This was my first time attending the Digital Government Summit hosted by Government Technology. The goal for this year's conference was focused on collaboration between government business leaders, government IT professionals and private industry experts. I have seen evidence of this trend in the Data Collaborative and Data Interoperability Work groups that we have emerged throughout Shelby County. We are starting to realize that the data we are holding in silos benefit us more when we combine it across functional domains.
The first session I attended was titled, "Open Data for ... All?", yes with a question mark. I think it is common when we do discuss open data that there is hesitation, a question mark, I know that I have my own set of concerns. This session was about the misconceptions we have creating open data portals and what that truly means for our organization. We often use verbiage such as "exposing data", where we should be referring to this process as "making the data available". Making data available is more of a testament to what the task actually is because citizens own the data, government is the care taker and facilitator of the data. Government should be firmly focused on ensuring the safety and credibility of data so that it is not misused. If we can not control the data, it can be abused and therefore ensuring data governance becomes equally important as making it available for public consumption.
The session was hosted by Jonathan Benett the Technical Director at Adobe Systems Federal and Adam Mansell the Governor's Management Fellow at the Department of Finance and Administration in the Office of Customer Focused Government for the State of Tennessee. They pointed out that lots of organizations feel that there is no benefit from publishing our data and feel there is nothing interesting to share. If we publish data, users will come we are responsible for providing citizens with data experiences that are meaningful to them. This activity of including constituents early in the process earns positive media, builds trust and empowers citizens and the tandem adoption of data governance increases expectations and reduces data fears.
The Keynote was Morgan Wright, Senior Fellow, Center for Digital Government and he spoke on Future Ready! The Playbook for 2020 & Beyond. He opened speaking about feeling like a "mosquito in a nudist colony, you know what to do you just have no idea where to start." That statement resonates so much with me because there are so many opportunities for innovation but I don't have enough arms to attack it all. With the speed of technology, economic, and societal change is accelerating at an exponential pace it is difficult to keep up and it becomes an exercise of anticipating the future. As leaders we have to think differently, merging the right technological processes and a cultural foundation of innovation. We can't be focused on just shipping employees to training for software products with no strategic plan, we have to now look at training them to be innovative thought partners. Being Future Ready focuses on what matters and why, what potential issues should be on your radar, and the adaptive, actionable takeaways that you can work on today to prepare for 2020 and beyond, including:
Disruptive technologies
Emerging regulatory issues
Citizen and employee experience
Future of management
Funding the future
He also spoke about modernizing job descriptions and training your existing work force to do the task that are required in jobs that have long been vacant. We need to deal with the fact that employees get bored and we are hesitant to allow them to explore new technologies and processes. What if we don't adopt industry standards and employees leave because they aren't challenged and feel boredom, even worse what if you don't train them and they stay. This is a great opportunity to pilot new workforce technology and test new learning models.
He also pointed out, while discussing the need for leadership to change, that Community cyber security will become a new government service. Although this wasn't a large point of discussion I immediately started thinking about how Community Cyber Security provides individuals, community leaders, and first respondents with information on how cyber attacks can impact, prevent, and/or stop operations and emergency responses in a community. This will become the new community watch focused on cybersecurity vulnerabilities, risks, threats, and countermeasures to counties. It looks at vulnerabilities of computer systems and networks and how these vulnerabilities can affect communities, organizations, and daily workplace operations and the actions communities can take in establishing a cybersecurity program. Right now we are are being very reactive to the threat of cybersecurity but we should be setting up community resources and opportunities to engage government, private and individuals to work through the potential issues just like we are working with data. Creating a community Cyber Security Force is an opportunity to partner, pilot and leverage technology with citizens.
The final session I attended was "Driving Change At Scale" it really tied the Future Ready concept together and discussed what was a state wide ECR(assuming Enterprise Content Reduction) project. Daniele Loffreda the Senior Advisor Portfolio Solutions at Ciena, Laura Young the Chief Nursing Officer Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services for State of Tennessee and Richard Zhu the Executive IT Director for Business Solutions Delivery Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services for State of Tennessee presented what they did to document business process and introduce a large scale ECR solution. I cringed at the confirmation that it took them 9 months to documents business processes for one hospital with a team of 30 - 40 individuals. The effort was a project to:
Minimize clinical record errors
Improve patient care through better documentation
Use resources more efficiently
Reduce file storage
Create a better flow of information
Standardize with the industry
Infrastructure also will not support innovation and the team did talk about the many different ways they were met with resistance. Most of the time people feel like they are losing control when systems are automated and the paper is removed from their desk. The perception is that the job security is gone but in actually those that can work through the implementation found that their time was actually released so they could be more productive and take on other task. Having a clear vision for the future communicated from senior leadership with a knowledgeable leadership team was noted to relieve many concerns. Also creating a demo site or test site so that teams can see and prepare to migrate to the new system helps to soften all the organizational noise. Project charters with a detailed project backlog helped to keep the project focused and prevent scope creep. This was a multi year project but the team did add that standardizing processes, forms and access did help expedite the plan.
Of course attending conferences means that you can not attend all of the sessions and there's something that you will miss. I look forward to attending next year and if you are interested the conference travels from state to state. Check out www.govtech.com/events/ for the next conference in your area.
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