Page 26 - FCW, September/October 2019

Cybersecurity and Modernization
Executive Viewpoint
A Conversation with
SUZETTE KENT
SUZETTE KENT
U.S. CIO Suzette Kent
The federal CIO discusses how the government’s new data strategy informs cybersecurity, emerging technology and citizen services
The federal data strategy is an ambitious, comprehensive approach to managing, using and protecting data. Why is it so important to tackle those challenges now?
We’re really excited about the data strategy, and there are a couple reasons “why now?” and “what’s in it?” As part of our big focus on technology modernization, we’re looking at legacy applications and transforming them and, in many cases, extracting embedded databases. So it’s the right time to ask questions such as: What do we want to do with the data? How do we make it more useful? How do we make it more accessible? From a work effort standpoint, modernization and addressing how we plan to use data in the future go together.
A second reason is we’re very focused
on protecting citizen data, so cybersecurity and privacy are very important. Some of those concerns are addressed in the Year-1 Action Plan through creating data inventory tools, increasing infrastructure maturity and building workforce skills.
The last big reason, and probably the one
I am most excited about, is that data is the foundation for our future-state technology because of the way our data-driven society works and the fact that we’re collecting more data everywhere. We have the opportunity
to use new technologies to leverage data
and information in a way that we never had before — to make citizen services better and improve the quality of the policy and program decisions we make.
What impact will the strategy have on the government’s cybersecurity efforts?
Cybersecurity is an area where we’ve been leveraging data as a strategic asset for
some time, whether it’s looking at pattern identification or sharing threat information. The industry and federal agencies have been making investments in data and advanced technology for many years. Now we can expand the focus beyond cybersecurity to everything that we do with data — not just examine the protection of data, but how it is used, how we protect individual privacy, how we look for bias in data and how we decide in which situations to use multiple years’ worth of data. The strategy gives us the opportunity to expand the set of disciplines we already have in the cybersecurity arena.
What steps can agencies take now to begin moving toward the strategy’s objectives?
There are a lot of activities in the Year-1
Action Plan that agencies should have already been taking steps to achieve, and many are doing so. Having a data protection toolkit,
an ethics framework for how to leverage
data, an understanding of where resources and tools are — those are some things that many agencies were already doing. We’re just putting more structure around those activities.
The most powerful of the agency priority items is understanding what questions they want to answer. Why are you making an investment in using data, and what part of the agency mission does it drive? If there’s any place they can start, it’s right there because that’s how you tie the mission, the resource dedication, the people investments and all those things back into answering the question: What are we doing for mission, for citizen services or as stewards of taxpayer money?
This interview continues at Carah.io/Kent-US-CIO.
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