Page 50 - FCW, May/June 2020

Management
The most
challenging time
for federal CIOs
COVID-19 has put unprecedented pressure on government IT, and the trouble doesn’t end with the pandemic
BY MARK FORMAN
Roughly every 10 years for the past five decades, the federal govern- ment has had to deal with major crises ranging from economic to terrorist to pandemic. COVID-19 has presented CIOs at all levels of government with unprecedented challenges to respond to the critical needs of the country.
Having worked in the Office of Man- agement and Budget, as a congressio- nal committee staff member and in industry during previous crises, I have noted that a common three-phase cycle always happens, which I’ll refer to as the “three R’s”: response, recovery and restructure. The cycle plays out this way:
• Response. Chaotic triage activity always seems to overwhelm even the best continuity-of-operations plans and key mission-critical programs needed to get benefits and assets to those most in need.
• Recovery. When the situation stabilizes, agency officials can take a breath and figure out how to bring order out of chaos — in this case, by taking advantage of OMB M-20-21
guidance to address multiple audits of actions taken in the heat of the coro- navirus crisis.
• Restructure. Audits and reports lead to new agencies, reorganizations and programs to make sure the country never has to experience the same crisis again (e.g., the creation of the Depart- ment of Homeland Security based on the 9/11 Commission report).
Recovery and restructure activi- ties in the 21st century have increased major technology spending (33% after 9/11 and about 10% after the housing crisis) before flattening that spending. Recovery and restructure phases from COVID-19 necessarily require increased technology spending and may even result in a radical restructuring of the government.
With the response phase activities related to our current crisis underway, let’s focus on the recovery phase. Stat- ed simply, the recovery phase will be substantially more expensive and less effective if the government does not make a major investment in today’s digi- tal government tools and techniques. In
fact, with the massive volume of trans- actions and data generated during the COVID-19 response, CIOs will have to help agency leaders recognize the need for cloud computing, big-data analyt- ics and artificial intelligence/machine learning to meet the historic challenges.
Here are four areas where the gov- ernment must apply digital government tools:
• Administration of grants and loans. Without the help of large-scale data analytics and algorithms and the ability to integrate citizen-sourced fraud and abuse insights, it will be extreme- ly difficult to manage risk and achieve performance goals. Traditional ways of sampling won’t work for the sprawling, multitrillion-dollar COVID-19 recovery phase.
• Logistics accounting. Jerry- rigged supply chains for emergency resources will now have to be quanti- fied and recorded against budgets. The government will face two options: It can either write off losses it cannot account for or it can apply records management, e-discovery and robotics tools to quan-
44 May/June 2020 FCW.COM