White House officials to huddle on future of federal workforce
Federal CIO Suzette Kent said she will talk about federal technology workforce needs at a White House session.
The federal technology workforce, said Federal CIO Suzette Kent, lags behind the commercial sector, and the government needs to do better at predicting what "work looks like in the future."
Kent said she will take those issues up at a White House workforce panel being held Sept. 12.
The day-long White House session to convene at the neighboring Eisenhower Executive Office Building, said sources familiar with the event, draws experts from good-government groups, academia and the federal government to address federal technology workforce issues.
The federal technology workforce, she said, "has to make sure we're not just moving up levels from a management perspective and that we're actually looking at the skills individuals have to have to be successful in the environment they're working in."
In IT, that means emerging technologies and different operating models, such as shared services or services that are provided externally to the federal government, she said at the Professional Services Council's Tech Trends Conference in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11.
"What we're talking about with the workforce session, is ways that we engage public-private partnerships, ways that we sustain a commitment to retention, to recruitment and to ongoing education for individuals who are in the federal government," Kent said.
In previous work in the private sector, Kent said she saw emerging technologies such as automation, robotics, artificial intelligence and machine learning transform commercial industry. Those same technologies are also important for federal agencies.
Contracts that help the federal government's move to the cloud and shared services, said Kent, are accelerating changes. "With cloud email," she said, "we're at a point where we've moved over half, and we're aggressively moving the rest of the federal government because email phishing is one of the top attack vectors."
Commercially available services and shared services, she said, allow agencies to accelerate certain functions, but also focus more on their missions.
The "nexus" of the President's Management Agenda, the White House's "attention to technology leadership" as well as bipartisan Congressional support for the technology agenda and the commitment to provide technological resources have provided an unprecedented opportunity to drive federal technology innovation ahead, she said.
"If we move our ordinary applications to shiny new technology and we don't challenge how we operate differently or how we serve citizens, I'll say that we've failed and missed an historic opportunity."