A Day in the Life of

NITECH ››› ADOPTING AN INNOVATIVE CULTURE

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF… MIKLOS KALI-KISS

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Recent recipient of the ‘Outstanding Individual Performance’ award, for his work on the COVID-19 and NATO Command Structure Adaptation Task Forces, Miklos Kali-Kiss tells Zainab Hashiru how he ended up working for the NCI Agency, what his job entails and the importance of his role

Like many organizations in 2020, the NCI Agency was faced with managing the COVID-19 pandemic and its organizational response to the crisis. In line with NATO Command Structure guidelines, the Agency got to work establishing its COVID-19 Crisis Management process and task force. Miklos Kali-Kiss, or Miki, a Hungarian national who has worked for the NCI Agency since 2017, was part of setting up this process.

“As the only other member of the Crisis Management and Business Continuity team with me in our first year, Miki played a crucial role in developing the team identity and the processes on which to base the Agency’s crisis management concept and business continuity practices,” says Peter Chapman, Head of Crisis Management and Business Continuity

As the son of two diplomats, his unique upbringing gave him the opportunity to learn how to adapt quickly to new environments and how to effectively make connections easily – skills he currently employs in his role as the Agency’s Crisis Management and Business Continuity Coordinator.

While completing his master’s in political science with a focus on International Organizations at Leiden University, Miki joined the Agency as an intern in the then Chief Strategy Office, which combined Communications and Stakeholder Engagements. His various roles since then have involved liaising with NATO and the Member States to identify opportunities for the Agency to evolve and presenting these opportunities to the Executive Office.

Q

What does your current work entail?

It varies on a day-to-day basis but the Crisis

A Management and Business Continuity (CMBC) office is managing several working groups that coordinate work across the Agency, reaching from the Executive Office to the other Business Areas, CIS Support Units (CSUs) and other NCI Agency organizational elements and NATO Headquarters. I work with them and provide a coordinating function with whoever is leading those groups. I provide support, write readouts from the meetings, make sure the agendas are coordinated and have the appropriate working-level discussions before heading into those meetings. In some respects, it’s administrative support but it is also much more than that.

Our office also deals with assessments of policy documents and forward planning. For example, I still do some work on the NATO Command Structure Adaptation (NCS Adaptation) and the subsequent work strands that came out of it such as the NATO Warfighting Capstone Concept and the Concept of Deterrence and Defence in the Euro-Atlantic Area. The latter is a whole body of work that encompasses all the current adaptation that’s happening around NATO. Our role is to assess all of those for their impacts on the Agency. So, we look at how that impacts the Agency’s support requirements, our decision-making structures and the processes that need to be in place to support the full NATO Agenda.

Q You were recently awarded a Merit award for ‘Outstanding Individual Performance’ on the recommendation of the Head of CMBC. Can you tell us more?

A Yes, I was! It’s great to be awarded and I’m thrilled about the recognition, but all of this is made possible because I’ve been able to work with really exceptional teams and individuals. Being able to perform and be recognized for this award also relies on the connections that have been built and good working relationships that we’ve established with so many people across the Agency. To that end, I think being able to advance business continuity and crisis management in this organization is not the result of a single entity or a single office. It’s the result of a collaborative effort at all levels and I think that’s important to recognize.

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Miki originally joined the NCI Agency as an intern before becoming its Crisis Management and Business Continuity Coordinator (PHOTO: NCI Agency)

Q

Which of the projects you’ve worked contributed to you getting this award?

A As part of my Stakeholder Engagement duties, I was assigned the portfolio of the NCS Adaptation work, which is a broader adaptation work around the command structure in NATO and how the Agency is meant to support that. As part of this, we were tasked with developing the Agency’s Crisis Management Concept of Operations, which initially focused on elements of CIS support but later became a Crisis Management Concepts of Operations in terms of our overall processes as an Agency. In the meantime, COVID-19 hit and I was tasked alongside the Executive Officer of the Chief of Staff to start up the Agency’s Crisis Management process. That meant establishing the COVID-19 Crisis Coordination Group, which became the working-level coordination group for handling the practical elements of the pandemic. Our role focused on staff health and safety including how to manage the health of staff, when to send people home, how to deal with vaccination information and how to deal with policies across the different locations to make sure that everybody is kept safe. We also established the COVID-19 Crisis Management Task Force which was the executivelevel decision-making body.

Q

Why is your work important to the Agency?

A

This is a role that combines both the outward facing interactions, and understanding of what is going on in the wider NATO structure. We translate that into the tangible actions and requirements that need to happen within the Agency in order for us to support the larger work that’s happening outside the Agency. Our office doesn’t necessarily need to get into the nittygritty about how something is done. We rely on subject matter experts for that, which is why we have specific task forces and coordination groups to enable this type of work. Providing a coordinating function and a management/oversight function is important, but that of course doesn’t take away from the work that is being done by the subject matter and technical experts at the operational and technical level.

Q

How does your work, and the work of your team, support the Agency’s strategic goals?

A I think our office is actually one of the first instances of the Agency starting to work in a different way. This office was established as a result of the ongoing changes happening in NATO, which is why it has this hybrid role where it looks both outwards and inwards to translate strategic concepts and strategic directions from NATO Command and HQ into tangible actions within the Agency. My role – and the role of our office – is to ensure that over the next couple years much of the work we currently do will become business as usual in the Business Areas.

If we do our work well over the next couple years, all of these processes that we’ve established, the documents we have written, the business continuity plans and the crisis management procedures should all be integrated into the day-to-day business of each organizational element. When we do business intake for example, we should automatically be looking at business continuity. When we look at operational support planning, we should immediately be looking to integrate resiliency and alternate contingency measures to ensure continuity of services if our primary solutions fail. I see the longer-term mission of our office transforming over the next couple of years as these considerations become increasingly ingrained in the way the Agency does business. This would mean focusing on broader, strategic-level issues that affect how the Agency supports crisis management NATO-wide, internally, and how continuity of services and core business functions can be ensured. All this would depend on the strategic direction of the Alliance, and the development of the Agency as a whole in the medium to long term.