HSDF THE PODCAST

Part 1 of 2 - Digital Transformation Through AI, Data Analytics & Cloud

• Homeland Security & Defense Forum

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Welcome to “HSDF THE PODCAST,” a collection of policy discussions on government technology and homeland security brought to you by the Homeland Security and Defense Forum. 

In this first of a two-part series, hear how leading DHS technologists discuss their agency’s modernization journey; acceleration of data analytics/AI capabilities for mission outcomes; and remaining challenges around budget, acquisition, and personnel..

Featuring:

  • Reshea Deloatch, Executive Director, Solutions Development Directorate, Office of the CIO, Department of Homeland Security
  • Carin Quiroga, Chief Data Officer, Immigration and Customs Enforcement 
  • Dr. Gerri Alston-Meggett, Deputy Chief Information Officer, U.S. Secret Service
  • Bill McElhaney, Chief Information Officer, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services 
  • Jay Meil, Vice President, AI & Data Analytics, SAIC
  • Luke McCormack, Former CIO, Departments of Homeland Security and Justice (moderator)

This discussion took place at the HSDF Technology Innovation in Government Symposium on February 22nd, 2024.

Follow HSDF THE PODCAST and never miss latest insider talk on government technology, innovation, and security. Visit the HSDF YouTube channel to view hours of insightful policy discussion. For more information about the Homeland Security & Defense Forum (HSDF), visit hsdf.org.

Luke McCormack:

We've got a lot of horsepower up here on the stage and I appreciate the time and effort that not only that you're doing today, but that you do every single day, and I want to make sure I point that out. I have to always start these panels, as you know, with a plea that if you have not considered public service, give it a try. It tastes great. You'll never regret it. We're going to talk later on this afternoon with the CIO and Chief Artificial Information Officer about some of the positions he's got out there a lot of cyber positions. These folks need the help. They're fighting the good fight and I know you all are partnering with them, many of you here.

Dr. Gerri Alston-Meggett:

Come on in the water's fine.

Luke McCormack:

There you go. Megan mentioned we're going to crank through a whole bunch of questions and answers here. We're going to stop about I don't know 10 minutes out, maybe a little bit more, to get some audience participation. We definitely want to get some questions from you all and then we have a nice little wrap-up question we're going to ask. All right, rishay, I'm going to start with you. Congratulations, by the way, on your new appointment.

Reshea Deloatch:

Thanks so much.

Luke McCormack:

I appreciate that. You've been in that role for a couple of months. If I recall you were the deputy for quite some time. Came in from an operating component. We always love to see that. Give us a state of the state. What are you seeing up there these days? But before you do that, 30 seconds on you know what is SDD, what is in your portfolio, and then talk to us about sort of what's cooking up there.

Reshea Deloatch:

Sure, sure so. The Solutions Development Directorate within the Chief Information Officer Headquarters of DHS. I have a large portfolio of applications. Some of it includes software as a service products. It also includes the DHS Enterprise Cloud identity services. I can go on and on. Just all kinds of solutions that meet the stakeholders that are also our components, the needs across DHS. So it's a wide array of solutions. The state of the state. I would say that these days, especially regarding cloud, it's less about trying to get it, make sure that we're transitioning off of on-prem data centers into the cloud. A lot of that work has been done, thank goodness. So more so these days I'm looking to make sure that we're more efficient, effective, employing more automation techniques to make sure that we're doing things a lot quicker. Some things that took us months before we're doing in hours. So a lot of those things these days we're looking to automate versus migrate.

Luke McCormack:

So using the technology, rather than spending a lot of energy installing the technology, so to speak Absolutely absolutely, which is a point I wanted to catch with Corinne. You are the CDO, you've been over there a while and I would imagine that I certainly would hope that you're not spending a lot of time wrestling with installing technology, trying to acquire technology. You're actually trying to use some of this technology. Can you tell us about some of these capabilities that you're using and then how that's enabling your operations?

Carin Quiroga:

Sure, and, surprisingly enough, I actually am. I come from software delivery, so it's kind of in my blood. So we actually are standing up a data analytics platform out of the CDO shop because we had one for our investigation side and the immigration side, but we were lacking one for the mission and management side, and so we really saw value there. So we're trying to stand that up. But a lot of my focus is working with those solutions and the people that are building those systems and making sure the data quality is there. They're using data standards because, at the end of the day, we have to make sure that, even with AI coming, we've got to make sure the data is clean and accessible and reliable, and so a lot of our focus has been focusing on the data that's in each one of those systems.

Luke McCormack:

So you hit the bingo card AI.

Carin Quiroga:

Yeah, sorry.

Luke McCormack:

Are you using AI? Are you not using AI?

Carin Quiroga:

I think it's very early in the AI stage.

Carin Quiroga:

I think, across the spectrum. I mean, there are samples of where we are using it. You can go to dhsgov forward slash AI and you'll see that HSI implemented an AI and machine learning to improve pictures and do some facial recognition. We're actually, in one month, be able to find over 300 new victims of child exploitation, and so you'll see that we are trying and exploring it. But there's a lot of work that we're also doing to make sure our policies and our processes are stood up and ready for that, and also making sure we have the skill sets and the resources. We want to make sure that whatever we do with AI is going to be responsible and ethical.

Luke McCormack:

Fantastic, jerry. Welcome and we really do appreciate you being here. Jerry, being the Deputy CIO at the Secret Service, we know you spent a lot of time wrestling with the 18 acres and all the national partners there Very tricky environment but we also know that you all, at the same time, have been on this modernization journey. Give us an update. We're all anxious to hear what's the Secret Service doing these days as far as modernization.

Dr. Gerri Alston-Meggett:

Well, first of all, good afternoon everyone. Thank you for having me. I bring you greetings from Kimberly Cheadle, the 27th Director of the United States Secret Service and only the second woman, and our Chief Information Officer, retired Marine Corps General, kevin Nally. So we have been on a tech modernization journey for a number of years and we are in a General Nally is implementing a cloud smart strategy and we're currently in the cloud adoption phase, and Director Cheadle has really given us our marching orders to modernize our IT infrastructure.

Dr. Gerri Alston-Meggett:

So you mentioned AI and, just like Corinne mentioned, we are also exploring responsible, safe, secure and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence. We are excited about how it will help us in our dual mission for protection and investigation, and we've identified a number of areas where we think we can leverage AI, and the first one out of the gate is deterrence of financial fraud and detection of counterfeit characterization. So we're excited. We are also trying to make sure we have our boots firmly on the ground, ten toes down, that we have the policies in place, the expertise and the resources as an opportunity to one, you know, protect our financial infrastructure and our nation's leaders, and two, just advance, the federal government and our technology posture.

Luke McCormack:

That's fantastic. Early adoption of AI on the counterfeit side, an area that oftentimes gets forgotten about. What the Secret Service is all about, right, it's not just I shouldn't say just but protecting the dignitaries, the president, et cetera, so that's awesome. I'm glad to hear that. Bill, we've all heard about USCIS and modernizing in a modern way. You all have been doing that for quite some time over there.

Luke McCormack:

I don't think it escaped anybody in this room all the activity that's going on in regards to various policies that have changed, various policies that may change. We were a couple signatures away from some significant policies. Give us a peek inside the building when these things are going on. Are you all in a situation now where you just say, hey, bring it on, we're just going to turn a couple of knobs and pull a couple of levers. Voila, bring it on, we're just going to turn a couple of knobs and pull a couple of levers. While we're done, are you pulling out these systems and putting them on the operating table and saying open heart surgery, here we go. You know, incoming. It's just what happens when you're in a more, let's say, a fairly modern environment there and are able to perhaps move swiftly or not. You know, maybe I'm giving you guys too much credit there and are able to perhaps move swiftly or not, maybe.

Bill McElhaney:

I'm giving you guys too much credit there. Well, at this morning's staff stand-up meeting, we were comparing notes as to who slept the most hours in Camp Springs, which is where our building is Okay.

Luke McCormack:

Sounds more like the operating table than the turning knob.

Bill McElhaney:

Of course no surprise to anyone here who's familiar with USCIS we are very much lean forward. We started investing in the hyperscalers and the cloud environments, agile approach and so forth some time ago and really that's paying dividends for us now. But first I'll say there's no silver bullet. We haven't discovered any of those. It's a lot of hard work and really the first part of the answer is all about the people.

Bill McElhaney:

We are very fortunate at this agency to just have really dedicated IT personnel on the federal side, of course, highly talented folks from your staff here in industry, and together we have kind of created some patterns that we are leveraging and reusing time and again. Some of those patterns that we've had great success with, of course, is agile and embracing the MVP, not trying to boil the ocean on every major initiative, but really our key legacy solutions. We've built very modular and we're able to kind of plug those in and reuse those and turn around rapidly for a lot of these policies that are emerging quickly. Some of the other things that we do. We really leverage the toggling pattern in our services and solutions and so that allows us to turn things on and turn things off very rapidly.

Bill McElhaney:

As you see, the thrash and the policymaking and so forth, but I'd say that we planted the tree a long time ago and it's really starting to bear fruit. And that's my sage advice to any of these large enterprises is embrace this. The marketplace has followed. Well, it used to be just about the cloud. Now it's about hyperscaling and integration with the products that work within the cloud and, specifically, in the federal environment. Those who have embraced the federal environment, all of those have come together and we are really kind of like you were talking about at the department we're not discovering so much as we're leveraging.

Luke McCormack:

Fantastic and I'm glad to hear that Sounds like the hard work has paid off. Jay, industry expert in the AI space, give us a perspective of what you're seeing from the industry's perspective, particularly as you sort of look across the interagency striped across these various capabilities. What are you seeing out there?

Jay Meil:

Well, again, thanks for having me. I love coming to these and I'll start by saying that I have the privilege of working across the federal government space, so DOD, the intelligence community and very closely with Department of Homeland Security, and I will say that for Department of Homeland Security, writ large, and for all the organizations within, it's really nice to see how forward-leaning everybody is in the Department of Homeland Security when it comes to data and AI and really starting to operationalize it. So what I see right now is there's still a lot of hype, both on the industry side whether it's integrators or vendors and also on the federal government side you know the consumers of the capabilities. We still have a lot of educating to do in terms of what AI can do and what AI can't do right or what it is. So that's a big piece of it.

Jay Meil:

I also think that and I've heard a few points up here today we need to be focusing on understanding how it works, explaining how it works for explainability, trust around that, understanding biases within it, if we're going to operationalize it.

Jay Meil:

If you've heard me speak before, I say a lot about anybody can do sandbox data science or sandbox AI, but if you really want to operationalize the technologies that you're building and integrating. You have to have adoption from the human users, and the only way you get to adoption is if you have trust, and the only way you have trust is if you have understanding, and the only way to have understanding is make it explainable and not have a black box. So I would say to my colleagues in industry out there and the vendors that we work with make sure that you're focusing on open systems architectures, make sure you're focusing on explainability, make sure you understand really, from ingest to inference, how the data is transforming, how it's being fed into the models to the extent that you can, how the models are making decisions and how those decisions are being utilized, because I think that's going to go a long way towards operationalizing the technology.

Luke McCormack:

Really do appreciate that top line. Instead of a 10 minute, can I get a 15minute? Just so I calibrate right on the back here? Got it All right? Good, all right, turbo round. Here we're going to do a couple of these Well, several of them actually. Corinne, I'm going to start with you Top two priorities. You've got a lot of stuff you're doing in 24. A lot of folks out here that want to help you want to get in your head. What are your top two priorities for 24?

Carin Quiroga:

For OCIO as a whole, I'll say the mission is always at our forefront. So accelerated service delivery how can we get services and our products to them faster so they can do their mission and be more efficient and effective? And for me personally, I've been a lot of focus on data literacy and making sure that that understanding is across our organization. So we set up a data empowerment program and making sure that data is available and accessible to everybody, and so those are the focus areas of my office.

Luke McCormack:

Give me a second one for CDO. We don't care about the CIO.

Carin Quiroga:

I have.

Carin Quiroga:

So the second one for CDO would be I call it the data bodega. The second one for CDO would be I call it the data bodega. So what it is? It's really a data catalog or a data marketplace, so that it's a centralized place that people can go to get data. Our data today is very siloed and so it's making it available, it's putting it in the bodega, so it's a centralized location. People can go see the dictionaries, know who owns it, what kind of data, see the tags and see the APIs so they can be able to use it.

Luke McCormack:

Bill must do for 24, top two.

Bill McElhaney:

I can answer that in so many different dimensions. You know, from an agency and mission perspective and, given the obvious, you know all about the mission. It's pretty clear that you know 24 and for the foreseeable future we're going to be focusing on that humanitarian mission space, and so it's all about integrating and creating more efficient processes for all of those humanitarian things that we're doing in the asylum space and so forth. The other one that's forefront back to my morning meeting that we're checking in regularly is the H-1B registration season starts here very shortly and it's all hands on deck. We're introducing some really cool lean forward online accounts for organizations, as well as some other really cool things for this year's registration. And then the third piece I'll throw in a third one. There is the new fee rule implementation. We have a lot of form changes and so forth. That, from an IT standpoint, that we've got to integrate that into Do we have a new fee rule.

Luke McCormack:

We do Fantastic. I'm sure you're happy about that.

Bill McElhaney:

It's a long time coming and congratulations to a lot of hard work across town.

Luke McCormack:

Off the ramen noodle diet there right.

Bill McElhaney:

Well, I don't know about that. I'll defer to the CFO in that regard.

Luke McCormack:

We've got Kika in the back. She's coming up.

Bill McElhaney:

Oh, is that right? That's good.

Luke McCormack:

I wanted to ask you on the asylum what does that mean from a system standpoint? Right, you're going to enable a lot of capability there, depending on which way these policies go.

Bill McElhaney:

It's making that process as streamlined and efficient from a case management standpoint from the IT perspective as possible.

Bill McElhaney:

So we're talking about the global system there and making those processes extremely efficient and productive, but as well our Ellis platform the global and Ellis platforms are converging and becoming more and more integrated, so reusing a lot of that capability that we built on that Ellis platform to augment that global platform. So that's really providing a lot of support, whether we're talking about activities on southwest border or we're talking about processing 765s in the various cities across the country.

Luke McCormack:

Got it. Rache. Top two priorities for SDD. Sdd for Rache, yeah, solutions. What's in your job jar for 24?

Reshea Deloatch:

I would say so. With solutions there are many across DHS, so with that comes some inefficiencies. So solution refinement is a big deal for me. Coming in, I'm able to take a look and see, okay, well what's the solution?

Luke McCormack:

What do you mean by?

Reshea Deloatch:

that I mean, for example, bill just mentioned case management. You might have 5 million case management systems. I'm being dramatic, but I'm being dramatic on purpose, because there are some efficiencies to be gained to say, okay, well, maybe we really only need three across the department. But there are some things like that to look at, and I'm not just talking about case management. It could be financial systems, it could be other systems, especially ones that are utilized by employees or different agencies.

Reshea Deloatch:

So that would be a priority for me to make sure that we are operating more efficiently and making sure that we are refining solutions and not necessarily paying additional costs that we don't need to because we already solved that problem elsewhere. I want to take advantage of that. I'd also say solution usability. We have a tendency to build and build and build and somehow we get away from the original requirements or even the end users to make sure that is this solution meeting that requirement. There are so many more modern techniques that are being used out in industry right now that we need to actually employ in the government as well to make sure that our solutions are meeting our end users' requirements.

Luke McCormack:

So I'd say those two role to make sure that our solutions are meeting our end users requirements. So I'd say those two Fantastic Jerry top two priorities for the deputy CIO.

Dr. Gerri Alston-Meggett:

That's an easy one. For me it's recruiting and resiliency planning.

Luke McCormack:

You heard it Recruiting.

Dr. Gerri Alston-Meggett:

The Secret Service, especially my office, the office of the chief information officer. We have an aging workforce. We have folks who EOD'd or entered on duty back in the late 80s, early 90s. So recruiting is important because we're seeing a retirement bubble, and resiliency planning for those who are staying with us. We have to upscale them for the new challenges that are coming and the new technologies that are emerging.

Dr. Gerri Alston-Meggett:

And given our state of state for the next four years, the Secret Service is the lead for a myriad of national special security events. So here in 2024, we have our usual suspects. We have the State of the Union Address, the United Nations General Assembly, neg Summit, nato, but then, in addition, we have the presidential campaigns, the Republican National Convention, the Democratic National Convention and then the ensuing inauguration. In 26, we have all those same usual suspects, plus FIFA World Cup In 28,. We have all those same usual suspects, plus the Olympics in 28, and then another election cycle, and not to mention the unplanned NSSEs, like a state funeral or APEC, the African Leaders Summit that we recently had. Those things were not planned because we didn't know about them. So suffice it to say recruitment and resiliency planning are my top two priorities.