How COVID drove a new approach to digital transformation

COVID-19 has pushed digital transformation to the forefront across the federal government over the past year.

Many agencies were “forced” to speed up the delivery of online services by innovating through the cloud, especially software-as-a-service.

Over the last year, some agencies had to reconsider their modernization roadmaps and adjust plans to meet more pressing and immediate demands to support a virtual workforce.

For some agencies, investments into their network, cybersecurity and collaboration tools in previous years put them in a relatively good position to address the significant and sudden change in their employees’ work environments. While for others, the pandemic required specific and accelerated IT modernization actions.

No matter where agencies started, all must continue to optimize their networks and services and data is a driving force behind those efforts.

These continued changes will lead to improving citizen and customer user experiences. It will mean taking advantage of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. And it will mean operational resilience because the cloud and the as-a-service model will ensure employees can work from anywhere.

How Digital Transformation Has Changed Over the Last Year

We have to continue to identify how best to improve that user experience, and that ranged from expanding our users ability to remotely log in--we had about 25,000 or so people dialing in or remotely dialing in and had to increase that capacity to nearly 90,000—to investing much more heavily in our network infrastructure to be able to accommodate not just those connections, but the ability for our users to be able to have a ‘normal functioning experience.

Kaschit Pandya

Deputy Chief Information Officer, IT Operations, Internal Revenue Service

Finding Balance with Cloud

So making sure that you're driving the ones that are highest value, most important, that are going drive the best outcomes to the cloud first, is really where we see like the most success amongst our customers.

Pablo Stern

Senior Vice President, IT Workflow Products, ServiceNow

Moving to the As-A-Service Model

We wanted to facilitate the experience of the applicant. We invested in that. Not only does cloud gives you an opportunity to do that, but it's also speed the market, because it’s agile and agile is all about that feedback and being able to respond to the feedback. I can set up a service, and if the service has something that's not exactly right, we can change it, and quickly turn it back around based on the feedback from the customer. We can provide them with the new experience and continue to grow and scale that way.

Yemi Oshinnaiye

Deputy Chief Information Officer, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services

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