Las Vegas 2019

The Push/Pull of Partnership - An Honest Conversation Between IT and The Business

This talk is a discussion exploring how mistakes by IT helped facilitate an important shift in the narrative of IT vs Business.


Mr. David Blair joined the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Office of Information Technology (OIT) as the Chief of Transformation in January 2017. In this capacity he is responsible for managing execution of the USCIS Transformation Program, which a digital modernization program that is moving USCIS from legacy paper-based business operations to an integrated electronic environment offering end-to-end digital processing services. Through Transformation, Mr. Blair is optimizing the development and delivery of technology solutions through a "platform of services" model that is centered on the creation of tangible business value, fulfillment of operational needs, and achievement of enterprise efficiencies.


Before joining the OIT team, Mr. Blair served as the Chief of the Capability Delivery Division (CDD) within the USCIS Office of Transformation Coordination (OTC). In this role, Mr. Blair was accountable for delivering digital products and services via a web-based solution called the Electronic Immigration System (ELIS), which is a digital platform that offers USCIS employees a seamless user experience with all of the digital products and tools needed to perform highly complex processing and adjudicative tasks.


Prior to joining USCIS in 2012, Mr. Blair served as a Program Manager at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific (SSC Pacific) in San Diego, CA, managing several defense-related projects that provided critical software and systems engineering support to naval information warfare. Mr. Blair also spent over 11 years on active duty as a U.S. Navy SEAL at SEAL Teams Eight, Five, and Three.

Mr. Blair attended San Diego State University where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in International Security and Conflict Resolution, and a Master of Science in Homeland Security.


Jim Lloyd currently serves as Branch Chief of the Innovation Branch, Division 4, Field Operations Directorate (FOD), US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Department of Homeland Security. In this position, he is responsible for a cadre of Business Advisors and Subject Mater Experts who bring innovative ideas into operational reality through collaborative and creative solutions. Prior to being Branch Chief, he had been a valuable member of the Innovation Branch since 2016, where he was responsible for gathering business requirements, continuous process development, and improving the transformative USCIS initiative named ELIS (Electronic Immigration System).


Jim Lloyd started his career with INS in 1998 as a "District Adjudications Officer" in the Santa Ana Field Office. He moved to the Los Angeles Field Office in 2003 to take a supervisor position and then moved into the Special Assistant role for the Field Office Director in 2008. In 2010 Jim became the West Coast Chief of Operations for the Verification Division and managed the SAVE and E-Verify programs in 5 locations (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, Lincoln). In 2013 he returned to the Adjudications ranks by taking the Assistant Regional Director position over the Adjudications program in the Western Region.

DB

David Blair

OIT Transformation Delivery Chief, USCIS

JL

Jim Lloyd

Branch Chief of the Innovation Branch, USCIS

MS

Melinda Solomon

Agile Training, USCIS

Transcript

00:00:02

As you may know, our first DevOps enterprise summit was in San Francisco in 2014. It was intended to be a conference, not for the unicorns. You know, the Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Googles, and Microsofts. It was meant to be a with, for horses by horses, no unicorns allowed. And this was despite the fact that so many of our friends were at the unicorns. There were many surprises, but without a doubt, the biggest surprise to me was which session was the most talked about. And it was the session from Mark Schwartz who was then the CIO of the U S citizenship and immigration services. And I think it's because we all thought we knew what world-class bureaucracies looked like. But then mark showed us how little we knew. And he described the sometimes bewildering processes that are necessitated by being a part of a massive federal agency, responsible for such an important mission.

00:00:51

I'm so honored that we have a team from USC presenting this year describing the amazing work they're doing, showing that the mission that Mark Schwartz helped start way back then still lives on David Blair is the USC AIS delivery. Chief of OIT. James Lloyd is branch chief of the innovation branch. Melinda Solomon is part of the agile training organization. And on a personal note, I'm so grateful for the important work that these people do. My parents were immigrants from South Korea, my wife and boss Marguerite, her parents were refugees from Vietnam and neither of us would be here without the work of this incredible agency and their dedicated public servants. So please welcome the team from USC S

00:01:35

Us citizenship and immigration services is the agency that administers our nation's lawful immigration system. Our mission is to safeguard the integrity of this system by efficiently and fairly adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting Americans securing the Homeland and honoring our values as part of the department of Homeland security, we are 19,000 government employees and contractors working at more than 200 offices. We ensure America meets its international humanitarian obligations by screening refugees and applicants for asylum. Our officers carefully vet those who apply to come to the United States to live and work by confirming. They meet all eligibility requirements as required by law. On an average day, we adjudicate more than 26,000 requests for various immigration benefits. We ensure the employment eligibility of more than 80,000 new hires in the United States through the E-Verify system. And we welcome nearly 2000 new citizens at naturalization ceremonies. In fiscal year 2018, we had a $4.5 billion budget supported almost entirely 97% by fees. In that year alone, we naturalized 757,000 new American citizens accepted more than 600,000 new lawful permanent residents and processed 2.1 million applications from aliens seeking to work legally in the United every day, we work closely with our DHS and inter-agency partners on behalf of the American people to ensure the safety and security of our immigration system while allowing immigrants whose requests are granted to enjoy the privileges and advantages of lawful presence in the United States.

00:03:30

So a welcome to the push poll, a partnership. This is intended to be an honest conversation between it and the business. We're here from citizenship and immigration services.

00:03:41

I am I'm David Blair. I run the agency's digital transformation program. I'm also the, uh, the chief of the, uh, transformation delivery division within the office of information technology.

00:03:51

And I'm Jim Lloyd, I'm the branch chief of the innovation branch within the field operations directorate. So I'm one of David's customers on the business side

00:04:01

And I'm Melinda Solomon. And I run the agile training program at citizenship and immigration as a contractor. And I'm really today just to agile, a USDA storyteller. So as you saw from the video, uh, we run the largest immigration service in the world. And so that requires a lot of work. And sometimes we have some pretty big challenges. One of the biggest challenges that we have is paper. We have a lot of paper rooms in buildings across the country full of paper, and it comes in the form of, uh, forums that people fill out to request benefits and then a whole bunch of supporting documentation to justify their request for that benefit.

00:04:46

Yeah. I mean, you think about all the files that we receive on a daily daily basis. And if you take each one of those stock them on top of each other, uh, they would reach twice the height of the statue of Liberty. I mean, it's, it's pretty crazy when you look at this, I mean, we were in the 21st century, we witnessed these technical marvels every single day, and we're still dealing with rooms like this. I mean, I always tell folks, I say, you may not find in the file that you're looking for, but you'll find the why we need to modernize. And that's that's for sure.

00:05:11

Yeah. And on the business side of things, it's important for us to communicate to folks outside our agency, that we do view these files as the lives of people, and many times more than just a person, an entire family may be waiting on that one mother or father to get status, to get the job, to get health benefits or whatever. So paper has been an inefficient way of doing business for a long time files get lost paper falls out of files, us CIS as the record keeper, we don't always have the file. Sometimes other agencies are fighting for the file. So it's a paper problem that we're trying to solve in an effort to meet our mission and serve the people we serve better.

00:06:01

So when it came time for us CIS, to start leveraging it, to solve some of these problems, this paper issue was really the logical place for us to embark on a digital modernization.

00:06:16

That's right. I mean, so again, traditionally, uh, heavily paper-based organization, um, we've had individual field offices and, and service centers as they, you know, they try to modernize, they try to kind of streamline where possible. Uh, but, but again, their tools are really go out and purchase the technology, uh, or kind of tweak local SLPs and, uh, and, and policies. And, but that, that kind of thing really, it causes some, some additional problems or you have the different offices operating different, you know, different ways. Uh, uh, really it, it causes problems in terms of sharing information with our DHS partners, uh, simple things like, you know, verifying the identity of an applicant. Uh it's um, you know, it's problems that we shouldn't have in this agency. And that's really the Genesis of the transformation program. I mean, this program is meant to take the agency, uh, go, you know, go beyond these, these paper-based processes, uh, to a, a fully integrated electronic operating environment. And, and the platform that we were building was, uh, the electronic immigration system or Elvis essentially. And, uh, you know, w who are our stakeholders anyway, I mean, we've got, uh, each of the operational director it's, uh, they're, they're all responsible for different lines of business. Um, they've got, uh, folks like immigration officers and records, clerk, and background checks, clerks. And again, each of these are folks that have their very complex jobs, uh, have to, uh, pay attention to policy changes and, you know, building like one system to kind of satisfy every single office. And, uh, and every directory within USC was definitely more challenging than originally anticipated. Right

00:07:53

Then our external interests are large and loud as well. I think a lot of folks think of citizenship and immigration in terms of the immigration or the immigrant population that come to us, but there's usually a U S citizen or a us resident filing for that person. We serve them as well. There are United States corporations bringing people in, uh, skilled labor, the U S farmer bringing people in. We serve the U S military. We have a lot of us citizens applying for international adoptions. All of these people are usually well-represented with attorneys, community-based organizations, they'll go to their congressional, their local congressional point of contact as well. So we have a lot of folks involved in a lot of voices involved in what we do,

00:08:46

And because we're a part of the federal government, we have a lot of oversight entities that we're beholden to as well. Uh, DHS acquisition and investment wants to make sure that we're using our money wisely and the government accountability office and inspector general wants to make sure that we're making ethical choices with the money that we have. And then of course, I mean, it's citizenship and immigration. And so congressional committees are always interested in what we're doing. So getting all of these stakeholders on the same page is pretty challenging. And really the initial goal was really just to get the business and it on the same page. And we hadn't really done it this way before. And it ended up a little bit like an arranged marriage. Everyone had really good intentions, but everyone had a lot of assumptions about what the other really wanted.

00:09:44

Yeah, I'd say that, uh, you know, we started, um, we were, we were very much like your typical kind of government organization. We operated in very strict hierarchies. Uh, we had teams that were operating in silos, a little, you know, little collaboration and, uh, we, you know, operate in this manner causes, uh, causes us to lose time. I mean, we, we, we, um, we had these self-imposed kind of handoffs where we'd have one group that was responsible for kind of, uh, they were responsible only them can engage with the users to elaborate requirements. And then once they were done and had all the requirements that they could possibly think of, and they would kick it over the fence to adept team, and then the dev team when they were done coding, kick it over to yet another like independent, you know, testing evaluation team and, and kind of so on and so forth. And so again, operating in this manner, uh, caused us to, uh, have to de-scope quite a bit, um, and, and become very, very focused on the, on the schedule and not focused on, uh, what was most important, which was really delivering business value and making sure that, uh, uh, business operations was, was functioning well.

00:10:45

Yeah. And from the business perspective, we felt back then everything was scheduled driven. Uh, the business requirements were secondary. Uh, we knew that the, it folks obviously have a schedule, they have deadlines, things like that, but the requirements just seem to come secondary to the schedule and something that, I don't know if it's unique to government, maybe you can relate to this, but we didn't hold the purse. You've heard the phrase of the power of the purse. We didn't go to it and say, Hey, build something and we'll pay you for it. They were building something for us. They were paying themselves for us or what they were building. And so it just kind of added to our feeling of a lack of control, lack of power that we didn't hold the money. We were just getting whatever the kitchen was, cooking your kitchen.

00:11:40

But, you know, we thought that, you know, with, uh, David representing the it community and, and Jim representing the business, that surely we were on the road to success. Uh, we had spent a lot of time planning and strategizing, and we were ready to celebrate when we launched our, uh, initial version of the system, but it didn't really end up that way. Exactly.

00:12:07

Yeah. Again, you know, uh,

00:12:10

He was driving,

00:12:12

Uh, okay. Yeah, send me up. I'm going, gonna keep my mouth shut now. But I certainly what was kind of meant to be a celebrated this, this big celebration, uh, was, was really a spectacular kind of disaster. I mean, um, of course everyone was committed, right? Everyone was, uh, working hard long hours. We focus on the mission. Right. But, but again, you know, commitment wasn't enough. And, um, you know, when we become, so again, so focused on the schedule and not focused on what's, you know, doing the right thing, uh, become the problem, uh, rather than focusing on fixing it or giving you guys solutions,

00:12:48

Something we contributed to this perfect storm on the business side as well, was that for a few years prior to turning everything on, we had been telling our field offices that this great solution is coming. Uh, we're going to solve the paper problems. Everything's going to be digital. It's going to be like the IRS. It's going to be like when you go to the doctor. And when we turned everything on, we did it with our most publicly visible product line, which is naturalization. And it just didn't work certificates. Didn't print people, weren't showing up for appointments because there were scheduling issues. And so we had people maybe flying from one island to Honolulu for an interview or someone driving over Rocky snowfield mountains to get to Anchorage, taking time off, work, running a hotel family with them, all the excitement, building to the family member coming out of the office with their naturalization certificate. And they came out empty handed because system didn't work. And so not only did we fail the people where it's our mission to serve. Another problem we had is we failed our internal users and they were trusting in us to give them something great. Now trust is very low. And our system Ellis really became a four letter word in some of our, our offices.

00:14:18

So,

00:14:18

So here in our story at this point, we're $800 million into this project and the program is in breach. So it makes sense perhaps to take a strategic pause. And I think our business and it stakeholders need to go to maybe the dev ops version of marriage counseling.

00:14:41

Yeah. I mean, the breach was a blessing in disguise and of course, you know, we're government and have these, you know, traditional, uh, hierarchies that exist everywhere. Uh, for example, in management directory, this is where our CXOs reside. And at that time, the program was kind of housed within the program. Offices is of course, Jim, your folks and FOD and others in, in, in, in the business who, so we call the business, uh, you know, they, again, they had their own kind of hierarchies. And so the breach allowed us to really take a step back, um, kind of reorganize into these, these business oriented portfolios. Uh, the portfolios were meant to, to align with each of the operational director. It's just making sure that we were always kind of serving their needs, that we were, that we were working in conjunction with their priorities. And then we assigned, um, these portfolio managers, folks that, you know, previously, uh, really didn't feel like they have the kind of authority to make decisions. Uh, here, you know, they had knowledge, they have the authority, but we put them together again with, with, with folks in the business to make sure that, uh, we are properly aligned and, and we're getting back to, you know, delivering business value and maybe just starting to earn some of that trust that we lost.

00:15:54

Yeah. This reorganization on the it side really partnered my team up with some very specific people and something David did for us that if I were to point to one moment in time where the ship started to make a U-turn and things were looking good, it was these field office visits that we were making. It wasn't, that managers were going out to the field because it was winter and folks wanted to go to LA and San Diego. It was the guys in DC who write the code. David was sending those guys out to the field so that they could see their product in use. They sat in the office with real applicants and real officers and watched real interviews in the live environment. And so not only were those guys getting to see their hard work at use in use, but my field officers and clerks were able to talk to them and give suggestions to them and say, Hey, this would be better if it did this. And the guy would say, well, I wrote the code for that. And he'd make a fix. They'd literally go to lunch while the new code was released into the production environment, come back, hit refresh. And it worked there. Their voice was now feeling heard in a very, very real way from the mail room clerk all the way to the top.

00:17:22

Yeah. I mean, I think that, um, again, another fundamental shift, right? Uh, our folks that again, in the past had been, you know, working to in these kinds of silos and, and these, these artificial handoffs, um, we needed to know that there are real ramifications for, for delivering products in services that are high quality that are meeting the needs of our users. Uh, and so as, as you mentioned, you know, we sent folks out to the, to the field and we went to th to LA to witness, uh, a 4,000 person naturalization ceremony in the staples center. And we saw when folks were, you know, pulled out of this ceremony, uh, you know, they're there, they're there, they're thinking, this is one of the greatest days of their lives. The, they took time off of work. They brought their family members with him, but because of the problems that existed in the system, uh, you know, there's no choice, but to pull these folks out and say, I'm sorry, we're going to have to reschedule you.

00:18:11

I, and, and so again, in our folks, you know, they took that to heart and they, instead of kind of, you know, kind of running back to DC, you know, heads hanging low, they, they actually came back inspired. Um, and they, they shared those stories with, with their team members and, and folks not only within their own team, but also across all teams. And, and, and the result was, was a kind of a cultural change across the organization. We saw, uh, folks be, uh, really being, uh, uh, working at a much higher productivity. Uh, and, and again, there was this motivation that had once been kind of, um, uh, I would say like a fire when you put a fire out. And in the past we operated on this kind of a very cancerous operating model where, so, so turning that around and, and getting folks inspired to do the right thing, uh, was, was definitely a game changer

00:19:01

From the business's perspective. And this isn't something that was written down in any formal plan. This is just a business guy talking to a bunch of it. Folks who know, you know, far more than I do about it. The secret sauce for me was in these field visits after office hours, when my team and David's team or David, and I would have dinner together, uh, talk in the lobby of the hotel. We talked about work, but we also talked about our spouses, our kids, our grandkids. There was something that humanized those guys on the other side of the table, when those personal conversations were taking place and it very quickly ceased to be an us and them sort of situation and became, became a we. And we really felt like one team. I'm not saying David buys me a Christmas present or anything. I mean, I've been waiting for one. He doesn't even hit like on my Facebook posts, but we talk daily, his team, my team, we talk daily and because everything is changing on the fly constantly. I really feel like if there's not that daily constant conversation, someone on his team, you're here, you, you know, uh, there's something wrong. If, if that communication's not there

00:20:35

Now that level of communication and positive relationship and significant trust between it and the business was not something that we could without really investing in aligning our it, uh, practices to be able to leverage tools and pipelines in a modern way.

00:21:00

Yeah, I think, yeah, by 2014 or 15, we'd already migrated to the cloud, but I think that, you know, now that the Jim and I are Facebook besties, uh, you know, we, we, we really needed to kind of elevate our game when we needed to, to bring in the tools and, uh, and practices that were going to kind of raise our, our, our level of maturity. And, and so, uh, you know, we started to, uh, to devote, you know, the basics, the voting capacity to, to working down our technical debt, our quality issues. Um, I mean, I think, uh, you know, about three years ago, uh, we were somewhere around 50% code coverage. And of course we had to work to, to bring this up, you know, well, over 85%, but that became a best practice. Right. Um, you know, we had to improve our pipelines. We had to make sure that we were, you know, uh, bringing testing, automated testing, wherever possible, you know, bringing, uh, performance testing and security testing into the pipeline. Uh, but I think again, another one of the fundamental changes, uh, we needed to get new products, new services out to, to Jim and his folks on a daily basis. And so we needed to do so in a way that was going to minimize, you know, uh, any impact to operations. So we, again, work to, to incorporate these zero downtime, deployments or CDD.

00:22:11

If you look at that second bullet on the business side, uh, you're probably thinking, is this guy going to stop talking about communication in every marriage? There's always one person that wants to talk right. All the time. So that's me. Uh, some of you probably flew, most of you probably flew here. Some of you might've even flown first class cause you're from those cool companies, something that you probably haven't experienced because you're not a government employee. That's the coolest is you get to be part of boarding group nine and you get to sit in the very back by the toilet. And it's awesome, but that's kind of where we were in this development process. The business felt like we were in the back of the plane. We knew where we were headed, but we, you know, we didn't get our Coke and peanuts until everybody else did.

00:23:11

And let us know when the plane lands, what David did for us though, is he really kicked open the cockpit door and brought us right to the front and he didn't have to do that. Um, he didn't have to open his door and show us the instrument panel, but my team now has, they all have JIRA access. We all have access to the Kanban boards, even though we're on the business side and maybe that's how you do business already. But, um, we're in the backlog grooming meetings. We decide what gets brought to the top and prioritize. So bringing us in and giving us access to everything, uh, it's a risk on his end, but for us it just makes everything so transparent. It eliminates risk for us, makes us feel very comfortable. Uh, even when things go wrong, there's no surprises. And so, you know, if you can give your business folks as much transparency as possible, I know it's risky, but I think it pays off.

00:24:14

Yeah. But I was also saying Jim's not our only customer. Right. And so we, we, again, in the days when reliability, uh, uh, wasn't really our friend, uh, we had lots of problems with that system. Uh, we really need to, to, to incorporate or take some other drastic measures in order to get product out the door, into the hands of the business without kind of bringing the, the city down without darkening, all the lights. And so, you know, essentially we, we started to decouple this, this monolithic application into microservices. And, uh, of course that gave us the ability to, to really, um, uh, scale, uh, more elegantly, I mean, solve our reliability issues. Um, uh, I think, uh, really I can deploy one microservice again, I can without disrupting, uh, without disrupting business operations. And I, and I think that, um, uh, once we, once we started to make those architectural and design changes, then, then we started making tweaks and I talked about zero downtime deployments.

00:25:08

Um, but we added a piece that we added, uh, the ability to, to toggle on features. Uh, and, and what this meant was this gave us the, again, we weren't, we didn't have to new development. We didn't have to keep hidden, uh, you know, in, in a different branch. I mean, we, the goal was to get this new functionality into the hands of, of gyms folks in the field so that we can get feedback and iterate on that feedback. And, and, and so what happened was when we started to incorporate these feature toggles, uh, Jim would identify, I have a person over here in Yakima or Phoenix, and, and we're just going to talk a little on for that one person. And so we could, because we had the tools and again, the maturity to do so, uh, and, and once, uh, uh, once he was comfortable, he said, okay, let's, let's open it up to the entire field office. And, or let's, let's, let's continue to move this to, uh, open it up to the, the, the district of the region. And so, again, this, this, uh, the zero downtime deployments, the feature toggles, uh, gave the business a voice in not only that, the timing of, of this rollout, but the scale on which we would roll things out.

00:26:06

Exactly. Right. And, uh, just to emphasize what David already said, I'm not a penguin. And I don't like to jump into ice cold water. I'd like to maybe dip my toe in the pool before I jump in. So for him to give the business a say in how things are released, because he's got a huge team and they're releasing new functionality and updates every day, I need to be able to give my field offices a heads up when something new is coming. And if it's something big, I might even need to train folks to train someone in Yakima or Boise, no big deal. I'll give you a week. But Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Chicago, the big offices, they don't want something new tomorrow. They need time to train. And so the toggles gave the business the opportunity to say when and where things new things were turned on. And again, lower risk, higher comfort level for us in this partnership.

00:27:12

So now that Jim feels like he's being heard, and it, David feels like he can truly be responsive to the needs of the business. We were in a position where we really needed to be able to have a culture where innovative experimentation was safe and something that people strove to do.

00:27:38

Yeah. I would say that when we, we had all the media attention and congressional inquiries and, uh, and we were in breach, uh, we had a lot of negative attention and it felt like a very punitive kind of culture. So, so you're right. I mean, creating that culture where folks could, could experiment and they could fail, uh, and they were safe to do so really resulted in some, some fantastic wins and, uh, things like, uh, what we call streamlined process. And we have a group of individuals, uh, all they want to do is renew a green card. I mean, it's something that we, we know these folks are we've, uh, we've, we've given them their green cards before. Uh, this is a low-risk population. What we did is we, we just use automation to, to kind of take over the, the kind of tedious and menial tasks that we had once had a lot of people spending a lot of time doing.

00:28:21

Uh, and, and, and that freed up the, the kind of the smarter, uh, officers who have the experience to do the complicated adjudicated decisions. And, and the result was fantastic. I mean, uh, we saw, uh, we had a backlog of like half a million, uh, of these green cards, uh, filings that were kind of piling up in the virtual shelf, so to speak. And we were able to re reduce those down and just, uh, maybe a few months to around 70,000 and, and from a customer's perspective, you know, they originally been waiting well over 10 months, just to get this again, a green card renewal. Uh, but through automation, we were able to reduce that processing time to around 30 days. And a lot, most folks are getting their, their cards are I gonna say most, but a lot of folks are getting their cards within two days. So fantastic results.

00:29:07

And from the business side, um, things were never forced or crammed down our throats. Like the second bullet says we were given control over the experiments. So even just a couple of weeks ago, uh, we're rolling out a new product line. Now we went to Baltimore and we did just two interviews, two cases, uh, people seeking permanent residency. There were some problems, nothing the applicant would have known about because our guys David's team fixed everything right on the spot. A couple of days later, we did two more cases in Seattle. All of the Baltimore problems were already identified and fixed. We got to Seattle, a couple more problems were discovered, but those were fixed before we got to Chicago a couple days later. So when my boss asks me, how are things going? How's everything going? I can say, well, we've, we've found some issues, but they were fixed. Well, is there a problem? Are we going to hear about this from the media? No, no. They, the risk is, is almost nil when we're testing at such a low volume. That's right. And as you can see, um, David Blair, if you read his resume was a Navy seal, but he's, he's so soft at heart. And he greets me every morning with love and affection and, and

00:30:35

Who's on the left and who's on the right. Come on.

00:30:38

I really value that. And I will say the one point I'm trying to make from the business side today is that, uh, we're getting things done in a government environment and it's happening in my opinion, because there are strong business relationships here. It's not really about titles with us.

00:31:01

Yeah. I will tell you that, you know, back again, you know, back when we didn't have this, this, this relationship, um, you know, we, we spent a ton of time, 10 years on a ton of money. Uh, and, and the result was, I think we were able to release like six products representing around 12% of the agency's workload. And when you contrast that to, to just, just the recent past or the past three years, when we have this, this, uh, this solid relationship, uh, you know, we we've been able to get product out the door consistently. Uh, we were able to reduce the size of our, of our resources and the cost, and, and ultimately, we're, we're now having, we now have a platform that's, that's digitally processing, nearly half of the half of the agency's entire annual workload. Uh, so again, it was magnitudes greater than it. Once was, you know, the first 10 years of this spectacular disaster.

00:31:53

So now it citizenship and immigration, we're no longer trying to recreate a paper-based process or simply digitize forums. That's not where our mindset is anymore. Now our goal is to truly enhance our enterprise agility. We want to achieve transformational outcomes that result in true business value. But even though we've had some significant success, we still have some challenges that we're trying to overcome.

00:32:26

I can take the first one there. Um, even though I don't supervise, my team does not supervise all of the contractors. The government has a lot of contractors. David's team has a lot of contractors. They don't like to say no. So on the business side, when we say we want something, and my folks are, they love gold plating. They love moving the goalpost, whatever phrase you want, they ask for the moon, not thinking in terms of what it's going to cost. Is it going to move this project back further? And so one of our issues, one of my issues is telling my own people, the business, Hey, uh, settle down. These folks are not always going to say, no, we need to know our limits so that we get, uh, what we've asked for and in a timely manner, otherwise we're just hurting ourselves. Yeah.

00:33:21

Yeah. I, I, you know, it's funny cause we, we talked about solving, uh, or getting past a lot of organizational culture issues and then we, we have, we still have some, I mean, uh, again, in technology we have folks that, you know, they really want to get the latest, the coolest, the bright and shiny thing. Right. And then, and then figure out w what problem we can solve afterwards. And so, you know, that's something that, that we really need to, you know, we need to change and make sure that we are a business first kind of mindset. And, and of course in a federated environment, uh, you know, there's a lot of, uh, kind of CYA mentality. And so it's just a matter of, again, DevOps principles, it's it's ownership and accountability. That's, that's it.

00:33:56

So we're enthusiastic to talk to you guys further at the speakers, um, session, uh, tomorrow afternoon, we'll be there. And, uh, thank you so much for your time.