Job Fairs to Become Two Ring Events With Online and In-Person Options

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Job Fairs exist to provide both job seekers and employers a convenient place to get access to a large number of what they are looking for -- jobs or qualified people. During the pandemic this process became even more convenient and scaled to provide more access to people and companies as these events moved online.

Like every organization, Job Fair organizers had to make a quick shift in March 2020 to move their events online. From canceling physical venues to choosing an online platform, these organizations were able to get up and running in a matter of weeks. Virtual Job Fairs generally allow visitors to click on a company's "booth" and read through material on their work, benefits, and open opportunities. Conversations typically begin with a text chat and can be elevated into a video chat with just a click for more in depth discussions.

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Planning Toward FY 2022 – A Peek at the Federal Budget

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The Biden Administration recently issued its request for 2022 spending. This practice is really more of a policy effort than actual budgeting, but serves to illustrate administration priorities to inform agencies as to what is likely to get approved in the final budget. The 2022 budget request has a number of IT-specific priorities, starting with the funding of the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) at another $500 million for fiscal 2022. This would be in addition to the $1 billion that was invested as part of the American Rescue Plan Act--money that helped support the ongoing effort to digitize government services and operations.

The $58.4 billion in IT spending includes marked increases in the IT budgets of the Treasury Department, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Department of Homeland Security. NASA and the Department of Commerce had small reductions to its IT budgets.

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Coordination is Key to CDO Success

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Chief Data Officers (CDOs) are one of the newer positions in government, but their role is quickly becoming one of the most critical. A CDO is charged with overseeing data-related functions, including data management, ensuring data quality, and creating data strategy. For government agencies, this requires close coordination with the Federal Data Strategy and the DoD Data Strategy.

Both of these documents define the specific roles and responsibilities of data officers and provide a framework for working with and securing data. Of course, each agency has unique requirements and missions, leaving the CDO to work out how to apply this guidance and standards to their organization.

Agencies are meeting these guidelines and integrating CDOs in different ways. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently announced a department-level CDO office to better integrate data into its operations and those of other agencies. The need for this level of coordination was underscored as DHS launched a department-wide COVID-19 vaccination campaign in partnership with the Department of Veterans Affairs health centers. DHS needed to identify, contact and manage responses from workers, which meant collecting and reconciling many different datasets from across the department.

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Agility. Enabled by Agile.

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Agility has been a key attribute for success over the past year and a half. Everyone had to quickly adapt in their personal and professional lives to do things in new ways to keep business and society running. Even the great bureaucracy of government found itself pivoting and quickly changing "how it's always been done" to meet the needs of the day. This should not end with the return to what feels like pre-pandemic normal. In the form of Agile methodology, Agility will play a huge role in the government's ability to continue the fast-forwarded digital push as a result of the pandemic.

Just as government pushed agencies to try Cloud with the "Cloud First" initiative, some are suggesting the same approach for Agile. An "Agile-First" evolution would have a huge impact on IT modernization efforts, accelerating the move from legacy processes and technology to a modern digital approach. The response to COVID-19 showed that the government can move quickly in changing how they do work (across all areas of government). An Agile-first "mandate" could institutionalize that speed and make it the rule rather than the exception.

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Putting a Value on Trust — Introducing Zero Trust Security Approaches

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With so many high-profile hacks this year, it's easy to want to throw up your hands and say, "Is there nothing that can be trusted?!" Interestingly, that lament is what is driving the latest approach to cybersecurity -- zero trust. Zero trust is what it sounds like, a security approach centered on the belief that organizations should not automatically trust anything accessing their systems either inside or outside their perimeters. Instead, all people and devices must be verified before access is granted. To the untrained eye, this seems untenable. How, in this day and age, when we depend on digital information and connection to do most anything, can we use a process where we have to constantly verify identity and access permissions? Luckily, the practice of zero trust is more sophisticated than its premise.

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