“After 30 years of law enforcement, and 20 years of [investigating] complex fraud, I’ve never seen anything of this magnitude,” said National Pandemic Fraud Recovery Coordinator Roy Dotson, special agent in charge at the U.S. Secret Service.

Dotson continued: “Obviously, the magnitude was high, but [we saw] just how pervasive it was when there were YouTube tutorials telling you how to apply for unemployment — if you live in Florida, how you can get it in Washington; or get a [Paycheck Protection Program] loan if you don’t have a business,” he said. “I don’t know how many people I talked to that just said, ‘I thought it was free money.’”

While he credited Congress and the federal government for trying to help Americans by trying to get relief funds out quickly during the pandemic, he stated plainly, “the vetting process wasn’t ready for it.”

Carole House, the White House National Security Council’s director for cybersecurity and secure digital innovation, echoed those observations, citing government estimates “north of $100 billion in pandemic fraud. The scale is devastating,” she said.  House, who previously served as senior cyber and emerging tech policy officer at the Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), said she was stunned by “the egregious amount of fraud” she saw, with people using federal relief funds to buy million-dollar homes.

“The tactic that interested me the most was the targeting of virtual meetings,” she told an audience of more than 250 federal, state and local law enforcement and public safety officials attending an AFCEA Bethesda forum at the National Press Club. “Criminals were compromising virtual platforms, using deep fakes to basically put up an image of the CEO to get to the person controlling the finances, [directing them] to send some payment to criminally controlled accounts.”

Following the money

Having the tools and manpower to follow the money has grown increasingly important for law enforcement agencies, both because of the dramatic growth in digital evidence that must be collected and because of the rising reliance on cryptocurrencies to launder the flow of money, said Steven D’Antuono, assistant director in charge at the FBI.

Criminals are deceiving people into “putting money in normal bank accounts, and then immediately siphoning it off into crypto, which we can trace eventually, it just takes a lot more work for us to do,” said D’Antuono. “And if anyone knows anything about the financial kill chain, we need to know the information quickly, so that we can go through SWIFT,” the global financial messaging service, to intercept the funds. Criminals are transferring from one coin to another to launder their money, “so there are a lot of challenges trying to trace those illicit funds,” he said.

“Even your most basic investigations today utilize cryptocurrency,” noted Dotson, saying converting cash to cryptocurrency is occurring on the smallest white-collar crimes.

At the same time, the expanded use of digital analytics, the cloud and new tools for spotting aberrations in financial transactions is giving federal law enforcement officials “a whole new mechanism for [identifying] vulnerabilities that are being exploited,” said House. But it’s also helping law enforcement investigators identify “members for disruption and potentially for attribution and understanding what the transnational criminal networks are popping up in these ecosystems,” she explained.

The fact that the White House is standing up an interagency COVID-19 task force on pandemic relief fraud, and designating a special prosecutor, are signs of how seriously federal officials view the issue of pandemic relief fraud, House said.

She also revealed that the White House is “actively working on” an executive order expected to be published “in the coming weeks” aimed at combatting and preventing “identity theft and fraud in government relief programs and other government benefit programs.”

Speaking to the topic of public safety, Matthew Emrich, associate director of fraud detection and national security at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, noted that fraud is also continuing to occur on a human dimension, involving “a large number of perpetrators and a large number of victims,” he said. “Some people see it as a victimless,” or just another version of white-collar crime, “but it can involve some pretty serious consequences for people.”

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The program is leading to a growing level of digital engagement with U.S. consumers and mailers and helping to generate new revenue streams for USPS. Called Informed Delivery, the USPS program delivered 12 billion digital images to 24 million consumers in 2019 with a growth rate of more than 200,000 customers a week. Along with that, Informed Visibility also offers “a wealth of real-time information to our customers and employees about the movement of mail through our network,” according to the Postal Service’s annual report.

The pilot for the program started in 2014 in the Northern Virginia region with about 10,000 users, said Bob Dixon, USPS’s director of product technology innovation. The vision for Informed Delivery was to offer Americans a more digital, responsive experience with their mail.

“We were seeing consumers starting to expect a digital experience with just everything they did to engage a brand,” Dixon said. “It wasn’t just about getting email marketing or banner advertising. It was an expectation by consumers to have some digital portion of every experience.”

Getting to that point, however, required investments in information and technology capabilities. Some were as simple as an “intelligent mail barcode” found below the address on business mail, while others involved more modern technology, like updating imaging devices to all mail processing equipment.

“We for the first time had the ability to show consumers a digital aspect of their mail, just from what was in the mail stream already,” Dixon said. “We leveraged those investments that had been designed and implemented to facilitate mail processing, and turned those into a product that we that we could give to our consumers.”

Particularly important to the program is a cloud environment that USPS will use to process incoming image files and generate millions of daily digest emails. This environment can be easily scaled depending on the volume of images in a given day, said Pritha Mehra, USPS’s vice president of IT.

Informed Delivery is going through a new set of pilots using containerization and serverless technologies to compare the performance and costs of the various cloud deployment options, Mehra said.

“Containerization makes the code more portable between cloud platforms and container management services allows the platform to automatically scale to the capacity that’s needed,” said Mehra. And through serverless technology, she explained, USPS provides the code and the cloud providers deliver the ability to manage the underlying infrastructure.

The Postal Service also saw a business opportunity to increase revenue through marketing content, allowing senders to include calls to action or other materials with the mail previews — “something that we can give to our mailers as an opportunity to really keep mail relevant and engage with a modern consumer,” Dixon said.

In a world that’s becoming more and more digital-driven, Informed Delivery is about more than a black-and-white preview of mail for the USPS. It gives the service a chance to make the physical medium of mail more responsive.

“Could we get consumers to respond more to a physical piece of mail if we added these digital aspects to it?” Dixon said of the pilot. “Our initial testing was designed to gather that data and it showed strongly that when we include an image in the daily email to a consumer and we gave them a response channel, they were far more likely to respond to that physical mail than they were if it were just the physical mail piece alone. And so for that reason, we started to continue to explore and further the program.”

It was a success. Between 57% and 65% of the email sent through the program was opened, often within an hour of receiving it. Additionally, 93% of consumers say they are satisfied or very satisfied with the service; and 94% would recommend it to friends, family or colleagues.

And to improve customer satisfaction even more, USPS is enlisting artificial intelligence, analytics and customer relationship management tools to predict package delivery events and why people are reaching out to its call centers.

The question is: “What do we need to do to basically solve the issue before they ever have to make a phone call?” Mehra said. “And so we are doing deep analysis and have developed AI models to precisely predict when a package will be delivered.”

At the end of the day, Informed Delivery “is about mailer participation,” Dixon said. In addition to driving “consumer satisfaction,” he said, it was important to USPS to continue demonstrating its value and utility in the modern mailing industry.

“In order for us to continue to be relevant, we need to serve both audiences. And the more mailers that participate and get value out of informed delivery, the better we’re doing,” Dixon said.

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But when it came to online transactions with external customers, NIST officials recognized the agency needed to modernize the user experience for its customers, according to Hannah Brown, acting director of NIST’s Business Operations Office.

Like many federal agencies, NIST oversees a wide range of government services and operating divisions within the Department of Commerce. Its 3,400 scientists, engineers and technicians play a crucial role in keeping the nation’s atomic clocks, electric power grids, computer systems and manufacturing standards up to date. It also partners with more than 1,300 manufacturing industry specialists and works with another 2,700 associates from academia, industry and other government agencies.

Unlike most agencies, though, NIST generates income — from manufacturers, power grid operators, scientists and research institutions — by offering for purchase an extensive catalog of standard reference data and materials in chemistry, physics, engineering, computing and other sciences along with highly specialized calibration services.

“We’re very proud of what we do,” said Brown. “We offer world-class calibration services and standard reference materials … that are critical to commerce and make a big difference for a number of different industries. So we want the customer experience to reflect the value that we’re providing,” she said.

Rethinking the customer service equation

As far back as 2014, Del Brockett, NIST’s CIO at the time and now chief operating officer, recognized the need to modernize how NIST handled its products and services orders. Up until then, NIST’s various departments relied primarily on a paper-based system, email and faxes for taking orders.

Brockett, however, believed that NIST needed more than an e-commerce solution. NIST would also benefit from a broader, enterprise customer relationship and case management platform to improve the agency’s “insight into its customers and partner interactions,” recalled Brown.

“If you really want to have a sense for the work that you’re doing, and the customer you’re providing services to — and if you want metrics around that to understand what you’re doing to make real improvements — then you’re going to need a platform that gives you that overall view. That’s really the point of a good CRM,” said Brown. “The nice thing too, is that it offers a higher level of accountability into the work we do, and transparency into how we’re providing those services.”

That belief was fueled in part by a series of successful deployments of a cloud-based, enterprise workflow management platform at that time.

The deployments gave NIST employees real-time insights into the progress of internal projects and resulted in a wave of improvements in customer service internally. That sparked a search for something similar to support NIST’s external customers and ultimately, a modern enterprise CRM and case management platform, according to Brown. NIST decided in late 2015 to begin work with Salesforce’s Service Cloud platform.

One factor that contributed to that decision, beyond the continuous updating software-as-a-service can offer, was its availability within the government’s FedRAMP-approved cloud environment, meaning it has to keep meeting the government’s detailed security requirements.

“Security and privacy are a big deal for us. We have an extensive process that we take to make sure we are guarding the data in our systems as well as we possibly can,” Brown noted.

Once the CRM system was deployed and ready for testing, the operations and IT team chose a low-pressure rollout, letting NIST’s products and service team leaders experiment with it.

“That was an important decision,” said Brown. “We knew the system itself was a great tool to use. But it was something we wanted people to use NIST-wide, so it was important to give people an opportunity to try it out. Like every new tool, it’s not about the technology, but the people and the approaches they use that really make the difference.”

Having a robust case management component also provides an important dimension of accountability, Brown said.

“It’s not just a way to gather data. You have a way to follow through on promises made,” she said. “And that’s a big deal. When you’re a private company, that’s really critical because you have a bottom line to meet. When you’re in federal government, that’s really critical because that’s your constituency — that has everything to do with our mission.”

Expanding e-commerce front-end

After getting the CRM system in place on the backend, NIST then began to tackle the work of improving the e-commerce interface experience for customers on the front end.

“There were early versions of e-commerce spread all over the place on our internal legacy systems, but there wasn’t a way for customers to go online and request quotes and purchase products directly and in a unified way,” Brown explained.

NIST’s development team opted to build on Salesforce’s B2B Commerce platform, deploying a foundational e-commerce platform in the spring of 2019 that supports NIST’s calibration services. The platform captures online orders for calibrations and funnels them into an order management process. If customers have questions, they’re able to initiate a request via email that becomes a trackable case and can be associated with every potential order, according to Brown.

Within a matter of months since then, NIST had digitally processed about $5 million in orders from about 900 different customer accounts, giving NIST officials confidence they were headed in the right direction.

“One of the factors that has everything to do with our success and, or, failure — and I mean both of those words intentionally— is having the right team, selecting the right tool, and the vendor you choose to work with who will do your development and manage the project,” Brown said.

Based on the initial positive reviews from customers, NIST is currently seeking information on a new round of development projects to expand on the capabilities offered through the e-commerce platform.

Next up on NIST’s development list are plans to make the agency’s standard reference materials and data references also available online, as well as training resources, according to Brown.

Longer-term, NIST has set its priorities on expanding e-commerce functionality for all of its products and services across the agency and creating a simpler, more unified experience for its constituents, said Brown.

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But to anyone who’s not a full-time research expert seeking NSF funding, the platform hardly lived up to its name. For entrepreneurs and startups in particular — who are typically unfamiliar with the process of applying for government grants and often the most in need of them — it was cumbersome and difficult to navigate, according to Ben Schrag, NSF program director of Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer.

“They are not experts. They’re almost by definition new to the process of government funding,” Schrag said. “And for entrepreneurs, generally grant-writing is not a standard skill set for them. Their skill set is pitching investors and things like that. So we don’t necessarily even want them to become experts, because that’s a lot of time that they could be spending building their companies.”

But it’s those innovative, bootstrapped entrepreneurs and small businesses that NSF aspires to reach through the program, which is also known as America’s Seed Fund,  because they tend to overperform in terms of return on investment and driving meaningful, transformative outcomes.

It was clear NSF had to create a more modern front-end process to better connect with this community. To do so, the foundation decided, it needed to help entrepreneurs get a quick “yes” or “no” before requiring them to enter the official grants submittal portal.

That’s where the idea for Project Pitch came from: A quick submission portal that sits in front of FastLane catered to entrepreneurs and startups, who, if they are a good fit, get an official invitation from NSF to submit a full proposal and help along the way.

Project Pitch allows NSF to “help them through it,” said Kelly Monterroso, a communications specialist at NSF. “So we know that if we invite them to submit a proposal, because they’ve gone through the project pitch process, we know who they are, we can hold webinars just for them, we can just really help them through their registration, all the paperwork that they need to submit. So it’s a way that we can help them through our process.”

The need for startup speed

Schrag himself spent the first part of his career at a startup. Before joining NSF, he became quite familiar with FastLane in search of funding. During that period, he learned just how impenetrable, in fact, the FastLane process can be.

Because NSF uses the scientific peer review process to review proposals, there’s “a lot of technical detail in the documents, and then the [back-end, review] process happens and there’s not a lot of feedback. You would go through Fastlane,  you submit a proposal, and then you wouldn’t hear anything for months, because you would just be waiting for the process to happen,” he said.

But that doesn’t reflect how the entrepreneurial community works. For startups, speed is the name of the game.

In comparison, the Project Pitch gives startups a response in less than three weeks.

Monterroso said Schrag and NSF’s small business program directors recognized this incongruity given their own experiences. “They are former entrepreneurs, they’ve started companies, they know what it’s like to need money to survive. And having lived that experience, they knew the need for speed and having a really quick ability to get back to a startup… They recognize that startups will often fail if they don’t get funding right away.”

On top of that, Schrag saw the need to treat grant applicants as customers and give them the best experience possible. “We want the best entrepreneurs to apply.”

The move to a modernized CRM

That prompted NSF staff to investigate what other government agencies were using and talk to their advisory committee about different products.  At the end that review, the decision was made to test a customer relationship management platform offered by Salesforce, already in use elsewhere in small business innovation research programs across government.

“What we really wanted was out-of-the-box software that we could just pretty easily turn on,” Monterroso said.

Salesforce’s Service Cloud Lightning Edition, a software-as-a-service platform that allowed the agency to design what it needed for entrepreneurs to submit a Project Pitch, offered the best path forward, according to Schrag. NSF also opted to pair the CRM platform with a cloud-based, email marketing tool called Pardot, also from Salesforce, to better engage applicants and keep track of those interactions.

“The lack of upfront cost is really important because this is a pilot. It’s still a pilot, honestly. We’re still changing things,” he said. But the ability to start small and move quickly was just as important.

“Again, we were all entrepreneurs in our former lives and the kind of calling card of current startups is the minimum viable product. So we have some questions we want to answer. Let’s get to those answers as quickly as possible. And we can always iterate and change and develop things later,” Schrag said.

“The idea was, what’s the smallest amount of money and time we can spend to just test whether this thing, this process works, whether the entrepreneurial community likes it, whether the program directors find it useful? And then you go from there.”

Once the system was set up, all NSF had to do was add the application to its website as a form and create new content and webpages around the process, Monterroso said. Training was fairly minimal and all-in-all, the process wasn’t major undertaking, she said.

But the results were meaningful, Schrag said. “We had almost universally positive feedback from the community, which we weren’t sure we would get. But again, the whole idea of having this on-ramp seems to be very appealing.”

It even paid added dividends when the COVID-19 pandemic suddenly started dominating everyone’s attention.

Schrag said NSF was able to use the platform to call for proposals from “small businesses who think they have innovative technology that can potentially and relatively rapidly impact the current situation.”

On the backend, NSF simply created a tag in the system that allows program directors to quickly find COVID-related research applications as soon as they’re submitted.

“And this ability to have them submit a small amount of information with a fast turn through,” Schrag said, has helped put the promise of fast back into FastLane. “The case management platform is really what makes it go.”

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For NSF CIO Dorothy Aronson, the experiment — which involves giving documents the equivalent of “digital fingerprints” — represents more than just finding a new way to solve an old problem. It also offers a glimpse of how the expertise of data scientists, together with modernized technologies, can potentially accelerate the government’s efforts in identifying and funding innovative ideas.

“I’m fantasizing here, but if you’re a citizen, you could send any proposal for innovation to a single [government] location and it would be automatically distributed, or suggestions would be made, to various federal organizations,” she said. “We’re just starting off with little experiments. But there’s a lot of benefits that could come from this.”

That vision may seem like a pipe dream for the thousands of scientists, engineers, academic institutions and entrepreneurs who apply each year to 26 federal grant-making agencies and more than 1,000 programs nationally. But for NSF, which accounts for roughly 20% of federal support to academic institutions for basic research, the technology foundation to build on that vision is now largely in place, according to Aronson.

Capitalizing on modernized IT   

The challenge facing NSF and other grant-making agencies — including the National Institutes of Health, which is working with NSF on the project — is how to share and compare proposals without exposing private information and potentially valuable ideas to the public.

NSF CIO Dorothy Aronson

“We often get multiple ideas that have a very high degree of similarity and we don’t want to fund that same idea multiple times,” explained Aronson. “So we have to work hard to figure out where there’s duplication.”

Streamlining the workload of program officers and automating as much of the proposal process as possible is “a perennial objective,” said Aronson. “This is not a new problem. It’s just one that we didn’t have the opportunity to solve before.”

What has changed, she said, is a combination of newer technology capabilities and “the availability of people who know the tools used by data scientists in order to create and apply the concepts [we needed] to compare the proposals.”

NSF already had the technology in place to convert PDF and other types of documents into machine-readable formats. And about five years ago, it had begun investing in an enterprise data warehouse, which provides greater flexibility than traditional transactional database systems.

“That was a very important transition for us because it put the data more closely into the hands of the customers,” said Aronson. “They didn’t have to know tools like SQL, for example, to derive the information they needed. And that allowed us to go to things like dashboards for executives.”

Since then, NSF also began gradually moving much of its IT operations, including the enterprise data warehouse, into a cloud environment. That’s helped give NSF the ability over the past two years to capitalize, for instance, on language processing capabilities and artificial intelligence, according to Aronson.

All of those technology upgrades, however, weren’t enough to solve a critical problem: How to simultaneously mask the content of proposals, for privacy protection, and still give program officers a form of visibility into how one grant proposal was similar or different from thousands of others.

What NSF ultimately needed, explained Chezian Sivagnanam, NSF’s chief enterprise architect, was a way to create a mathematical abstraction, or “fingerprint,” for each proposal that could be compared to other documents, each of which typically runs 15 pages in length and includes a variety of images. However, that fingerprinting process also has to work in a way that can’t be reversed engineered, in order to prevent someone from exposing the underlying content.

Data scientists to the rescue

Aronson said the big “breakthrough for us” occurred when NSF began “bringing people into our organization who understood how to apply data science principles and look at problems through the lens of a data scientist. It opened a wider world to us because of the knowledge base of what other data scientists had already created.”

That led to discussions with a number of data science experts and a variety of testing sprints, according to Sivagnanam. “Luckily, we found an algorithm being used within NIH, called Word2Vec, that basically converts document content into numbers. It then applies mathematical statistics on top of these numbers and looks for cosine similarities to relate one document with another,” he explained.

There was just one more catch, he said. “Once we converted the documents, we needed to put the results in a common infrastructure.” That’s where the capabilities of a blockchain and a distributed ledger entered the picture.

“The idea is to score each proposal [for similarities] then build this ledger, scale this up, so that going forward, every grant that comes in through all these organizations will get in this ledger,” Sivagnanam said. “The ledger has the analytical capability that when it finds a close scoring match, it then automatically triggers an alert to the respective program officers on both sides saying, ‘Hey, there is something similar between these proposals. You may want to talk about them further,’ as a pre-conditional exercise.”

NSF’s blockchain development work gained traction early last year from the General Services Administration’s 10x program — a kind of incubator investment fund that supports promising technology projects that can scale across the federal government or improve public services.

“The blockchain part is important,” Sivagnanam said, “because the proposals may come in two or three years after one another. So you need to make sure there are immutable records…with the blockchain monitoring what historically has happened.”

Aronson made it clear, the process, for now, is still in a “manual” mode. “We’ve got the logic together that allows us to create the fingerprints. And we’re able to identify potential overlap. But in order to make it a real-time capability, we need something that will automatically convert a proposal to a fingerprint, add it to the blockchain and then communicate to everybody else on the chain — so it would be a constant conversation,” she said.

“Because we really didn’t have everything in place two or three years ago, this idea really wouldn’t have been actionable,” she said.

She now believes the time is no longer far off when, if a proposal comes to NSF, but is better suited for the Department of Energy, it could be routed and flagged within minutes instead of months. “It would allow us as a federal government to be more efficient at our distribution of innovative proposal ideas.”

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“Agencies have new opportunities to tackle the tough issues and get answers to their big questions using high quality data from multiple sources,” said Nancy Potok, chief statistician of the United States, in a new report released June 27 by the Partnership for Public Service and  Grant Thornton.

The new report, Seize the Data: Using Evidence to Transform How Federal Agencies Do Business, acknowledges that the use of rigorous evaluation and data analysis to inform decision-making is still nascent and not widely adopted in government. But the tactic has taken root in some programs, the researchers say, and those examples point to some recommended practices.

The report urges agencies to use both a “top-down and a bottom-up approach” to build evidence-based organizations, calling on leaders to set expectations, empower staff and develop bureau-level learning agendas. Those opportunities are likely to get greater attention in the wake of recent legislation — the Foundation for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act signed into law by President Trump in January — and the latest White House Federal Data Strategy, released June 4.

A ‘key to our success’ at DOE

Creating a culture for evidence-based decision making starts in part by promoting the benefits, the experts say. The report points to efforts at the Department of Energy, where senior officials realized that some employees were reluctant to report safety issues at DOE facilities for fear of repercussions. The key was to get employees to see such reports as important data, said Josh Silverman, who oversees reporting activities within DOE’s Office of Environment, Health, Safety and Security.

“We’ve gotten people more interested in reporting issues at their sites so we can avoid incidents in the future. They’re doing it for the benefit of others who might learn from it and they’re doing it without fear that they will be judged harshly,” he said. “Reporting and analyzing thousands of minor events is key to our success in preventing the major incidents from occurring.”

The office publishes short reports illustrating how safety issues occurred, such as the improper handling of hazardous material.  “We’ve focused on becoming more of a learning organization,” Silverman said.

Outside help at USDA

The Partnership for Public Service report also emphasizes the need to strengthen internal capacity and external research-practitioner partnerships to build up data-gathering and evaluation skills.

Mark Denbaly, deputy director for Food Economics Data at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service made that clearer during a Partnership for Public Service forum held in conjunction with the report’s release.

Trying to leverage data to make better decisions at USDA is a daunting task, given the scale of some of its programs, Denbaly said. He cited a USDA nutrition program for women, infants and children (WIC) that provides assistance through 60,000 store operators across the country and involves more than a million products.

The need for deeper data analytics expertise led USDA to partner with New York University’s Administrative Data Research Facility (ADRF) to develop an intensive one-week training program for USDA and other federal government staff, set to begin this October.

“The training is going to teach them to use the tools to help them answer really useful questions at the local level, such as, ’How much does a WIC household spend on food and what percent of that is spent on WIC-related food products?’ Or ‘What is the shopping pattern of households on WIC compared to households which qualify for WIC but decide not to participate?’” he explained.

The program is on a fixed budget, he said, “so the better you manage the program, the more people who can benefit from that.”

‘Connectivity is really important’

Other recommendations in the report called for driving longer-term and shorter-term learning — relying on continual feedback, rapid experimentation and customer feedback — and to use existing data as well as new data to generate added insights.

“Leaders at all levels are interested in … how you connect spending and cost information with the benefits, “ said Amy Edwards, deputy assistant secretary at the Treasury Department for Accounting Policy and Financial Transparency, during the forum. But she added, more needs to be done to ”utilize the administrative data we have at Treasury and combine it with other data” to get the value out of it. That connectivity is really important.”

Other panelists at the forum also stressed the importance of transparency and asking the right questions.

“It’s really important to bring transparency to the process as well as the products,” said Christina Yancey, the Department of Labor’s acting chief evaluation officer. She’s recommends posting evaluation plans online, for instance, and also posting what active studies are underway.

She also recommends starting with people “who are interested and invested in working with you,” who can become champions for evidence-based decision making. “Don’t try to convert those that are resistant because you’ll just waste way too much time.”

Former Office of Management and Budget associate director Robert Shea, now principal for Grant Thornton Public Sector, summed up the essence of the report, saying: “The important thing is having the information available in its most rigorous form at the point at which it can have the biggest impact on a policy.”

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Visvanathan sees all sides of government: from defense and intelligence to public safety and policing, judiciary and social services, and the CIOs responsible for national infrastructures, smarter cities and education. While his background is in technology and engineering, his passion since joining IBM 16 years ago, he says, has been challenging the status quo and leveraging innovation and modern technologies to fundamentally transform industries.

Sreeram Visvanathan, in his Dubai office, oversees IBM’s government business in more than 160 countries. (FedScoop)

FedScoop met with Visvanathan in his offices in Dubai in late December to discuss how he sees AI unfolding in governments across the globe — and why he believes government CIOs are uniquely positioned to drive the AI debate within their organizations.

Editor’s note: The transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

FedScoop: You’ve commented that a lot of government leaders you meet around the world aren’t prepared for how quickly AI is coming and that many may not be asking the right questions. What are you observing? And how might government leaders get better prepared?

Sreeram Visvanathan: If I look at the last 12 months, the dialogue and debate are no longer if, it’s when, and that’s changed around the world. I notice it in any discussion I have. But many people are still cautious: experimenting, doing proof concepts, maybe playing around with some chatbots, or automation around a stand-alone part of a process rather than an end-to-end process.

If you look at other industries, they are looking at AI and saying, “How can I reimagine the entire process?” That’s because you have a profit and loss account that you’re trying to manage and…you’ve got competition from everywhere.

In the government sector, people are still debating should we, should we not? Do we need to cleanse the data first? What is the single version of the truth that I can have before I can teach a machine how to understand the data? The thinking is sequential at the moment. Once the first movers start making some leaps, though, and the benefits become obvious, then others are going to take leaps.

We see several forcing functions around the world that are going to make this not an option anymore. The first is an aging workforce. If you look at the government workforce in many of the countries, especially in Europe, it’s aging rapidly with, in the next five years, 20-to-30 percent retiring. Take Germany, I think it’s closer to 40 percent. Imagine the impact, the loss of policy-making capabilities, the loss of customer service and citizen service that you lose. How do you replace that?

Second, the technology is just so much more advanced, so much more proven and less expensive. Barriers of entry and to experimentation are coming down all the time. Yet the one thing I hear from [government] CIOs is, “My budgets are getting cut. I can’t find enough people. I’ve got systems that I’ve patched for the last 30 years that I’m afraid to touch because nobody knows how the hell it works, but it actually works. Right?”

I think we as an industry can start addressing some of those workflows…by sharing examples. Intelligence and public safety are wonderful areas [using] AI for video analytics, structured and unstructured data, and patterns, drawing from volumes of data that a human being can never go through and where there’s a compelling need to stop bad things from happening. They’ve embraced it. But in civilian government, it is still slow. Our view is AI is going to take off. The first movers are going to take some risks, but they’re going to see benefits.

FS: You’ve said policy makers may not be engaged in the right debate about AI. How might you reframe the discussion?

SV: I think that the debate that needs to be had is, “Is AI really going to kill jobs? Or is it going to be more replacement of one set of jobs with another set of jobs?” The jury is out on this. You get two different views. One says, for every job that you lose, you’re going to replace with a new type of job and a new set of skills. So, all we need to do is train people on a new set of skills. The other school of thought says, there’ll be a big part of services-related jobs that a machine can learn.

If you look at many of our mature markets, over the last 30 years they’ve gone away from manufacturing and design to becoming much more service oriented. Those are exactly the jobs that can get replaced or significantly reduced by machines. So, what do people do? What do universities need to teach them? How will they work?

Then you add another dimension to this: Most of our children and grandchildren will live beyond a hundred. So, they’re going to have multiple careers and need to become lifelong learners. But what are they going to learn that makes them more valuable than a machine? These are existential issues that need healthy debate and we don’t see enough debate anywhere in the world. It is happening in pockets but not at the scale that needs to happen.

FS: Which governments do you see emerging as early AI adopters and what are the consequences if you’re a late adopter?

SV: I don’t think there’s an easy answer to the consequences, but let me tell you what I’m observing. As I travel around, AI provides a great leap-frogging mechanism. Take Dubai as an example. It has mandated that all agencies use blockchain technology. They are looking at end-to-end processes. No other government around the world has done that.

In Abu Dhabi, for instance, they’ve defined some 80-plus customer journeys, for everything a new expatriate needs coming to live in Abu Dhabi. They need a work permit, flights to come into Abu Dhabi, a place to live, a car, schools for their children and so on.  All those services are being integrated into one package of services no matter what the backing agency is.

Now, that’s a very interesting way of looking at [government services] because you’re breaking through the cycles of “this is my turf, this is my data, this is my customer.” Our view is governments are going to compete for resources more and more. You see it now the way Amazon reversed [its search for new headquarters cities], asking, “Who wants my business?” That’s going to happen between countries and between states in countries. Does that mean that Dubai or Abu Dhabi is going to compete with the U.S.?  Of course not. But they’re going to be more competitive than neighboring countries to attract investment.

In the U.S., you have states that are moving faster than others. Take Delaware. We just did a blockchain piece of work that allows you to get a business license much faster. Ease of doing business is going to be one of the advantages. The point I’m trying to make is, smarter markets or states that put some distance between them and others in terms of breaking down the silos between agencies are going to get a distinct advantage.

The European Union Council discussion around the role of AI is very interesting because they have a critical mass in terms of countries, in terms of workforce, in terms of governance. It’s the most robust thinking that we have seen. The issue that I have with this is that, it [offers more as] a leadership paper but not practical implementation for day-to-day operations.

For me, the debate needs to be led by CIOs with the CEOs of agencies to say, what is the implication, what could be the benefits and how can we serve our constituents better through the use of AI?

FS: How would you suggest CIOs advance the discussion?

SV: I think the CIOs [need to go] on the offensive and say, “Here is the potential of AI. If I understand the business of our agency, what data we have, what data we could use, and here are the implications, the possibilities, and engage in a debate with the business side of the agency,” I think CIOs will, one, get buy-in, but second, get more budget because it will be seen as transformational. The CEO has to buy into it, but it has to be a partnership, and I think the CIOs have a wonderful chance to lead this debate.

FS: What other trends are you seeing around the world that U.S. CIOs should keep their eye on?

SV: There are a few things that I’m observing: One is a focus on design and experience. A lot of the time we have spent as IT professionals has been on the engineering side of things, not on the experience side of things. The experience side of things is what drives production and endorsement.

I’ll give you an example. One of my clients disperses all [of their country’s] social services benefits and retirement pensions, worth billions of [dollars]. The previous mentality was: I’m the provider, you’re the recipient, you need to claim from me. Now they’ve turned that into a design where they’re in the service of the person who needs the service.

They have saved literally billions of [dollars] in the way that they’ve orchestrated the consumption of the service…where the validation happens behind the scenes. AI tools, for instance, see as you’re filling in the application if you claim to be living in a separate house, but social media shows that you’re living with your parents. The AI can come back and say, are you sure this is your address because we found this other address? The fraud that happens with social services currently quickly drops. So, it’s design and workflow being thought through both from a customer service angle but also to address your core issues, which is what the CIOs need to do.

A second thing is talent and employee experience. We all know it’s a brutal war for talent and it’s going to get worse, especially talent that understands AI and cloud. And in the AI industry, you can’t exactly outsource everything to a third country, so you’ve got to build talent locally. Yes, people who have this notion of service to their country are going to come and join you, but you still have to create a work environment and learning environment that is conducive to attracting talent.

I see the best CIOs thinking about employee experience, not just about their depth of technology. How do you create the right workspace, the right collaboration alignment? I see CIOs rotating people in and out of laboratories that they create, where new tech is tested. That gets a lot of people energized and excited. Some of the best CIOs actually take some of the older members of their team who are not up to date with the latest technology, mix them up with young upcoming tech geeks, put them into a lab and then take them back into their day-to-day business and suddenly you start seeing a pattern change in how they think and implement solutions and engage in business.

Lastly, I’ve seen the best CIOs try and frame the “exam question” differently — they spend a lot more effort not on the downstream government work but on the upstream arguments about what the problem is they’re trying to fix. And that changes the downstream outcomes. So those are the things I would say to CIOs.

Read:  New survey shows federal agencies are already achieving demonstrable value in AI

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A new United Nations report shows just how much other nations around the globe have risen up and surpassed the United States in delivering on that vision.

Denmark, Australia, Republic of Korea, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northland Ireland, Sweden, Finland, Singapore, New Zealand, France and Japan all rank higher than the U.S. in their overall use of information and communications technologies to deliver public services, according to the latest global assessment of 193 U.N. member states.

The bienniel survey, which dates back to 2001, lays out a revealing snapshot of how the world’s leading and developing economies are harnessing mobile and cloud technology for public service.

“The 2018 survey highlights a persistent positive global trend towards higher levels of e-government development,” said Vincenzo Aquaro, chief of digital government for the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, which released the report July 19. The number of countries with “high” to “very high” e-government development indexes surged from 94 in 2016 to 111 in the latest survey, according to Aquaro.

But the 300-page report also delves for the first time into some of emerging challenges governments now face with advancements in technology.

Among them is the specter of technology’s darker side on societies — and the need for policy makers to grapple with concerns over cybersecurity, the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs, and a growing digital divide between those who can access information electronically and those who can’t.

“There is a strong concern about the risk of losing jobs because of the capacity of machines to provide new services and functions,” Aquaro said in an interview with FedScoop. “The ethical issues need to be discussed, and somehow defined before it’s too late,” he said. The rapid rate of technology change, and the impact large, commercial technology firms are having on societies, are outpacing the ability of policy makers to keep up, he said. “This is absolutely new,” relative to the U.N.’s prior surveys.

The gradual decline of the U.S.’s global ranking as a beacon for e-government development in part reflects what the U.N. measures and its agenda to address the needs of many nations. The U.N. survey captures and then indexes three dimensions that drive digital government in 193 nations: the scope and quality of online government services; the extent of wireless, internet and telecommunications access; and measures of adult literacy and human capital.

The U.S. ranked 2nd globally in online services, 20th in telecommunications infrastructure and 15th in the U.N.’s human capital rankings, according to FedScoop’s analysis.

Notably, the U.S.’s ranking for online services jumped from 12th in 2016, to just shy of the top spot in 2018, suggesting government agencies have made it significantly easier to apply and pay for a widening range of services online.

That helped the U.S.’s overall rankings — moving it up one position to 11th place this year, compared to the last report. But as recently as 2012, the U.S. ranked 5th globally.

“The report is a powerful tool, but it needs to be contextualized at the country level in order to make a strong analysis of the reasons behind the behaviors,” Aquaro said. The U.S.’s vast size and complexity presents entirely different challenges for deploying e-government services than for smaller countries.

That said, European countries continue leading e-government development globally, Aquaro said, even as many other nations, including the U.S., Australia, and Republic of Korea as well as developing countries, continue to make steady advances.

One reason behind Europe’s accelerating progress traces back to government initiatives begun more than a decade ago in the United Kingdom, and subsequently in Brussels, said Julia Glidden, general manager, IBM Global Government Industry.

“EU countries have been taking advantages from the collaborative and cross-national approach facilitated by the European Commission in implementing, at a national level, the [E.U.’s] single digital market strategy, its goals and targets,” said Glidden. Many of those nations also did more to fund e-government development, she said.

Glidden pointed to the work of U.S. Digital Service and 18-F, federal teams which help agencies jump start online service development, as examples of where the U.S. continues to innovate. But those efforts are hard to scale without the kind of coordinated polices and funding that have sustained continued progress in Europe.

Among other facets of the report is a full chapter devoted to the role of technology in the hands of government as a tool for better anticipating and responding to natural disasters and the need for governments to establish “e-resilience” disciplines.

“The U.N.’s focus on the use of technology, like geospatial, cloud, mobile, AI to help governments anticipate, plan and respond to emergency management — with an eye toward predictive response — is really path-breaking and something governments really need to pay attention to,” Glidden said.

Despite the many challenges, the U.N. survey also makes clear how far many countries have come in developing e-government solutions. When the U.N. conducted its first e-government survey in 2003, just 45 countries were able to provide public services online through a one-stop platform, and only 33 countries could facilitate online transactions.

This year, according to Aquaro, all 193 member states have national portals and backend systems to automate core administrative tasks and 140 provide at least one transactional service online.

In addition to the full report, which includes more than 50 case studies on how various nations tackled their e-government challenges, the U.N. has made all of its survey data, along with interactive maps and related country data, available online here.

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