5 innovation tips to ensure users can access data — when needed — to make the most of it

This is the sixth article in our IT lifecycle management series, Delivering the tech that delivers for government.

For Kuan Collins, the work she and her team at Booz Allen do revolves around innovation and data — both to help government organizations and users deliver on their missions and to help the Booz Allen employees that collaborate closely with those federal organizations.

It’s a clear mission, said Collins, vice president of solutions architecture.

“The future of government is really about: How do we do better with the data that we have, make that actionable and make decision-making as efficient as possible for the stakeholders within agencies as well as the stakeholders that they’re providing the services to?” she said during an interview for Federal News Network’s series, Delivering the tech that delivers for government.

The focus then becomes bringing services to bear that help agencies succeed despite all the potential disruptions taking place around them, Collins said. She added that Booz Allen is hyper-focused on helping agencies strategize against the executive orders for zero trust, artificial intelligence and customer experience in particular.

“Our focus on innovation really is around modernization for agencies and helping agencies with their data-enabled strategies” and implementing the technologies to support continuing modernization, she said.

How does her team do that? By creating a culture of learning, experimentation and true collaboration with modern tools and technologies. “We’re focused on training associated with that,” Collins said. “How do we train our employees, our client workforce to leverage and utilize these new emerging technologies, enhancing customer experience to increase adoption and utilization of these technologies to solve the customer’s problems?”

Collins shared five innovation tips that can help ensure that future for Booz Allen and for the government.

Innovation Tip 1: Eliminate user frustration

Training and system design are dependent on one another, she said.

“At the end of the day, if we don’t have a workforce that is trained in the way that they need to be trained to utilize and design these systems, there will be a lot of frustration around the fact that we went and implemented cloud, or we brought some AI capabilities to bear, but it really didn’t change the way that we were delivering the services, the way that we were doing the business,” Collins said.

Human-centric design helps by leading to interfaces that are user-friendly and intuitive, and that lead to adoption of these technologies as agencies strive to modernize their environments, she said. This design approach — a combination of people, process and tools — also takes into account accessibility and cybersecurity, all against each client’s mission set.

“Human-centered design is really all about understanding first: What are we trying to do? Then having that intimacy around the problem and showcasing how AI and cloud and better cyber practices really can enable much more efficiency and better solving of the problem in a clearer, much more coherent way,” Collins said. “And having the stakeholders almost joyful to engage with that agency around the services that they’re providing.”

Innovation Tip 2: Bridge the gap between personal and on-the-job digital experiences

Given the proliferation of AI and forward-leaning user experiences that people have in their personal lives can create pent-up demand for those same experiences at work or when interacting with government agencies.

“We’ve got AI in the context of how we’re engaging with everything from our refrigerators to our televisions,” Collins pointed out. “We don’t want that cognitive disconnect when they’re now engaging with a government agency or in our workplace and not having those types of services in a secure way to manage the work that they’re doing.”

Therefore, a big focus of modernization needs to be on bridging the gap between those experiences, she advised.

Innovation Tip 3: Make the experience seamless

A goal of any successful project should be that a client agency’s users can carry out the mission and the technology becomes almost a backdrop that allows for a seamless experience for everyone, Collins said.

To know if that’s true, Booz Allen runs pilots around specific use cases. Collins’ team looks at everything from how the internal or agency stakeholders receive the service through how the customer or citizen engagement transpires.

It will also visit with Booz Allen users, collect data about the experiences, look at internal adoption rates and run vulnerability scans.

“How are we responding to those threats? How are we meeting service level agreements or what we might even call customer experience level agreements?” Collins said.

Innovation Tip 4: Prioritize data — the right data

Data, data, data. It’s essential to improving services because users need to be able to access the right data when and where they need it, she pointed out.

Collins touched back to the potential disruptions that agencies must navigate — everything from geopolitical competition, budget uncertainties and strained resources to a changing workforce and complex problems like climate change.

“How do we better enable the utilization of data to address all the challenges that we talked about — to make those decisions more effective, quicker, easier — because there are so many unknown unknowns,” she said. “What we want to do is make it where the agency can do the business that they know how to do so that they can really focus on the things that are out there that they haven’t figured out yet — those much more complex issues.”

The challenge is that agencies often are early in their modernization efforts and so can’t fully take advantage of emerging technologies to optimize the delivery of services, achieve efficiencies and share information more effectively, Collins said.

“The primary problem that most agencies are facing is around data — how they secure it and how people use it,” she said.

The goal of many projects at Booz Allen is to help make data secure, accessible, shareable and actionable. And that’s not just within an agency but between and across agencies too, Collins said, and pointed to the Defense Department’s Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) as an example of how that type of strategy is taking hold.

Bringing together multiple groups of users across organizations with access to the same data will allow for more predictive capabilities, she said. JADC2 exemplifies how to normalize around better information sharing, information management, data standardization and being able to innovate with that data, Collins said.

“There’s a need for multitenant, cloud-based, secure environments,” she said, adding that “there’s a need for a mix of on-premise as well as cloud-based storage so that we can share different classifications of data more easily and really see the power of these data-enabled missions.”

Innovation Tip 5: Bring on AI and automation — and sandboxes

Leaning into AI will be necessary so users can fully take advantage of data and also so that organizations can protect that data, Collins said.

“The most important thing outside of AI is having an environment where this AI can reside and protecting the data that it’s being employed against,” she said.

There’s potential for AI use in areas ranging from business operations to complex critical systems where the technology’s capabilities will be embedded in the delivery of services.

Booz Allen has invested in developing sandbox and test environments where its teams can collaborate and discover together and also have its users collaborate with government users.

“That multitenant, cloud-based, secure environment, that really is about not only creating production-ready environments for all of the business solutions but really that sandbox environment as well, where we can create a dev environment, spin it up, test out a dataset, or a use case or technology and ensure that it’s going to deliver on what we’re thinking it’s going to deliver,” she said. “We establish a hypothesis around: Can we deploy the service with this tool in the way that we’re thinking about it?”

The sandbox approach can help get to a faster outcome, Collins said. “It becomes not only an opportunity to prototype that technology but an opportunity to train a team that’s going to be deploying it. It’s a great way to do a lot of different things around the people and the tooling and establishing that business process associated with technology.”

Discover more stories about how federal systems integrators and government contractors manage their enterprise infrastructure environments in our series Delivering the tech that delivers for government, sponsored by Future Tech Enterprise.

To listen to the full discussion with Booz Allen’s Kuan Collins, click the podcast play button below:

Check out all podcast episodes of the Delivering the tech that delivers for government series.

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