Kent Cunningham (Nashville, TN) –
Federal agencies have made improving operational productivity and efficiency through targeted use of technology a top priority. It was my honor last week to testify before the Oversight Subcommittee of the House Committee on House Administration on June 16 to discuss Modernizing Information Delivery in the House. My presentation, “The Future of Productivity,” explored how the House of Representatives could make its business operations more efficient and productive through improved use of communications and collaboration technologies.
Information exchange and collaboration are the lifeblood of our government, and communications keeps it pumping. The House must be able to work collaboratively and securely. This need for managed, enterprise collaboration solutions applies to their own staff and parties, as well as offices across the aisle, Senate offices, and the general public.
The House and other federal agencies recognize that they have some great opportunities to use modern communication and collaboration technologies to improve productivity and efficiency. Microsoft has decades of experience in helping federal agencies and partners implement systems that accommodate users’ desire for choice, flexibility, and mobility, while still satisfying those organizations’ need for enterprise-grade security,integrity and reliability. We also have a particularly deep understanding of government security,privacy and compliance.
My recommendations to the subcommittee included having the House develop a unified, interoperable platform that accommodates users’ desire to choose their own devices and applications while supporting institutional and legal requirements for data security and retention. Ideally, this platform would support both current and future technologies. This kind of system that facilitates user choice on the front end with a unified infrastructure on the back end would allow the House to:
- reduce costs through improved processes and workflows
- improve access to information through enterprise search tools which provide access to content, calendars, knowledge workers, and committees
- simplify the process of creating, editing, and sharing digital information
- efficiently retrieve the data that people need to be productive
- empower people to work collaboratively while on the go, while maintaining document fidelity and supporting secure, interoperable standards.
Given how far technology has come in recent years, it is easy to forget how much time and effort it once took to create documents, memos and reports. Documents used to be typed, and mistakes were commonly corrected with white-out. Making one change could sometimes require retyping the whole document. Authoring documents collaboratively and managing organizational workflow was a time- and paper-intensive process that could stretch out across weeks or months as paper copies of each revision were manually shepherded from office to office.
This is not how enterprises produce results today, and it is not an optimal model for the House. As Congressman Greg Walden (R-OR) noted in his testimony before the Subcommittee, too much Congressional business is still done on wasteful volumes of paper, and it needn’t be so. I am encouraged and excited by the House of Representatives’ effort to reduce waste and improve collaborative processes within the House.
Kent Cunningham is the Chief Technology Architect to the Microsoft Federal Civilian and Health business. Follow him on Twitter at @kent_cunningham. A version of this article appeared at FutureFed.
Read Kent Cunningham’s testimony in full on the Publicyte Skydrive.
Art credits: Rob Marquardt, House.gov
