Overhauling ageing infrastructure and instilling greater technological readiness is a challenge in private business, but it’s a different beast in the public sector. The kind of money available to private sector IT teams might eclipse government-provided funding, and in some cases continued, undisrupted service is essential to government function.
Change with Merit
In the US, federal employees are protected by a merit-based system that encompasses fair and equal recruitment practices, non-discriminatory and equitable treatment, standards of integrity and concern for the public interest, adequate training provision, retention and separation policies, freedom from reprisal, and more besides. These principles apply to all civil service employees, and they not only protect employees but also the integrity of federal operations.
Underpinning this system is the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), an independent quasi-judicial agency within the US Government whose mission is to uphold the merit system in employment decisions by reviewing and adjudicating cases where employees claim there has been a breach. With a remit encompassing more than two million federal government civilian employees, it poses a demanding and complex environment for its IT team to ensure the technological infrastructure is in place to ensure smooth operations.
Meeting the IT Challenge
Leading that IT team is CIO Craig Thomas whose longstanding tenure with the MSPB gave him a clear view and understanding of paint points or inefficiencies in existing IT systems. Having risen through the MSPB’s IT ranks, Thomas had accrued the understanding to make targeted, resourceful and impactful changes. The transformation process has involved digitising documents and processes spanning decades, along with migrating from on-prem resources to the cloud. Thomas’s experience has served as the backbone for what has been a significant challenge met successfully.
“Prior to becoming a CIO, I was manager of the enterprise business applications team. It was apparent during my tenure that we could more effectively spend strategic, budgetary, and human capital by modernizing.. When I made the transition to CIO, we looked at each component of our IT solution and we asked difficult questions. How do we offload maintenance burden? That was a big one.
“How do we decrease costs? How do we ensure scalability and future-proof the system so that we’re not recreating the wheel every five, 10 years? And, how do we verify the effectiveness of the technology? In some cases, our technology was simply not that effective. How do we increase visibility into the data that the technologies store and create? We had a lot of blind spots where we couldn’t see into our tech, so how do we increase visibility?
“The digital transformation has been critical to MSPB operations because the agency can absorb much more organisational change without having to spend time and money retrofitting IT systems. The environment that we’re in now requires the ability to move very quickly and to change direction with minimal effort.”