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In your experience, what are the technological trends you’ve witnessed happening?
If we look from a technology competency standpoint, the whole idea of digital transformation in an organization, be it in the public sector or any organization, they can be segregated into two different dimensions. The first dimension is how a company looks at its data as an asset—how it is being collected, what kind of data is being collected, and how it’s being stored. The other dimension is the type of analytical tools that organizations need to embrace within their environment to take their goal to the next level. So, the question is what specific problems do they have and how can we bring in these statistical and mathematical techniques to drive these questions on a much broader scale. Here, the analytical dimension comes into play.
The next one is how they take these results of analytics and convey them to the senior executives. This is where I see a lot of visualization platforms gaining prominence. But according to me, the main objectives are analyzing the data and assets. Think about what type of analytical frameworks we need to do the analysis on the data available. The kind of visualization platforms that are needed should also be considered during this phase.
"To embrace changes, the leadership should change in accordance with the changes that take place organizationally"
Any specific set of requirements that you see in the industry?
Based on my discussions with other CIOs and CTOs across the federal governments, I have come to a conclusion that there has to be a mission that drives the requirements of the agency. One of the ways for organizations to be successful is to embrace the cloud as a platform and carry out their analysis. So, cloud computing is one thing that I see inside the different departments that we have across the government landscape. Even at EPA, we are trying to know the new sources of the data that we have, through which we look at doing analysis and visualization.
One of the other important factors is infrastructure. All these technological deployments require infrastructure, and the ability to provide these kinds of services. So, what we have done at EPA is that we have built a cloud platform capable of operationalizing this analytics, data science, and visualization.
What are the challenges that you see in the industry and how can government agencies overcome them?
As all of us believe the fact that to embrace changes, the leadership should change in accordance with the changes that take place organizationally. But, the way I look at solving this problem is a bit different.
1. My advice for the leadership in the federal agencies is not to get tied up in their mission and building the technical capabilities to meet the goals.
2. Also, organizations deciding to go in a different direction with their technological capabilities should not be mishandled. Data visualization does not change if somebody has a different vision on how EPA should function. The approach is to build the capability that will enable an organization to do its mission despite what people are thinking.
How would you see the evolution a few years from now with regard to disruptions and transformations in the arena?
In the last decade, I have witnessed the capabilities getting matured enough and converging into a mature solution. I think some of these capabilities are becoming a day-to-day part of the enterprise; so, now the question will be how we are going to use that mature solution to drive some of these ideas that we haven’t thought about before.
Another thing what I see happening is probably the adoption of cloud computing within the federal government and the idea of leveraging cloud computing as the base for the organization. SaaS-based solutions will help us to get compliance faster and secure the environment.
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