The federal government’s top technology official said June 15 that “the digitization of everything” will help accelerate a new technological model that infuses cybersecurity as a core component.
“This digitization is relentless and it won’t stop and it’s accelerating and it’s changing everything, including government,” Tony Scott, the federal chief information officer, told government employees during his keynote at the inaugural CIO Council IT Symposium in Washington, D.C.
“We’re going to see more change in the next three or four or five years as the technology industry responds to today’s challenges and figures out new architectural models and paradigms for the future,” he added.
Digitization, he said, is forcing the public and private sectors to “re-imagine everything,” starting with what the customer wants and what they’re trying to do. And this means applying new design techniques, business models and workflows.
This will also change the way the government and private sector approach cybersecurity, which Scott called “one of the big challenges of our time,” alluding to several high-profile cyberattacks such as the recent Office of Personnel Management hack that compromised information on 4 million current and former federal employees.
He said one of the problems is that most of the technology and systems architecture were designed and built in the 1970s or 1990s.
“It’s kind of like trying to put airbags on a ’65 Mustang,” he said. “It just wasn’t designed for security. It wasn’t designed for safety. We had different issues, different things we were trying to do as we created those software models and software paradigms.”
Scott said the new generation of digital technology will build safety and security within the fabric of operating systems, applications, interfaces and networks and user devices.
Another issue he addressed was training the next generation of government technology workers with the technological and managerial skills needed as the current graying workforce retires. That should be a focus, he said, along with changing the current culture with “soft rules” – whether laws or agency “norms” – that make it difficult to perform work.
“It shouldn’t take a team of lawyers from one agency to interact with another agency when it’s time for that activity to happen,” said Scott. “You should just be able to do it, as one example.”
He said the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act, or FITARA, will help in this regard. The law elevates the profile and capabilities of agency CIOs, providing them with more decision-making power. Scott’s office recently issued final guidance regarding the law and is awaiting plans from agencies regarding how they will implement it, which will also get needed congressional oversight, he added.
“And if you think about nothing else about FITARA think about good governance, good conversation and pithy conversations that enable the leadership of whatever organization is involved to make the best possible decisions going forward,” he said. “That, to me, is FITARA in its essence.”
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