Page 12 - FCW, March 2017

Commentary|STEVE BENNETT
STEVE BENNETT
is director of SAS’ Global Government Practice.
5 technology priorities for President Trump
The Obama administration made significant improvements to federal IT, but there is much more to do
When President Barack Obama took office in 2009, the iPhone had been on the market for a scant 18 months, use of cloud computing was nonexistent, and Facebook was just starting to pick up steam.
Technology moves so fast it’s sometimes hard to grasp how far we’ve come in just a few short years. The federal government has made progress as well, but it still lags far behind the private sector in how it uses modern technology.
The Obama administration took some crucial first steps, but much more is needed. President Donald Trump’s team must not only contin- ue this positive use of technology in government, but accelerate it. Here are five places to start:
1. Increase trust in govern- ment. With almost eight in 10 Americans dissatisfied with the way the federal government is working, there is much to be done to improve confidence. One important way that technology can help is to continue the focus on transparency.
Because so much of any organiza- tion’s business is digital, continuing the Obama team’s push for open access to government datasets will help. Programs such as Data.gov and the Digital Accountability and Trans- parency Act have shown promise, with agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminis- tration, the Interior Department and NASA leading the way.
Nevertheless, more can be done to provide key strategic and opera- tional data in addition to the primar-
ily scientific data released today. The Trump administration must push harder for agencies to release data while facilitating development of the tools to make sense of it.
2. Promote efficiency. Budget pressures will continue to influence decisions, and agencies will keep being asked to do more with less. Analytical tools can help agencies
The Trump administration must commit to a dedicated expansion of mobile services in a secure way that maintains privacy.
with everything from detecting and preventing fraud in government benefits to optimizing the use of constrained resources.
With the right investments in analytics, the Trump administra- tion could make the most of what will certainly be ongoing budget challenges and could continue to improve efficiency.
3. Connect with citizens. Mobile technology has changed the way consumers act, and the government must adapt. Using “citizen intelli- gence,” agencies can learn exactly what their customers — the Ameri- can people — want from their
government. The Trump adminis- tration must commit to a dedicated expansion of mobile services in a secure way that maintains privacy. That strategy will require new approaches in technology leader- ship, procurement and implemen- tation to avoid the security pitfalls experienced by a number of previ- ous attempts.
4. Keep pushing cybersecurity.
With the government storing so much valuable information, criminal enterprises and adversarial states will continue to view it as a prime target for attacks. Protecting data will be an increasingly challenging but critical focus area to ensure that the government remains a trusted source. Without that credibility, citizens’ faith in government will continue to drop and might reach
a level from which it cannot recover. 5. Battle asymmetric threats online. At the beginning of the war on terrorism, al Qaeda had a cen- tral office in Afghanistan to which recruits could travel for training. Today, terrorists use the internet to inspire, recruit, train and conduct operations. People no longer need to leave their homes, let alone their countries, to become radicalized or connected to terrorist activities.
The Trump team must set up systems to better combat those efforts, including adopting text analytics capabilities that can mine public information to provide more advanced intelligence into the inner workings of online recruitment and training efforts. n
12 March 2017 FCW.COM