Page 28 - GCN, Jun/July 2016

SERVING THE CITIZEN
REINVENTING GOVERNMENT COLLABORATION
Agencies are striving to provide digital services to match their peers in the private sector.
SPONSORED CONTENT
PAUL CHAPMAN
CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, BOX
SHARING DATA STORAGE and processing power across agencies was long the aim of IT managers
and engineers who were behind the federal government’s first data center
architectures. The Department of Agriculture’s National Finance Center, which has been offering integrated shared services since 1973, was an early success. It still has more than 650,000 employees on the payroll every year.
Today, such data centers are a rarity rather than a rule. Instead, agencies face challenges sharing resources while using antiquated, cumbersome technologies in an environment where users
have come to expect they will be able to easily communicate and access information quickly and easily with any device, anywhere and at any time.
The demand for new digital experiences and
for collaborating across boundaries has also become a mandate. Like their private sector peers, government agencies now serve a new style of citizen that has grown up digital and demands a digitized mobile first experience.
To meet this high-performance wish list, outside-in thinking user experience designers in the government sector are turning to new methods of developing digital applications, including using specialty “micro-services.” These are components of existing services or applications with proven value in the marketplace.
Today, there are many micro-services developers can bring together, integrate and curate to create new integrated service experiences
for the individual citizen, agency or end user. Using these services, organizations don’t have to spend millions of dollars and time and effort in rewriting applications. They can instead focus on assembling and orchestrating higher value-added capabilities and enabling a faster time to value.
Content management platforms like Box are valuable tools for building these modern shared services architectures both as a content
platform and first party application service. The recently unveiled Box for Government initiative
is designed to bring together different digital product suites, helping agencies work remotely and collaboratively. The solution leverages the Box modern content platform and an ecosystem of pre-developed integrations, meeting government compliance requirements including FedRAMP, CJIS, and IRS1075, and ensuring security and privacy of sensitive government data.
More than 6,500 government entities worldwide are using Box. The U.S. Department of Justice leverages the Box content platform to coordinate across bureaus and external stakeholders.
The DOJ chose the platform to power the modernized Law Enforcement Information Sharing Program, which helps DOJ employees manage sensitive law enforcement data, collaborating with internal and external stakeholders while ensuring strict compliance with rules of evidence. DOJ relied on the Box ecosystem of partners and integrations to manage user identifies, authorize collaborators, secure endpoints and mobile devices, and create evidence reports, all leveraging the Box platform.
The ability to securely share and collaborate without requiring risky architecture changes, establishing infrastructure enclaves, and relying on insecure communication channels has become increasingly critical to agencies like DOJ. Those agencies are under pressure to operate at millennial-driven standards.
These advances remove obstacles from
a generation of government workers and citizens who have grown up in the digital era, letting them collaborate in creative ways at an accelerated pace. And in the end, that may be one of the most valuable lessons millennials can leave for the next digital generation—learning to curate 21st century datasets.
Paul Chapman is Chief Information Officer at Box.
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