Former Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) Suzette Kent issued a call today for the Federal government to focus on enterprise-wide systems as the “North Star” for guiding future improvements to government workforce management technologies and service improvements.
Speaking at the FedScoop Federal Forum sponsored by Workday in Washington, D.C., Kent said it “seems like we’ve been working forever” to engineer broad improvements in Federal IT capabilities. She said it’s past time for the government to seriously pursue an enterprise approach to IT and service offerings for workforce management, versus approaches that are siloed in individual agencies.
“Here’s the question,” she said during a panel moderated by Workday Managing Director of Federal Industry Matthew Cornelius, “When we have … the same requirements, and we have an employee workforce that needs to think as an enterprise, why do we keep doing everything individually and in silos?”
In the context of Federal IT used for workforce management and service delivery, she said, “I think we have made some strides” toward improvements.
But, she added, “I think we had some fallacies of how we approached it before, and that we tried to justify things down at the detail level of every single agency and every single environment, instead of thinking like an enterprise.”
“The North Star is the enterprise,” Kent declared. “Thinking about it, how do we do it holistically,” she asked.
“That’s how we bring efficiency,” she said, adding that specific to workforce management, “How do you have different components thinking about – don’t think about jobs, think about skills combinations and how to make that more transparent and flexible.”
“Because as we continue forward, we have to continue to upscale and refresh … the workforce,” she said.
“And what a great concept – if we understood the skills that were needed to do a thing and move across the government and present those opportunities to individuals,” she continued.
The North Star in that effort involves the continued pursuit of a “modern approach to skills,” Kent said, adding, “The way that we do that is through shared capabilities across all agencies, and common investments, and not letting everybody chart their own course.”
