Suzette Kent, who has served as the Trump administration’s federal chief information officer since February 2018, is a veteran of business transformation efforts at private companies such as EY, J.P. Morgan and Accenture. But like everybody else, she’s never faced anything quite like managing through a pandemic. In Kent’s case, that involves scrambling to ensure federal agencies have the tools and systems in place to manage in a time of “maximum telework.”
Kent spoke with Government Executive Editor in Chief Tom Shoop recently about her efforts and her overall approach to managing federal IT modernization. Excerpts from that interview follow.
How are you adjusting to the new way of work?
Especially in the beginning, what was incredibly challenging was the work cycle was almost continuous, especially for some of the agencies that had to set up some of the recovery capabilities in just days. So it was literally around the clock, and we were putting out different pieces of guidance that had to be discussed and reviewed, also on that 24-hour cycle. It was incredibly intense. I met with the CIOs and CISOs every single day, and then one-on-one individually, more than that. We were just moving so quickly.
We had to look at things to say, how do we create new and different boundaries, especially when people are working from their living space? And what does that look like? And how do you back off from answering the phone 24/7? I’m not joking: The phone would ring at 5 in the morning, the phone would ring at 2 at night. When we saw that the road was longer, we had to get to something sustainable, so that we had people who were fresh. And that’s where we looked at different typ ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
