AFCEA 2011DHS information officers discuss the future of technology at AFCEA
The senior technology officials of several DHS agencies gathered for a roundtable discussion at the AFCEA Homeland Security Conference in Washington, D.C. to outline their priorities, challenges, and plans for procuring technology and implementing capabilities at their respective departments; information officers from TSA, the U.S Coast Guard, the National Protection and Programs Directorate, and Citizen and Immigration Services were present; each official expressed similar plans to increase mobile access to data, digitize records, establish national databases, and streamline the flow of information; officials believe these remotely accessible databases can also help reduce costs and enhance customer service; the officials also noted the difficulty in hiring qualified personnel with cyber security skills
On Wednesday 23 February 2011, senior technology officials of several DHS agencies gathered for a roundtable discussion to outline their priorities, challenges, and plans for procuring technology and implementing capabilities at their respective departments.
The discussion took place before an audience at the AFCEA Homeland Security Conference in Washington, D.C. as part of a live broadcast on Federal News Radio.
The panel featured Rear Admiral Robert E. Day Jr., the chief information officer (CIO) of the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG), Dave Epperson, the CIO at the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD), Leslie Hope, the deputy CIO of Citizen and Immigration Services (CIS), and Stephen Rice, the deputy CIO of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
Each official expressed similar plans to increase mobile access to data, digitize records, establish national databases, and streamline the flow of information.
According to Stephen Rice, the TSA hopes to design a system that will enable the entire agency to access “TSA data anytime anywhere,” so that they can become a “much more mobile organization.”
Eventually he hopes that agents will be “able to access that data at checkpoints, access that data in our break rooms, or access that data anywhere in the terminal.”
Officials at USCG, CIS, and NPPD are seeking to adopt similar systems to that of TSA.
Leslie Hope believes these databases could reduce costs and enhance customer service, in addition to offering greater mobility.
In reference to CIS efforts to digitize its record system, Hope said, “Every documented immigrant in the United States has a paper file in our organization, and I can tell you that in our national record center there are several football fields two tiers high full of paper files.”
With offices across the country trying to access these files, it is “timely, costly, and just inefficient” to ship each of these files to the various offices.”
By digitizing records and creating a national database, Hope believes that CIS can offer “enhanced customer service, enhanced integrity in the immigration system, and definitely an ease of managing our internal resources, which I think is ultimately going to end up costing the consumer less money.”
Epperson noted that it was not just about pushing information to agents in the field, but also ensuring that the right data was getting to the right people to avoid information overload.
He said, “What happened in the past was we sometimes gave them information that had little value, so we’re trying to make sure that the information that finally gets to an operator or a responder in the field can be of value so they can do something or execute something based on it.”
Highlighting the difficulty of storing and apportioning data to the right channels, Admiral Day said that the various agencies working to clean up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year generated “over fourteen million pieces of paper and sixteen terabytes of data.”
The Coast Guard is now in the process of archiving and storing that data in a searchable format for future use.
Another common theme that emerged throughout the discussion was the difficulty that each agency had in hiring qualified personnel.
When asked what challenges their respective organizations faced, Admiral Day noted the difficulty in “hiring people with cyber security skill sets.”
He explained, “We’re competing with everybody in the industry. We’re competing with everybody in this room. We’re competing with everybody in the radio audience that are looking to get in this business and grab personnel.”
Stephen Rice added to this noting the specific need for IT program managers at TSA.
“We have a lot of people with a lot of skills in two areas. They are either deep technical or they are deep business. We need to find that blend where they can articulate the technology to our user community, get those business interests, and then guide those programs and projects to success,” he said.
Underscoring the importance for successfully implementing these new technological capabilities and hiring personnel, Admiral Day said, “We understand that every single day what we do is now mission critical. Ten to fifteen years ago it was ‘Nah, it’s just IT,’ but today it’s mission execution.”
