our upgrades and reintegrate those solutions together.

So there are a lot of opportunities to lean our solutions in terms of productivity systems and in running our business.

The oversight question is really interesting because we have conversations with OMB, particularly about [IT Capital Planning and Investment Control], about how CPIC doesn’t really support agile. They’re trying to figure out how to support agile with CPIC, but I think you’ve got some underlying concepts in oversight that make that hard.

Some of the underlying concepts in oversight are, “Hey, you should be able to tell me three years ahead what projects you are going to work on.” Well, I might know generally what projects I’m going to work on, but I’m not going to have activities and projects three years ahead. [They say], “But we just got through looking at Exhibit 300,” and that’s exactly what we’re being asked to do is, “Tell for your projects are for 2018.” I don’t know what my projects are for 2018, at least in terms of a start date, a finish date and the duration. I might know [that] I have these general capabilities I think I want to add in 2018.

So I think it’s a huge opportunity from an oversight standpoint, I think the folks who are responsible for oversight get that and I think we’re all struggling with how we’re going to get there together.

With that flexibility on things like phishing attacks and network vulnerabilities, do they help you more in terms of keeping networks more protected than on, say legacy systems?

Certainly. I think you’ve heard Tony Scott talk about building in security as opposed to trying to build security around an old system and I think you’ll hear a lot of people talk about that. It’s the best way to create security, to bake-in security from the very beginning, to be secure by design.

It’s sort of like when I used to work in quality. People used to test in quality and then they said, “Well, wait why don’t we design in quality, and then we can test it out to make sure that we hit our goals, but our primary goal is going to quality planning and design.” It’s the same thing, security planning and design. And then you can test your security because you should, but it should be designed in from the beginning to be much more robust than trying to build it around an old system that wasn’t designed with the kind of attacks and issues we have now.

No one could have predicted the world we live in, from a security standpoint, when people are building mainframe systems in the 1950s and 1960s.

What advice would you give a possible successor about the CIO role?

What I almost always tell people when they ask for advice on this area is don’t be afraid of change. I think the government tends to be averse to change. We tend to move slowly and anyone who comes in needs to figure out how to move things fast.

The industry is moving fast, the threats are moving fast and the biggest risk of government is moving too slowly and having both citizen needs pass you by, but also get swamped by events with security issues.

The Executive Leadership Conference has put a big focus on being a change agent for public service. What traits do you think a good change agent needs to possess?

So that’s an interesting problem because as you probably know USDS and 18F brought in a lot of change agents and other agencies [are bringing in] a lot of change agents.

There are kind of two types of change agents: The ones who fit and the ones who the antibodies reject. So we really want to have change agents that will not be rejected by the agencies’ antibodies, which most importantly means we need people who trust and respect government employees to be change agents. We have lots of really smart, really capable people working for the government who have spent a long time in a system that’s hard to work in. They know a lot about how to work in that system.

While many of those folks can no longer consider the possibilities on their own, what we find is if you bring in someone who is a change agent who wants to make change, who’s got an exciting vision and who is respectful of the people they work with, very quickly everyone gets on board with that change agent. If you bring in someone who thinks they know it all, the antibodies will reject that person.

So we want people who have good ideas, have a bias for action, who are willing to take risks, but also who are really collaborative and who have a lot of respect for the ideas and the capabilities of people around them and who are as interested in learning from the people who work for the government as they are in helping the government be more successful.

It seems like you have a two-pronged campaign where you working with industry on these regulations, but you are also informing patients of their rights to be able to share their information. Can you talk about those education efforts?

So when HIPAA was enacted 17 years ago—20 years ago for the law and 17 years ago for the regulations—it built in is right of individuals to get a copy of their own records and to suggest corrections when they found errors in the records or the records were missing information, but that record system, from the care perspective, was primarily paper-based. After HITECH was passed and we started to digitize the system, the Office for Civil Rights revised those rules to make it clear that not only can you get a copy, but you can get a copy electronically if it’s stored in that format and there are some security controls on that and that you can actually transmit a copy of your records to a person you need it to go to. So back to that referral situation, even though the law allows two doctors in a referral situation to share the information, if it’s not happening for whatever reason, you as the patient can say, “Send my records to this second doctor down the stream,” so the doctor has what they need to treat you. So OCR embarked on a process of really giving a lot more elaborate examples in their FAQs that were issued in February and that set of guidances were addressed to primarily physicians, the health care organizations and the lawyers who serve them. What we promised to do was to use our special secret sauce at ONC to take all that information and turn it into something that was usable every day by consumers. So the videos that were released in June were kind of the first effort in that regard and we really like them. We spent a lot of time in the field with patients, field testing language and how we would describe things with physicians, making sure that they hit the right note about collaboration between patients and their physicians and also being sure to incorporate the most modern technology. Because really, the patient is on the mobile phone and the health care system has to catch up to them there.

As chief privacy officer, what is the question you get asked the most about interoperability?

“Am I allowed to do that?” When we’re asking people to exchange information, that’s really what we get. And we have to do a lot of work to sometimes tease out what that question is about, right? Is the question about a patient being allowed to disclose their information where they want it to be? To a parent or a child or a family member who might be a health care professional who’s coaching them through a particular issue or to a doctor or to a researcher or to precision medicine, all those different things. That’s the one universe, but then we think about the providers’ perspective, they want to improve patient health, that’s why they went into the profession of medicine. And so we need to help them understand that the digital information is a tool that facilitates that and the sharing of the information is a tool that facilitates that. So when providers ask, “Are we allowed to do that,” we try to give them relevant information for their context, whether it’s treatment context or we have a lot of work with other HHS agencies relative to Flint, Mich., and the lead crisis. Because now we have to test the children for lead poisoning, and if we find lead poisoning, we have to track their health over a long period of time. Similarly, women who have Zika and who might become pregnant, all those things require a fair amount of information over a fairly long period of time with a lot of different actors in the system. So again, we end up talking about what’s allowed and what’s not allowed.

You’ve mentioned before the benefits of threat sharing when it comes to cybersecurity. We’ve seen it in other agencies, like Homeland Security. Can you talk about what the benefits would be for HHS?

Sure, I just want to make sure people understand the difference between threat sharing and sharing health information, that’s sort of the first question we get. So sharing health information is when I tell a doctor I have this condition or this disease or this prescription so they can account for it in care. Threat sharing is when a systems administrator identifies some anomaly in their technology which indicates a security flaw or a security incursion and that’s completely different from actual [Protected Health Information].

Across the health and public health sector, we’ve been working very hard with our sister agencies at HHS to improve the rate at which health care stakeholders share the threat that they identified. And many efforts were in place well before Congress and enacted the [Bipartisan Budget Bill] last year, which gave us some specific charges and more work was done in response to those charges. So to put the DHS context in it, DHS is kind of the mothership or the home port for threat sharing that the national security infrastructure has identified. It’s their job to get back out to the sectors, and so we want to hook our health care stakeholders into that. The way they hook into that is through Health and Human Services’ Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response.

So every cabinet level or every economic sector, if it were, has its own agency that’s responsible for facilitating this activity. [Department of] Energy has one, Transportation has one, Commerce has one and Health has one, and it’s housed within Health and Human Services’ Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. So what we do is we collaborate with ASPR bring the private sector into what the government is already doing to share within the government.

So I want to point out that if it’s an area of a lot of confusion because in the health care sector—the businesses are range from very, very tiny to very, very large. And we know that the really large businesses have sophisticated cyber threat detection infrastructure and are already participating in some threat sharing. Maybe they need to participate in a little bit, but we know that where the weak link in it is that as the business gets smaller and smaller. Again, if you’re going to have a very highly trained specialist who’s running his own little doctor’s office, you want him to be taking care of your health and not be worried about cybersecurity, but by the same token, he is responsible for the security of the system. We need to create better methods and strengthen the methods by which we bring the smaller organizations into threat sharing so that threats are shared across the health and public health sector.

The analogy I gave a couple months ago, which is what I’ve used for a while which is kind of my favorite, is the neighborhood watch. If you participate in a neighborhood watch in your own community, you know your neighbors and everyone knows each other car. You know when there’s an unfamiliar car on the street or with somebody’s jiggling the lock on your door that doesn’t look like they belong there. And you tell each other, “Hey, this guy was casing the neighborhood,” or “I thought I saw a suspicious car.” So cyber threat sharing is the same thing, only it’s a virtual neighborhood, and we organize it in states by economic sectors. So we have a virtual neighborhood in public health and health, and within that community, for people to share the threats they identify and to take information about identified threats and know how to respond to them.

Can you talk about the challenges of facing patient consent to share health information with providers?

One of the things we look at as we look across the health care system to see if it is interoperable is how much is automated versus subject to paper. It’s a pretty easy litmus test in terms of as you look out into the universe. What we find is that while we have great standards for data architecture and we know what a certified electronic health record is and we know what kind of data elements have to be collected, what we don’t have good standards for is electronically documenting a privacy choice when one is required. So, in backing up to our earlier question, there are many circumstances for ordinary health care when the rules are in place to allow information to flow as it needs to for the patient’s care without the necessity, legally, of getting that patient to find a piece of paper. But when you do need to get that piece of paper signed, how can we automate that process? How can we make it as easy as, you know, you can apply for a mortgage online? That used to be a process that was just completely covered with paper, and now we do it electronically. How do we bring that technology in the health care so that we are using appropriate credentials from an e-signature standpoint, that we have good capture of that information within our system so the systems talk to each other to understand that information as it is being created? So that if I’m saying to you, ‘I have [someone’s] consent,’ you recognize that data instead of me having to pull a piece of paper out of my file cabinet and fax it to you.

It’s a little more than a year since the Interoperability Road Map came out, can you talk about the progress that has been made in that time and where you are looking to go from here?

My team, we made a couple of firm commitments. The first one was to sort of help sort out all of the confusion about privacy laws. We put that into three buckets. The first bucket was, “What does HIPAA actually say?” So we did a very concerted effort this year with the Office of Civil rights to publish some basic factsheets on how HIPAA supports interoperability because it allows physicians to exchange data for care without first having to get a patient’s signature. So that all came out in February. The second thing we did was, as a corollary to that, this work that we’ve done in the Office for Civil Rights on you as a person, as an individual, your right to get your data and move it wherever you want to go, that’s sort of Bucket One.

Bucket Two is helping states that have their own privacy laws understand the policy implications of having unique laws, how that might be interfering with their own interoperability goals—for example, for their Medicaid populations—and how can states collaborate to arrive at privacy standards that work across the country. Maintaining the protections that those laws already create, but also facilitating interoperability. So that was through our grant from the National Governors’ Association, and while the results of that are not public yet, we’re very pleased with the progress that NDA has made and we’re very excited for when they finish that work.

And the third point was to help our stakeholders understand, at the policy level, the implications of adopting consent and documentation rules that HIPAA would not require. So that is a work-in-progress. We gave ourselves three years to get that work done. We’re about halfway through the second year right now, and again, I’m very happy with the progress. We don’t have any public information.

What tools do you have to help people improve security in the health care sector?

So for a long time we’ve had a tool called a Security Risk Assessment tool. It’s free, prepaid by the American taxpayer, downloadable. It’s a tool that has always helped the physicians. They could download it and it asks questions about their environment. Based on the answers, the physician or their office manager or whoever can help identify places in your own environment where they can strengthen security. They can take that and focus their efforts on things that really need repair. We just released a new version of that, we released it with bug fixes and a few upgrades for operating systems Next year, hopefully, we’ll get an even more fancy new release out. It’s our No. 1 download on HealthIT.gov. It’s used by consultants and office managers and people trying to understand the security rules. As with all of our tools, we use them in concert with the actual regulator here at the Office of Civil Rights, and we’re really excited that came out [in September]. We also have material on our website under the security and privacy tabs: video games and online training tools so that individual offices can really get to improve their own security behavior. Because one of the things we know about security is it about half of poor security results from human behavior as opposed to a technical flaw, like answering a phishing email. We’ve all been trained about that, but we can always use more training.

So it seems like a multi-pronged front, where you are educating the public, working with industry and collaborating with OCR.

One of the things I think we do really well here at ONC is take very complicated information from other people—like Office of Civil Rights or the Department Homeland Security—and turn it into stuff that ordinary, small health care businesses can really absorb and understand. That’s something that we were asked to do in HITECH, and we’ve really taken it as kind of our pillar of the work we do in my office.

You mention the presidential transition, we are also currently in the midst of this massive IT transition and modernization. Do you see these events as sort of a bridge and how do you connect these initiatives between administrations?

So the IAC side of ACT-IAC got started in 1979. One of the things we are going to do to kick things off on Sunday afternoon is we actually are going to have a very brief slideshow — about five minutes — that is the history of ACT-IAC from 1979 to the present. That’s both the history of the organization, but more importantly, think about the different presidential transitions that have occurred. What were state of the arts at the time?

If you really step back about it, when the last presidential transition happened in 2008, most people didn’t have a smartphone. There was no expectation that you could get things through an app and actually engage your public through an app or engage public servants. So what will be the new expectations that will occur with this transition as well? We need to think about those.

And you are absolutely right that we’re sort of on not just a pace of fast change, but actually exponentially accelerating change. So one of the things we want to underscore on Sunday evening is that we are really on that path in which this hockey stick of exponential change is going [up]. We have a choice.

Public service is not designed to move fast, partly because they wanted checks and balances. The last thing the founders wanted was a king-like individual. Public service either figures out new ways of delivering public service differently and better in the next 10 years and we managed to move forward as a nation or we continue to have the same conversations, we don’t make progress and 10 years from now we’ve missed that opportunity to sort of ride that disruptive wave and figure out new ways of delivering the results for the nation. And that really depends on the conversations we have here.

So the goal is to really sort of put that forward as a proposition for the conversations on Monday and Tuesday so there are ripple effects in 2017 and 2018. The last thing I want is [us] having the same conversations a year from now or two years from now.

What I’d love to do is experiment. I mean how many of us with a smartphone, if we could, share data anonymously on air quality, water quality, transportation quality to improve our local environment we probably would, but right now we’re not doing that. We’re not realizing that in today’s era, it’s not just that things have to be pushed by government professionals, things can be delivered by the private sector and things can be delivered by the public themselves standing up and choosing to do it if they want.

And so that’s why our theme is ‘Change Agents delivering results differently and better.’ Success for me is the 800 people at ELC, that’s just a ripple in the pond that then go to 8,000 and 80,000 change agents in public service.

In talking about Change Agents and also Edge Leaders. If you had to describe the skill set you would think would be crucial for those two components, what would you want to see in those?

When I look for a good change agent or a good edge leader, the first thing I always look for is the ability to first listen before they seek to be listened to or to first understand the landscape that they seek to disrupt before they disrupt it.

I’ve seen great cases. In fact, here at the FCC, most of our successful change agents, whether they come from private sector or other government agencies, the key to their success is they first identify what’s going right, what’s not going right and then they plan their disruption. It’s when you get someone that comes maybe from the West Coast or something like that and the first thing you try to do is try and make it as if it was whatever they came from. And it doesn’t usually work out.

So most successful change agents, it’s when they come in and they take the time to understand the landscape they seek to actually change.

And so I’ve seen cases where people come in and they think they want to recreate maybe that start-up they came from or that dot-com. And while I applaud that sort of hunger to bring disruption, I myself back in 2009, I was actually trying to push agile development. The Agile Manifesto came in in March 2001, and I was being told by my agency, ‘No, buy into the five-year plan,’ and I was like, ‘Well no, I was actually with the Bioterrorism Preparedness Response program. We don’t have a deal with the terrorists not to strike until we have something out,’ and it was literally on Sept. 11 when I was actually supposed to brief the CIA and the FBI as to what we would do, and thanks to agile development, we had something.

But I share that because if you’re going to change a system, you have to recognize that there’s probably decades of things behind the scenes, there’s reasons why existing processes [are there.] It doesn’t mean we have to repeat those processes, but we can change that. And so change agents seek to understand what you’re going to change.

The other thing I look for it with a good change agent or a good edge leader, you’re going to incur friction. All I ask is make sure that most of the friction that you’re going to create is about moving the car forward versus heat and light. You need friction to make cars go forward, but there are some times when friction is just spinning its wheels and producing a whole lot of heat. That’s when I’m really happy to work with a change agent to try and figure out how can we actually translate that into forward momentum.

So if you’re a good listener, you understand how to make things change and you understand how to empathize with the people you’re trying to disrupt and then your disruption actually gets to somewhere, that to me is the sign of success.

With disruption in the private sector, you’ve seen often times a development and whatever society turns around to catch up to the development. It seems like with government itself, you can’t have that ‘blown-up’ disruption. So is it a conversation between both parties that is going to make those conversations happen?

Yes, I think so much of what we do in public service really does depend on engaging the industry and engaging the outside public. One of things I always say is the last thing we should be doing is writing custom code, that’s not our skill set. Our skill set is about delivering services to the public.

So how can we use micro cloud solutions that are already out there, and we mix them in interesting ways. Whether they be processing a form in a more effective way, whether they be machine learning, if you actually get a response faster and in better time — whether it be showing things on a map better — we shouldn’t write that from scratch. I mean, that’s not our forte. And so it does require engaging the private sector and saying, ‘Here’s our challenges. How can we best work on them together,’ and it’s a conversation.

I was recently at an event where a large brick and mortar company was talking about how they realized that if they didn’t change their business model in the next three or four years they’re going to go bankrupt. They also had challenges of culture change, they were very hierarchical. It was going to be a slow process. And so their solution was essentially to create a second organization and have that run as a competitor. When the second organization succeeded, that would sort of consume the old model. Or if it didn’t work they’d write it off and try again.

We really can’t do that in public service. I can’t imagine going to Congress and say, ‘Look, we need funding for a second agency that’s doing the same exact thing. We are just going to see if it works. If it doesn’t, you write it off and we’ll try again.’ Congress would not allow that. We have to be good stewards of taxpayers’ dollars. So how you do culture change is a little bit different in public service because you don’t have seed funding, you don’t have an investor capital fund. The Department of Defense cannot go bankrupt and say, ‘Let’s do another round of [venture capital] funds.’

What we can do, however, is we can find safe spaces to experiment on those things that are possible, and if it succeeds, we show that and we say, ‘Look, this may fit your context. It might not, it depends on what you need in your mission edge, but this is what’s working over here. If you want to copy it, great. If it doesn’t fit exactly, try some other experiment and if that works, let us know.’ So we can begin to cross-pollinate across different groups.

The most important thing in my opinion, we need to stop thinking about hierarchies and we really need to think about how we do network effects. Because nowadays, no one problem fits into one department or agency. The challenges that we face as a nation, and as a world, really are sort of horizontal in nature. Yet how do we actually break out of these department and agency models and think about teams of change agents that span across sector?

Now heading to the presidential transition, you have very much been a spokesman for shifting off of legacy systems and updating IT. If you were to have a successor, what advice would you provide them to step into that role?

The good news is one, I’ve done succession planning. I think that’s incumbent upon any good leader. Not that I’m planning to change, but if I did, the most important thing you can do as an effective champion of change agents is give people autonomy. If you take away people’s autonomy, then you take away their sort of intentional intrinsic motivation to do a great job. And then just becomes a nine to five job and they’re checking a box.

We’ve had great success where I say to people, ‘Look I’m here to be a digital diplomat and your human flak jacket. I know this is going to be a bumpy ride. I know there’s going to be friction, however, I trust you. If you come to me and make a good pitch as to what we should do and why, I’m going to invest in you and give you autonomy. Run as fast as you can and learn from it. You’re going to maybe hit some roadblocks and are going to have to adjust. Just run as fast you can, involve as many stakeholders as you can that you can bring along with you, but any flak is in my way.’

And I think that’s something that you don’t see enough, not just in the public sector, I think in a private sector, too there are jobs where people’s autonomy is taken away and they’re no longer motivated. And so if there was one message I could share about public service to my future successor, people can do amazing things if you give them trust and an environment in which they can learn.

You know that’s where I often say I don’t really feel like a CIO. Sometimes I say therapist, but other times I just say I’m really just a champion of change and it just happens to be so much to change right now as digital.

Wherever I go next, I like to sort of understand and help people understand how can we move quickly and how can we deliver results and experiment. Because the only way we’re going to figure out how to deal with this exponential change is do things differently and better. There’s no immediate textbook, but let’s experiment as quickly as we can, let’s involve our stakeholders on good ideas and let’s deliver on those results as we move forward.

Recently there has been a lot of talk about not only open data and its possibilities — which seem almost limitless — but things like transitioning off about legacy systems to facilitate open data. What do you see is the future of those two sort of conjoined movements?

Actually, that’s a really great question. I recently was invited to give a short, almost TED-like talk at the Executive office of the President on ‘Beyond open data.’ Because in my opinion, I’ve actually put forth two things: One, ‘federal government’ is a 20th-century word that we need to actually stop using. Because, again, if you think about it, in 1776 [with] packet latency, the time it took to send a message between New York and D.C. one-way was three days. Nowadays, it’s milliseconds. We don’t have to centralize everything.

Similarly, I think so much of what makes this nation succeed is really all of us. It’s when industry, plus local communities, plus government professionals are in alignment, we do great things. The challenge is often we’re not in alignment. Maybe that’s, in some respects, good because there’s checks and balances. However, I think the art of a good leader is having that conversation about how do I get everyone on board at the local level, with industry and the government officials to deliver results.

And so with open data. Nowadays, with smartphones, we have the equivalent of a supercomputer back in the 1980s in our pocket and we’ve got it for an amazingly low price. That could inform transportation, that could inform water quality if we had something that was anonymous and actually people had trust.

We’ve done at the FCC, back in 2013, we did a little experiment which said, ‘If you want to inform how fast your mobile broadband connection is, you can get the results yourself and you can share that anonymously with the FCC to make sure you know where there’s broadband spots, where there are gaps.’ That actually ended up where one, we saved money because we crowdsourced it, but even more importantly, it was about building trust.

You can imagine in 2013 saying, ‘Hi, I’m with the U.S. government. Would you like to actually download an app that I will monitor your broadband connection speed?’ You may not succeed. But what we did do is we made the app open source. By making open source, enough people took a look at the app. It was on GitHub and they said, ‘Well look, they’re not collecting your IP address. They don’t know who you’re in a five-mile radius. It’s privacy by design.’ And so that actually as a result made us the fourth-most downloaded app, right behind Google Chrome for a while on the iOS store.

Think about what recently happened in New York [with the capture of alleged bomber Ahmad Khan Rahami], essentially that was crowdsourcing, basically a community watch. So it’s not just government making its data available, but the if public wants to share data and they volunteer it, they can also share their data and it can make our community safer and more resilient. That, to me, is actually what’s needed beyond open data.

However, you’re absolutely right. Right now, as long as we’re using legacy systems we can’t seize on that. That’s partly why at FCC, we’ve said we’re going to 100 percent public cloud.

The other sort of disruption that’s right on the horizon: Back in 2013, there was a competition to see if anyone could write an algorithm that would grade papers as good as a third-grade teacher and for $60,000, someone actually won that competition. In 2014, actually, there is a copier that came out that could actually take a handwritten test, handwritten answers and actually grade it for the teacher.

Now it’s at the third-grade level, so we’re talking about sentences and math and things like that, but it’s pretty impressive. In 2015, a company elects to its board of directors an algorithm and gives it voting rights. Also in 2015, [artificial intelligence] has been tested to say which meetings you should go to, which meetings you should skip and if you do go to meetings, who should go along with you to be the most productive. In 2016, I’ve actually seen competitions where they’re actually trying to write an AI that can actually answer real estate law questions as good as real estate lawyers and are right now at about 80 percent accuracy. There’re actually other cases in California where the jury setting bail is actually being done by an AI, which doesn’t discriminate, it just looks at the facts.

So how much of what we do in public service right now is either prolonged in terms of it takes a very long time because we want to make it fair, so we have so many different people involved to reduce bias, or it’s just a very cumbersome process, again, because we don’t want any one person to bias it. If you had an artificial intelligence that was open source, you’d get answers in milliseconds and it could actually be a way that people could see that it can’t be biased because here’s what the algorithm is doing.

So I think the next major disruption, in my opinion, for public service is not just open data, but actually how do we get AI to take those rote things that we need to be made equitable, make them faster, deliver the results faster to the public and then that allows us to focus on what are those things that are so hard that we can’t automate them at the moment.

I was reading an interview you had done about Operation Server Lift to shift the FCC data solutions to third party systems. You said that FCC was able to set up a cloud prototype within 48 hours. Now, that seems like the level of speed needed to develop agile government. What kinds of things would you advise other federal agency leaders to set up that kind of infrastructure?

So what you touched upon, Operation Server Lift, this is precisely when we made this intentional shift to go to a public cloud and commercial environment. Having things on premise generally is very expensive to do, but even more importantly, very slow when you need to actually set something up new. And so by going to public cloud, the gain that we’ve got first and foremost is agility such that we’ve actually had cases where bureaus and offices come in with a new idea, they give us requirements and two days later, we’ve actually got something for them.

That is why you have to get off doing things on premise. This is why you have to stop coding applications because that is just going to slow you down and you can’t move with speed. The second thing that going to a cloud infrastructure gets you is that resiliency.

Just yesterday we had a system that involved with emergency alerts. There was huge interest, especially in the aftermath of the events that happened in New York two weeks ago, and so had that been on premise, we may not have had additional capacity. But because it was cloud, we could actually have some elasticities and expand to address the additional users.

Then finally, what cloud gets you is you’re not really spending a lot of money to maintain those systems, that’s what the vendor does. That’s economy of scale. They also have way more cybersecurity people than we could ever possibly hire because they’re a large firm. And so you get that sort of economy of scale and efficiency, so that instead of spending your money on trying to maintain the system you’re focusing it on a new development, you’re making changes as the mission changes and whenever a new requirement comes in from the Congress or the administration, you can actually almost literally turn on a dime as opposed to having all your money locked up and trying to maintain old systems.

Beyond the modernization of IT systems, why do you think it’s important for the government to develop faster solutions?

If there was one thing that I really wish could be emphasized in the next transition, I think the public, in general, doesn’t recognize the difference between people that are political appointees versus career, and in some respects, they don’t need to.

One of the things I celebrate in the United States is that we do have both people that are political appointees and career. Generally, the political appointees set the policy and set the political objectives and then there are those of us that are career senior executives.

Whether or not I’m doing public service 10 or 15 years from now, I don’t know, but my main focus is less the politics and much more about just how do we get things done with speed. And I share that because so much of what I am greatly concerned with as I look at what’s going on is if we don’t figure out a way to continue to deliver public service with speed that meets the needs of the different stakeholders in the public, we may actually undermine trust in representative government.

And that’s why again I’m trying to break the word and not say ‘federal government’ anymore. I’m trying to say intentionally ‘public service.’ Because otherwise, people might start asking for something that looks like a dictatorship or an oligarchy, which can move very fast. However, again, the founders wanted checks and balances.

I go back to James Madison who said he wanted ambition to check ambition. ‘What is government but the greatest reflection of humanity? If all men and women were angels, no government would be necessary.’ I share that because I think this is a conversation we need to have as a public, which is where we can we actually begin to experiment with new ways of doing public service and involving the public, not all of it just technology. Maybe some cases the public’s helping make decisions.

Because otherwise, if we don’t show that representative government, representative public service can move with speed, I am concerned about what the future has in store.

Q. What major initiatives are you carrying over from the last CIO?

A.

There are three big projects: Joint Operations Center, or the JOC, upgrade to make it more modern; we’re also upgrading the National Capital Region with new radios, antennae to be able to better collaborate with Metropolitan Police Department, FBI, Customs and Border Protection and various other governmental agencies within the National cCapital Region; and the last one would be what we call EC, enabling capabilities, which is where we’re converging our networks’ voice, video and data over an IP infrastructure and also we’re building a network operation security center, which will hopefully be manned 24/7 in the next year.

I’d also like to caveat: Our telephone system will not completely be voice-over IP. Call me old fashioned but I like to have an analog-type backup system in case the IP network goes down.

Those are the three big initiatives: the JOC, enabling capabilities and the National Capital Region upgrade.

Q. What new initiatives did you start when you became CIO?

A.

When I first came on I didn’t put any new initiatives in place. I wanted to assess what was going on, where the service was headed and also wanted to get a handle on, as a consultant, the state of the CIO Office. That’s what I wanted to get an assessment on.

For the future, the big thing we’re looking at is a different type of cellphone to better support agents and the officers out in the field. We’re looking to provide more capabilities for mobile types of operations.

And when we say mobile and providing a seamless transition from the office to the field for the agents and the UD [uniform division] officers, that’s globally. So that includes when individuals that we’re protecting travel worldwide that they have that capability wherever they are in the world.

Q. What’s the next big program you want to place, the next thing you want to change looking forward?

A.

One would be put in a virtual private network. Get rid of the desktops and laptops for everybody and have a virtual network. That’s probably the long-term goal.

Part of it, too, is to get the right amount of money for a mission-based budget, to get the money that we actually need to accomplish the mission. The service has been really supportive, we just have to keep the day-to-day fight on — “I need the money to do this” — in order to provide protection to what we feel is not just adequate but meets the needs for the special agents and uniformed division officers out in the field.

And continually push toward a more automated environment. I’d like to take a lot of the paper processes out and make it automated for the service. That’s another long-term project and goal: Just to continually improve on the mobile workforce.

We’re looking at a thin client, to include the virtual aspect of it. We are actually in the process of building a hybrid cloud [working with commercial vendors] but we’re going to keep it here [on-premise]. We’re not at this time looking to move to a commercial cloud.

Q. How has technology and cyberspace changed the mission of the Secret Service?

A.

Technology and cyberspace have not changed the mission of the Secret Service. I would say it’s probably enhanced the mission of the Secret Service, especially in investigations with cybercrimes.

I am completely impressed with the men and women that actually do work cybercrimes and cyber forensics, of their intelligence and dedication to the mission, of what they are required to do. I don’t know when they started to build out those cyber forensics types of capabilities but I do know that it’s a very key focus of the director.

Before I got to the Secret Service, I was completely ignorant of all of the cybercrimes that go on, from fraud to credit card fraud to counterfeit to pornography. I just had no idea how much and how good the Secret Service is at doing that. In fact, the only ATM machine I use now is the one in this building.

Q. What is the Secret Service’s role in cyberspace?

A.

The mission is protection and investigations and cyber is intertwined within the mission and conducting investigations. I’m not going to sugarcoat it or put a fancy spiel on it. I call the 1811s — which are the agents and the uniformed division officers — I refer to them as the infantry and we’re here supporting infantry, so whatever it takes to support them. If cybersecurity is intertwined in supporting their mission, to make sure that their IT assets work and providing the integrity of what they’re looking at.

For example, if they’re looking at a video screen or looking at something on their phone or their computer, whether it’s a tablet, their mobile, etc., is that they can trust what they’re looking at.

[We] accomplish that with very smart people and good tools.

Q. Are your tools bought or built in house?

A.

Our tools are both in-house and commercial-off-the-shelf tools.

Q. Cybersecurity is becoming an integral part of the CIO’s job. But at the Secret Service, security is the job. Do you have a different view of cybersecurity than your CIO counterparts elsewhere in government?

A.

I don’t know if I see it differently, but I look at cybersecurity as intertwined within the mission.

I put it in Marine Corps infantry terms: You set up a defense perimeter and it’s a layered defense, but you also have a recon element, which they go out and probe or look with, like, say, a red team or blue team out into the area of operations or area that we’re responsible for, and it’s all part of the mission. But the mission is protection and investigations and SSEs, therefore the cybersecurity piece of providing the secure, confidential network where they have integrity and it’s available is all part of the intertwined mission.

I wouldn’t say that my first mission is cybersecurity and then it’s protection; protection and investigation and SSEs is the No. 1 mission.

Q. How much of the Secret Service is now dedicated technical issues

—

cybersecurity and the like?

A.

I would say 100 percent, everything we do is focused on technology because my mission is to support the agents and the uniformed division officers out in the field. They need the IT assets and resources to support the mission. So we design things that go back to the basics I learned when I was a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps as a comms officer: redundant, reliable, secure and flexible. If one of those four key aspects are missing, then I have to look at myself and my staff and say: “How can we improve this?”

Q. When securing an event, what percentage of your field staff are focused solely on technology?

A.

The agents, uniformed division officers, what we call APTs — administrative professional technical personnel, which I’m like an APT — we’re all trained on how to use the devices and we’re trained to be aware of, for example, spear-phishing or phishing attacks. But the 1811s in the field are focused on protection, they need the IT devices to conduct their protection in terms of collaboration with the other agencies and their other agents. So we are completely focused on IT in terms of support.

I look at it as it has to be working. I think the agents and the uniform division officers demand or expect it to work to accomplish their mission.

Of the people I have working for me, it’s probably close to 60 percent that leave here and actually go support [field operations]. But what we also do for IT/comms, cybersecurity professionals, we actually pull others from field offices throughout the globe to help support us, as well.

I may have someone in Chicago that I feel more comfortable with performing certain functions than maybe somebody else, so I will ask him or her to go to New York for six weeks and they do. It’s a collaborative effort from throughout the whole Secret Service.

I would say probably 20 percent [of personnel at any given event are working on technical issues]. For example, in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, there’s a coordination control center at one location, there’s a multi-agency control center at another location, there’s a joint tactical operation center at another location, there’s operations going on at one of the airports and then there’s another huge operation going on at another location down by one of the piers.

For example, the pier, I was down there yesterday and there’s over 300 cars, SUVs, that have to be outfitted with radios. It’s a huge effort.

Q. How does the CIO’s Office and that mission support the overall mission: protecting the presidency?

A.

I believe May 20 was the White House shooting — which there hadn’t been one in a while — and I know it was a Friday and happened probably later on in the afternoon-ish time frame. Immediately, literally within seconds, the entire staff was up in the Director’s Crisis Center. We were there probably until [11 p.m.], and the communications: perfect.

The voice, video and data worked. We had local TVs on, covering and seeing what they were covering on the news; we had the JOC feeds, the video feeds that were pumped up to the [crisis center] so the deputy director could view what actually happened. The voice, video and data worked great.

It got back to feeling operational — unfortunate circumstance, but in terms of the staff coordination and staff communications and IT communications, not just within this building but throughout the National Capital Region, was a seamless effort.

Q. What would have happened if those things didn’t work as they were supposed to?

A.

I don’t know. But I have great faith, trust and confidence in the people that work for me that they don’t fail. We don’t fail.

I may have been sitting in the Director’s Crisis Center but I know for a fact I had over 30 people that stayed behind to make sure the mission was accomplished. I had radio personnel, I had video personnel, I had network personnel, I had cybersecurity personnel; they all stayed behind and I don’t remember having to ask them, they just did it. That’s the dedication of the people that I have.

Q. What lessons have the Secret Service learned from recent hacks and how has the agency adapted?

A.

The visibility hasn’t really changed the way we’ve operated. I firmly believe that we as a nation — and as DHS components — have to focus more on just IT and cybersecurity tools. You may implement Tool A today, the bad guys are going to figure out how to get into Tool A.

I think it gets back to a saying we had in the Marine Corps that the best trained cyber brain was a well-trained IT person. To me, focus on training education for the workforce and making sure that your back doors are closed and your patches are up to date and your techniques and tactics and procedures for making sure your network is secure are up to date. Just don’t lax.

I put it in perspective with my folks: The special agent out there working 12-hour shifts, focused for 12 hours, we have to be just as focused on the network to make sure that our patches are up to date or configuration management pieces are up to date and well-coordinated or configuration management boards are synced together. I think that’s the key.

Some people do disagree with me out there on this one subject. But I think we keep chasing the latest and greatest cybersecurity tool — gotta have it, gotta have it, put it in your network, etc. — I think that’s good but again I put more time into the training, education and making sure that what we currently have is secure.

Q. How do you view the Secret Service from your position in the CIO’s Office?

A.

The way I see the Secret Service from the CIO’s perspective is I have openings and I don’t just need IT professionals — I need IT professionals with good leadership skills and diverse skills.

The reason I say that gets back to these national special security events. We work with a multitude of outside agencies and organizations and I am just completely impressed with how the Secret Service brings everybody together to accomplish the mission. Wherever I go and introduce myself to people or get introduced to people that we work with from other agencies or organizations, we get nothing but accolades.

I’ll give you a couple examples. At the [Republican National Convention] in Cleveland, I go up a couple days or a week in advance just so I don’t get in everybody’s way to make sure things are going well. The gentleman that is the operations officer for the Cleveland Indians baseball stadium where we had a setup, I hadn’t talked to him more than five minutes and he said: “I want to tell you that I am so impressed with the Secret Service and how you men and women operate.” He continually said: “You’re mission focused, you’re well respected and you work extremely well with others.” And he said: “You’re the finest organization that I’ve ever … come across or worked with,” and that you hear that throughout.

Another example, when I was in Philadelphia for the [Democratic National Convention] and I was leaving outside, checking out of the hotel, the lady at the hotel said: “You know, I really hate to see the Secret Service leave here in a few days.” I said: “Why?” She said: “Because you are the nicest men and women. You’re such gentlemen and ladies. It’s just a pleasure to have you stay here … and I’ve never felt more secure than the last couple weeks.”

Part of it is a strict hiring process. But I think the men and women here take a lot of pride in what they do and who they represent. I think it’s a calling, much like it is in the service; I think it’s a calling like going to the priesthood or joining the Marine Corps. Joining the Secret Service is a calling and you take a lot of pride in what you do.