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Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility Driving Progress Beyond Policies
Diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) are perennially important topics in the government that President Biden’s June executive order has elevated. Many state and local governments were leading the charge to equitably serve diverse communities, and the pandemic has amplified the need to evolve those efforts with urgency and intention. We’re spotlighting approaches and mindsets toward DEIA that can elevate this critical work happening nationwide.
King County, Washington, has a process and tool to “identify, evaluate, and communicate the potential impact — both positive and negative — of a policy or program on equity.”
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Chief Information Officer Tanya Hannah and her team use the county’s Equity Impact Review (EIR) Tool when evaluating all IT projects, regardless of size. A valuable lesson that Hannah has learned from conducting EIRs is that what’s perceived as modern and intuitive internally might not be viewed that way by the very people that tech solutions are meant to help.
For example, the county’s process to modernize its property tax system includes a public-facing component online that allows seniors to see if they qualify for certain tax exemptions. As part of the EIR, Hannah’s team ran usability tests. They found that users generally wanted to know the qualifications upfront, rather than having to enter personal information to verify if they qualified.
The technology didn’t impress users, so the county had to redesign it, she said. They wanted an experience they found easy to use and understand. Hannah shared questions to ask as you weigh equity across projects:
MEASURE EQUITY ACROSS PROJECTS
→ How do people connect with your organization?
→ Who is not connecting with your organization but should be?
→ What’s available for your user base to access, and are they using those resources?
→ Are you providing the best delivery methods to reach your users, particularly underserved individuals and communities?
EMBED EQUITY IN DIGITAL SERVICES
Earlier this year, GSA announced the expansion of its Login.gov solution to state and local governments to much fanfare from the government tech community.
This is a big deal because governments at all levels grapple with verifying that people are who they say they are to receive a government benefit. Login.gov is “a single sign-on solution for government websites that will enable citizens to access public services across agencies with the same username and password.” This development overlaps with many of this guide’s innovation categories, including digital services, CX and cybersecurity. But we’re highlighting it in this category because Login.gov secured a $187 million boost through the federal Technology Modernization Fund to primarily address issues of equity. More than 30 million people and businesses use Login.gov to access more than 200 services spanning 27 federal agencies.
“One of the primary goals of these funds is to provide accessible and equitable capabilities that can be used by underserved and vulnerable populations that traditionally have experienced barriers to online or digital services,” according to the TMF website.
PLAN,PRACTICE, ITERATE
The Homeland Security Department (DHS) is building momentum on its newly released Inclusive Diversity Strategic Plan (IDSP) that came out late last year.
“Notice I call it inclusive diversity,” said Sharon Wong, DHS’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer and Executive Director for Strategic Recruitment, Diversity and Inclusion.
When people think of D and I, people think of diversity or inclusion. “We decided to flip that because it’s about how do you include the
diversity that you have,” Wong said. The plan is
about elevating the human experience.
“A best practice was putting out the IDSP and our educational curriculum. Nearly 400 of our executives have participated in our inclusive diversity leadership seminars,” Wong said. The department is also building on the success of its Inclusive Diversity Dialogue Programs, cohort-based groups of about 15 to 20 employees who come together every other week to talk about issues in the workplace, particularly around inclusive diversity.
“One week it might be around the values of the organization or ethnicity and race,” Wong said. “We have such high demand that we always have a waitlist.” Goal #1: Unleashing the power of the shared human spirit. This is about empowerment at the individual level and how each person’s potential to be at their maximum best is unlocked.
Goal #2: Expanding opportunities to grow and serve the nation together. This is about ensuring that DHS is reaching all segments of society; that no one is left behind during outreach and recruitment; and that everybody has the opportunity to grow and develop, feel that they belong, and use their individual experiences to inform the workplace. Goal #3: The third goal is leading with intention to make a difference. This speaks to each of us, not just leadership by rank and title. Everybody can be a leader. You can lead from where you are.
HOW AGENCIES CAN TAP INTO AN ECOSYSTEM OF INNOVATION
Innovation, by necessity, is a team sport.
The challenges that government agencies are trying to solve cannot be addressed by the ingenuity of one solution or one vendor. Instead, agencies need to think in terms of an ecosystem of innovation, allowing market forces to generate, refine and build on the insights and ideas of individual innovators.
That is the approach the open-source community takes, said Michael Epley, Chief Architect and Security Strategist for the Public Sector at Red Hat.
"The competition of ideas in the open-source marketplace spurs hundreds of innovations and lots of different projects throughout that
ecosystem," Epley said. "It’s only
when an idea reaches critical mass, or fills a specific need or niche, that we see it take off."
Innovation in Action
Consider Kubernetes, an open source system for deploying and managing containerized applications, which are designed to be ported easily from one type of platform (e.g., an on-premises server) to another (e.g., a public cloud).
Google originally developed Kubernetes for its own use but later shared its source code with the open source community through the creation of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, enabling other vendors to extend its capabilities to address various requirements.
Red Hat, for example, has developed a Kubernetes platform tailored to the needs of organizations doing DevSecOps, an approach to software development in which developers work closely with the security and operations teams to build solutions. "This is really what Red Hat does," said Epley. "It has special expertise in watching that open source marketplace of ideas and figuring out how all these pieces fit together."
Innovation in Demand
Epley noted three areas in which government should look to industry to spur innovation:
→ The adoption of cloud and cloud-based solutions, with a focus on meeting government requirements for security and compliance. In particular, industry will be key to supporting efforts to modernize
FedRAMP, as required by the president’s May 2021 cyber executive order.
→ The development of edge solutions, which extend the IT infrastructure to users or systems in remote offices or in the field. The use of compute and storage resources must be supplemented with remote or automated management capabilities.
→ The security of the software supply chain, as required by the executive order. This is where it’s important to distinguish between traditional open source software and enterprise versions, which provide tools to help agencies identify and fix vulnerabilities, enforce security policies, and validate a system’s security profile.
Collaborating on Innovation
But government agencies are an essential part of the innovation ecosystem, Epley said.
“There’s an ecosystem around not just the people who create the software but also the users,” he said. Government agencies “are the experts when it comes to defining what problems they have and the requirements that the community needs to satisfy.”
Government developers also have the opportunity to contribute their own innovations in the open source market, Epley said.
SAY GOODBYE TO RISK AND HELLO TO VALUE
Innovations in document review technology are creating new opportunities for legal leaders and legal teams to create value for their organizations. Usable not only during e-discovery, but also in use cases in privacy regulatory compliance, internal investigations, and more, document review technology are changing the calculations CLOs and GCs must make when evaluating and implementing legal technology. Single-instance storage architecture, especially when embedded in a holistic technology platform, helps organizations secure data against the constantly evolving cyberthreat landscape, deliver real cost savings, and achieve new levels of efficiency in document review.
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HOW AGENCIES CAN INSOURCE THEIR WAY TO INNOVATION
An interview with Clay Cocalis, Chief Revenue Officer, Exterro
Combing through electronic files in response to a public records request or investigation is grueling work. It’s the type of complex task that can involve nuanced systems and has long been ripe for outsourcing in government.
But the layers of outsourcing also come with multiple workflows as agencies coordinate with outside counsel and different service providers. “Anytime you have multiple workflows, that is a recipe for something that could potentially go wrong,” said Clay Cocalis, Chief Revenue Officer at Exterro, an e-discovery and legal software platform provider.
But the evolution of more intuitive and cloud-based options is putting the power back in agencies' hands, enabling those with limited staff and modest budgets to set workflow standards and other parameters on their terms.
The state of California, the city of Denver and GSA are among the government entities doing so. And they’re using Exterro’s platform to meet unique and complex e-discovery and information governance requirements.
“The Exterro platform allows the government to do more self-service than they had been able to in the
past,” Cocalis said. “Historically,
they had to outsource everything. Now, they can pick and choose. It gives them 100% control over how much they want to do.”
As agencies embrace new ways of using technology to manage data across litigation, compliance and privacy obligations, Cocalis offered these best practices to keep in mind:
Reduce risks
Let’s say an agency has a disagreement with one of its technology vendors over the level of service being provided and decides to do business elsewhere. Depending on how much work was outsourced, there’s likely a lot of data that must be gathered and transferred to another vendor.
These types of massive transitions will likely alter workflows and expose the agency to some level of risk — at a time when no one is immune to cyberattacks.
But if an agency has its own platform, permissions can be granted and revoked more seamlessly while also ensuring that workflows remain intact, Cocalis said.
Rethink workflows
Cocalis advised agencies to work with attorneys and other stakeholders to answer this question: If we started from scratch, what would we want our workflow to look like? Anyone doing business with the government would have to comply.
“When it comes to things like litigation, you can’t control the litigation cycles, but you can control the efficiencies and workflows and ensure they are predictable,” he said, noting that Exterro’s secure cloud platform works on a consumption-based model rather than agencies agreeing to a fixed fee and potentially overpaying.
“The world is going through a shift when it comes to legal data, and we want government agencies to be a part of that transformation,” Cocalis said. “We want to make sure that they have every advantage that the corporations they are working with have as well.”
