In this session, experts explore the benefits of cloud-based solutions, the impact artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies have on the infrastructure, and where more can be done to improve customer experience delivery.
Anthony Jimenez
Welcome back to CarahCast the podcast from Carahsoft, the trusted government IT solutions provider. Subscribe to get the latest technology updates in the public sector. I'm Anthony Jimenez, your host from the Carahsoft production team. On behalf of GovExec and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast focused around FedRAMP. Experts have long realized the power of cloud-based technologies to deliver more reliable, scalable and flexible solutions previously bogged down by legacy systems. As the current administration places more emphasis on the importance of customer experience, cloud has become even more valuable asset. In this session, experts explored the benefits of cloud-based solutions the impact artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies have on the infrastructure and where more can be done to improve customer experience delivery.
Anne Armstrong
My name is Anne Armstrong, and I'm the VP for strategic alliances at GovExec. Our panel is transforming customer experience with the cloud. Experts have long realize the power of cloud-based technologies to deliver more reliable, scalable and flexible solutions that have frequently been bogged down by legacy systems. As the current administration places more emphasis on the importance of customer experience, Cloud has become an even more critical asset, we're going to explore the benefits of cloud-based solutions, the impact of artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies, and where more can be done to improve the customer experience. Joining us for this conversation today is Mark Lucas, Director of cloud computing the Department of Homeland Security, Wole Moses, Microsoft's federal civilian cloud innovation leader. And Ravi, you're gonna have to help me here.
Ravi Jagannathan
Ravi Jagannathan.
Anne Armstrong
Thank you. The Senior Director of Global certification assurance and trust at Palo Alto Networks. Thank you guys for being here. I'm going to ask each of you to tell me a little bit about what your job is, and how that interacts with FedRAMP program. So, start with you, Mark, and we'll work down.
Mark Lucas
Thanks, Anne. Okay, so I'm the current director of cloud computing operations at the Department of Homeland Security OCIO. Office. Interesting, because FedRAMP is fundamental to the underlying security of all of the cloud-based environments that that we're leveraging now. So as a part of that, obviously, there's a need to enhance that security once we get an authorization. But the intersection of that, as were those environments must stay secure, as we ensure that critical applications and services that we provide to the American public are where they need to be in the appropriate time and that they're available.
Wole Moses
Thank everyone for being here. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you. So, I'm Wole Moses, I work in Microsoft's federal civilian organization, I lead our strategy internally with our partners, and when most importantly, with our customers, the Federal civilian government agencies around adopting and leveraging innovative technologies that can help drive transformation just completed 24 years at Microsoft. So, it's been a long run seen a lot happy to be here, part of this panel.
Ravi Jagannathan
My name is Ravi Jagannathan. I happen to lead both the commercial and the government certifications, certifications, like FIPS, Common Criteria FedRAMP, sock ISO, we do all kinds of certifications around the globe. So of course, one of the most important certification we do my group happen to be in the R&D engineering. So, we make the certifications happen. And we work in FedRAMP, moderate, high, and in the IL five space. So, it's all public. You can see in the FedRAMP marketplace, several of our product listed in Monterrey and we are gearing up for a lot of our services are going through jab Hi. And we got some services running in Aisle Five. Also, FedRAMP is very important for Palo Alto Networks. And we spend a lot of time and energy. We believe it is a very critical program for overall security aspects of the cloud deployments.
Anne Armstrong
Thank you. This will be a question to all the panel, and we can just jump in and conversation. Making government services available and accessible is clearly a top priority. What are some of your other top CX priorities right now and how do they relate to the cloud? Mark? Do you want to?
Mark Lucas
Yeah, I'll start. So, it's interesting we at the Department just stood up a first thing government customer experience directorate, specifically focused on customer experience and human centered design. Mine is unique because we invested the resources to ensure that customer service continues to be at the forefront of what we do. And services in American public, that team that we've put in place has hit the ground running to address some of the forefront runners of customer experience that engaged with the public GVP TSA, FEMA, some of those other organizations who directly interact with the public. But that entire team is actually specifically addressing customer experience across the whole of DHS to a way to ensure an institutionalized customer experience for everyone that we interact with both internal and external to the department.
Anne Armstrong
I'm gonna ask you later, but some of the things you're doing but Wole?
Wole Moses
Yeah, so for us from a Microsoft perspective, we provide platforms and tools to enable government agencies, government contractors, and government partners in general to build it enable customer experience solutions. So for example, we have platforms and tools that enable government agencies to automate and digitize repetitive paper and manual processes, we have tools to enable government agencies who want to innovate around chatbot experiences, as a way to express serves to experience or improve citizen experience, low code, no code technology and other cloud-based capability that we provide, which enables non-technical non developers, employees or contractors, but folks who probably know a lot of the processes and the problems, enabling them to use those low code, no code methodologies to develop solutions. And then finally, most recently on generative AI, on and leveraging that to transform all of those types of capabilities. So, for our perspective, we really are looking at this from the perspective of providing tool sets and platforms to enable innovation.
Ravi Jagannathan
Customer experience, and you end user experience is vital for any product, especially for cloud services, there are several things few things, most importantly, are very important. You know, the being part of an engineering group, we always look into how can we make the user interface easy, so for the end user to use, and for the cloud administrators, or the service administrators who buy Palo Alto network services to deploy, they should be able to buy the service easily, and consume it for themselves and deploy it for customers, right? So, ease of use, is something that we worry about constantly. And the second thing is how do we make the user interface intuitive? How do we have the human nature, you know, goes from one step to another, especially in security, somebody was telling me this morning, security services should work seamlessly security is so innate to the service that is deployed, if it shows up itself as an issue, then you know, it has not been deployed. So it is very important to, for us to integrate into the infrastructure so innately that people feel they are getting the service that they are getting end users, however, the security is automatically built in, that is for the end user experience, from the agencies who buy our services, to deploy it to for themselves, or for end users of different kinds, they should be able to administer and monitor and then deploy the services with ease of use. And they're also we worry about how the services are easy to you know, consume and deploy, and at the same time, administer and monitor. So, we are looking for, and constantly striving to improve user interface services in all of these aspects.
Anne Armstrong
Well, that leads us into the next question about what role Human Centered Design plays in your organization's obviously, you want people to be able to be aware of the service and then be able to use it. How do you measure that? How do you figure out whether human centered design is working?
Mark Lucas
I think it comes back to I mean, human centered design. There's a lot of different methodologies out there in the industry and the different phases to implement human centered design. But it all comes down to that customer experience. And two primary ways that we're able to measure that is one customer feedback, whether it's the passengers at the airport, it is the disaster survivors on the ground at the disaster locations around the world, or it's actually working with the Customs and Border Patrol at the border. That's one way. The second way is kind of a more ambiguous way. But it's actually one of the important telltale signs of whether something's working well is when nobody's complaining. So, DHS has been doing this for years. I mean, it's and a lot of organizations out there have been doing human centeredness on for a long time, but now we're starting to institutionalize that methodology across all of our components to make sure that there are solid processes that can be mimicked for everyone to do. But when you're talking about human centered design, how do we do it? So, from inception, to design to implementation of systems, we're designing that all around the forefront of how does the customer engage with the system? How are they getting the services and capabilities that we need to give them and seamlessly and secure as we possibly can. So, there's two primary ways there are many other ways that departments are working on. But I think those two are primarily the front.
Anne Armstrong
Wole, do you want to?
Wole Moses
Sure. As far as human centered design, so I'll tag on to something that Mark was talking about, as far as some of the work that CBP is doing. I applaud you on that work. I just came back from vacation overseas last week, and the differences are subtle, but I definitely noticed a better and a smoother experience entering the country. And I'm gonna give a shout out for Global Entry, because that process is changed. I signed up a few years ago, me and my wife and my daughter just flew through that, that global entry line. So, if you don't have it, I highly suggest you invest in that. So, in general, I think the federal government's doing great job around on the work with human centered design, I love the focus around life experiences as really the grounding by which the customer experience improvements are made. So some of those life experiences preparing for retirement, I think some of the focus areas this fiscal year, preparing for retirement, dealing with the natural disaster, facing a financial shock, if you think about the interactions that citizens have in dealing with an agency or agencies, that's a smart approach that life experience is sort of that grounding is a great approach to how to enable citizens interactions with governments to be smooth across the lifecycle from a Microsoft perspective, as far as human centered design. Another way I can look at that is around obviously, we provide tools for end users to use. And so, one of the things I'm particularly excited about is with the advent of generative AI, we have this concept called AI copilots, and so AI copilots, you can think about those as AI assistants within every single application or platform that you use from us. And so, for example, if you're in a team's meeting, if I'm in a team's meeting that I joined late, or that I missed altogether, I can actually ask my team's copilot, what did I miss in the past 15 minutes of this meeting? Or what did Mark say about a particular topic in this meeting? And it will actually provide me with the summary of that. And so that's really focused on putting the human at the center in that particular application. What does that person need from this application? And how can the application anticipate that another example is we have a tool called GitHub copilot, I used to be a programmer in college, but I haven't really done much with it since then. But I've got some home automation projects at home that require me to program in Python, which I didn't learn. And so GitHub copilot as a tool that enables me to figure out how to do this code, making suggestions for me, it's anticipating problems that I'm having with the code, as far as debugging my code, is helping me to document code or helped me to understand code that someone else wrote and documenting that for me. So, a number of different ways I can look at this. Let me stop there.
Anne Armstrong
Ravi?
Ravi Jagannathan
Yeah, the end user is always at the center of every product. So, the way that we think about this in engineering is how do you empathize with the end user? How are they going to use the product, right, that makes us think what kind of issues and difficulties the end user may land up using our product? Again, there are two kinds of end users, right. One is the end user who is you mean leveraging our or consuming the service, the government services, or the other user is the administrator who are buying the security services from Palo Alto network to deploy it within their agency that could be consumed within the agency, or it can it may or may not be visible to the end customers. So there are two kinds of users are the most important thing, when it comes to the end user experience is V back that is section 508 that the federal government mandated where all of these cloud services will have to be accessible for people that are differently abled, or people who are disabled, this is something we take very seriously in all of our product, we are evaluating section 508 against section 508. And we strive to meet the section 508 requirements because this is very important. We take this seriously because I think it shows not only our commitment, and that we really care about the end user and I think you know a lot of the digital systems that you know the are catching up to We're getting to know what section 508 J believe is a very important thing. And again, the how intuitive it is we applied to both to our user interface, graphical user interface. And we also apply this to our command line interface CLI interface. So, between the two, how can we enable the end user to really consume the services seamlessly, is something that we constantly worry about, again, you say empathy is at the center comes at the very beginning of our product development. And that's how we think about the end user experience.
Anne Armstrong
You come from an engineering background, how do you make sure that customer experience is part of the project at the beginning, and not bolted on afterwards?
Ravi Jagannathan
Yeah, the bolted on is what happened in nine days, maybe beginning of 2000s, right? People went and did a project either on their server or on the desktop. And they released it, and bunch of people saying that I cannot do anything with this. They're like, Okay, now let's see, figure out how we can, you know, add on these things, right. That's how it worked in 90s, and maybe in 2000, tense, but now in the cloud era, please we do in Palo Alto network is we shifted the end user care and user experience and mipad considerations to the left, it starts from defining the product requirement, you know, the product requirement will say, Hey, these are the security plus the user end user requirements it estimate. And then it by the time it goes into the functional spec, all of that requirement for the end user interface, and user empathy, all of that is built into the functional spec. And when somebody is designing and writing the design spec, the design will be designed based on the requirements of the product, and the functional aspect of the product. And of course, when the implementation follows it, it'll tightly follow the product requirement, functional spec, and the design spec. So, the implementation, you know the will adhere to that. On top of it, when we do the QA process. In the QA process, they constantly refer to the commitment that was made to the product from the product requirement. So that's the QA process and choose how we ensure the end user experience from ease of use intuitive of the product itself. And then the how it integrates into the product that enables both the administrators of the cloud services of peloton approach products and the end user experience. So that's so we have shifted everything to the left. And we believe that is the right thing to do.
Anne Armstrong
A lot of people today have mentioned AI and generative AI, where does it make sense to leverage artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. Mark, you want to?
Mark Lucas
I'll give you a perfect example. So, one brought up about international travel. So, I'll bring because I work in the Department of Homeland Security, I'll bring up a personal experience that highlights that my wife's Korean so we went to a big family reunion in South Korea, we were married 35 years. So, we went back for a big family reunion on the way back, we went to the coming to the port of embarkation. And when I went there, you know, the lines are usually long, are usually long, but what TSA is currently piloting. So, they moved me and a group of other individuals over to the side. And they said, come over here, and I didn't know what they were doing. And so, one of the TSA agents came over us this phone was back in a I scan my picture and said, you're good to go through customs, there was no contact, there was no checking passports, there was none of that. So that's a perfect example of what it means to actually improve customer experience. If you can reduce the burden on the public by the services that we're providing. It's a major win not only for the organization, because we're probably managing taxpayer dollars, we're making it better for us. And I was a personal beneficiary of that process of what we're piloting Don't be asking me the name. And because I don't know what the name is, I'm not managing that. But definitely was a recipient of the technologies and stuff that we're that we're using, and we're piling. So, within a short period of time, you should see that all across the airports. So, it will reduce the timeline. So that's one place it makes sense.
Anne Armstrong
And Wole, do want to jump in?
Wole Moses
Yeah, sure. I mean, I love that example that Mark gave because no doubt there's a lot of technology in the background, but to the end user to the person experience it. It was seamless, it just worked. And so, and that's a great example of when a customer or citizen would be delighted by that experience to the question around AI or generative AI for sure. 2023 seems to be the year of AI, the time I spent on AI last year versus this year, completely different. So, from a Microsoft perspective, obviously we're investing a lot in generative AI We have a service called Azure open AI, which, by the way, received FedRAMP. About three weeks ago, we're working with a lot of government agencies who are doing some trials and pilots in trying to figure out how this could improve the way they work. Customer Experience is an obvious area. So, there's several different ways AI can be part of the customer experience improvement, one that jumps out that a lot of agencies are exploring is around improving how citizens interact with agency data. Think about a chat GPT experience grounded on agency data. So, in other words, you can tell this chat GPT to ignore everything else, you know, just focus on this corpus of data, this corpus of knowledge that I'm going to supply you with. And so, if you think about customer service interactions, that's a perfect place for that to, to be used. So grounding, we're seeing agencies looking, grounding citizen experience, with agency knowledge base data. And so, citizens can have this sort of freeform chat conversation with that chatbot and is replying with that expertise. Based on that agency's knowledge base, both internal customer experience, as well as external citizen facing examples. Another way we can think about using AI as far as a customer experience would be during an interaction with a human. So, think about all the times a citizen may need to call into a call center for federal agency, I've talked about copilots, this concept of the copilot earlier is not just something that Microsoft can do, agencies themselves can build copilot experiences. And so, think about a human customer service agent, with an AI customer service chatbot, guiding them along that conversation with the citizen guiding them with suggested questions to ask that citizen based on everything the citizen is saying, guiding them with solutions to propose to the citizen. So that's the second one. And then third one is that we're seeing is around going back to those that human customer service experience. So, using generative AI in some other AI technologies, think about the ability to capture the entire transcript of that customer service interaction. And then AI generative AI specifically can summarize that conversation in almost real time to understand why are citizens calling into our call centers, what is their sentiment at the beginning of the call? And at the end of the call? How are our customer service agents performing during these calls? And so taking all that knowledge agencies now can they have a feedback loop through which they can become better informed around why certain call volumes are happening, why people calling in, and that can inform other decisions like, hey, we need to update our website, or we need to update other parts of our omni channel citizen experienced because we're seeing these trends happening today. That's not something that's just happening because of you. You think about the volumes of calls that come in, it's impossible to really understand what's happening during those conversations. But that's an example of what generative AI can help with.
Anne Armstrong
Interesting. So, Mark, DHS has been working on something called a cloud security gateway solution. It features micro segmentation of architectures and more visibility across hybrid cloud environments. Can you talk a little bit about that? What kind of effect it's had?
Mark Lucas
Yes, am I sure can so we have a cybersecurity audience. So, I'm sure they're familiar with that. But I'll explain for the more general sense. Some time ago, we awarded our data center and cloud optimization contract. It's a multi-year award to a new vendor that's managing what we like to call our hybrid compute environment, which is our data center instance, Mississippi, our colocation environments, which are around the country and our cloud service provider environments. That solution allows us to not only see in real time what's happening in and out of those cloud environments, it actually allows for seamless integration with those environments, and helps us to improve availability, which the end result is better services to the public that we serve. So, it has been a very impactful solution, as we move to 3.0, to allow us to seamlessly ensure our security and provide our services and capabilities at a much faster rate to the public that we serve.
Anne Armstrong
Thank you. And let me follow up on that with you are part of a FEMA team that some years ago, when a service Citizens Program it, but you've been part of the intersection of cloud computing, and customer experience for a number of years. How do you see those working together and why were you attracted to that particular segment of technology?
Mark Lucas
So, good question, Anne. It's been a lot of time at FEMA. My early time in the federal government actually my first federal job was with FEMA is one of their sites. are architects and engineers doing multiple things. So, as I started making decisions about my career, many years ago, I served 22 years in the military, in service to the country. So public service was inevitable for me to kind of move to the next level. And so, when I retired many years ago, kind of migrated to FEMA, because of the job that was there in cyber towards the end of that many years ago. Now, because I've been to DHS headquarters for over four years. Now, my personal and my professional passion has been both cybersecurity and cloud one, because I wanted to be in the middle, what's happening, those two things are kind of at the crux of what's happening with customer service. Because I mean, regardless of what's happening on the back end, whether it's in as your AWS, Google or the latest cloud service provider environment, it's all about providing seamless services to the public that we serve. And so, what attracted me to that was, I just wouldn't be on the cutting edge of whatever was happening, AI and ML seems to be the latest talk. And I'm heavily engaged with organizations trying to take advantage of that now, because I'm still in the middle of all that. But Cloud and cyber are still in the middle. And they're at the nexus of all that stuff. So, it's personal and professional interest to answer your question. And I just like to keep learning new things. I'm a lifelong learner. And so, I always want you to understand new things. And it's great. We're here with the steam congregation is here today, because I'm among friends and cohorts and people that love cybersecurity as much as I do.
Anne Armstrong
Okay, good answer to the whole panel, what kind of benefits are we beginning to see from the renewed focus on CX, we've got an Executive Order, we've got money being put to it, what do you see happening now, that's worth commenting on.
Ravi Jagannathan
So going back to the Bolton days that you mentioned, in the old days, the way 90s It used to happen is that people release their products, it went into the field. And then whatever's once or so there were constant complaints from the end users, and then the sales guys will complain about it. And then reluctantly, some support guy will make it a feature, and then it will eventually end up in engineering. So, the whole cycle can go on for six months, nine months, whatever. But now, in the cloud era, the focus on user interface happens within minutes or days, in the worst case, we release a product and the cloud service get deployed. And we get immediate feedback. And this feedback loop has changed. That's one thing, how the user experience the product has changed. So, we get to know about it. And another thing that has changed is a lot of the cloud services is like every three, four weeks, we keep on updating something or other in the in the cloud service. So, we also have an opportunity to address those things faster. Right, when somebody complaints about a user experience and the end user experience that is not, you know, the 100%, you know, the satisfactory are some things we are missing, we get to address that. And this has become mainstream now. And that's one way that user experience, focus actually has brought in a renewed energy to this field, at the center of all of this that we always talk about is empathizing with the end user constantly. And that is something very important in all of our products.
Anne Armstrong
Wole?
Wole Moses
Yeah, so I would say as far as the benefits that I would assess from the focus on customer experience, first of all, I'd say there is an appreciation of the importance of AI citizen, high customer satisfaction, and how that relates to high trust in government, which as we know, has been waning over the years. So, there's a direct connection between how we experience our interaction interactions with the government, how we think about the government, how we trusted the government. So, I think that's the first thing I would call out. Secondly, I'd call out the focus on human centered design. So, I talked earlier about some of the this really being framed around life experiences. And so that focus on human centered design, I think, is an important sort of outcome of the CX initiative. Thirdly, I say as a technologist as a person who has a passion for technology, I love the fact that this provides an opportunity through which government agencies are looking at using technology for innovation. There's a recognition that, hey, there's a lot of really transformative things that we can do with technologies like artificial intelligence, that consistent with our goals around improving customer experience, the early results are positive as well. So, I was on performance.gov Yesterday looking at some of the early metrics around improvement and the percentages of customer satisfaction score. are some citizens going up? So that's a great thing. And so, I call those things out.
Mark Lucas
Appreciate Ravi's comment earlier, when we look at what we're already doing, I mean, holistically, the government has been doing the business of managing taxpayer dollars appropriately, and providing the services to the American public as we should. But the customer experience initiatives I know that we're putting in place to department allow everybody to be involved in the decision-making process, especially the customer as they've always been. But everybody from the beginning to the end is now a part of that. So now, they're not only an increased enhance focus on it, we're allowed to deliver something better and more seamlessly. And Cloud is one of those enablers, to allow us to seamlessly provide better customer service faster. The public is not focused on the technology. They're focused on what they came to get, right. That's what's important about this, all this technology. It's great. We're all technologists, we'd love it. But in the end, it's just an enabler of providing what we need to do for the American public.
Anne Armstrong
Thank you very much to the panel.
Anthony Jimenez
Thanks for listening. And thank you to our panelists. Don't forget to like comment, and subscribe to CarahCast and be sure to listen to our other discussions. If you'd like more information on how Carahsoft can assist your organization, please visit www.carahsoft.com or email us at fedramp@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and havea great day.