Overcoming the Fear and Loathing of Moving to the Cloud

This is an enhanced transcript of the interview originally posted to Federal News Radio by John Gilroy on May 17th, 2016.

Today’s interview is with Rusty Pickens, Senior Advisor for Digital Platforms for Public Diplomacy at the U.S. Department of State. Pickens is one of those rare individuals who started out of college working a help desk and wound up working in the White House.

This means that he is grounded in the technical aspects of moving to the cloud (MSCE, CCNA, PMI, AWS, Certified Scum Master, Salesforce Certified Developer) as well as having the ability to work through the human problems and work in collaboration with other teams to integrate complex systems.

During the interview, Pickens talks about a challenge he had at the White House with moving a correspondence managing system to the cloud. Some agencies may have room for mistakes, but if there is a mistake made with White House correspondence, then it is discussed on the front page of major newspapers.

Pickens shares with listeners his involvement with the Federal Salesforce Community of Excellence where fellow federal IT professionals can share trials, tribulations, and successes with others in a “judgment free” environment. Listen to the interview to see how to bring together various stakeholders in a high-pressure environment.

John Gilroy (JG): Welcome to Federal Tech Talk with John Gilroy here on Federal News Radio 1500 AM. In the studio, world-famous Rusty Pickens, and he works with digital platforms for public diplomacy at the U.S. Department of State. Yay! Cue the applause; cue the paparazzii! Rusty’s getting to be kinda famous in town, he’s doing a lot of speaking, he’s going to a lot of events, and he’s getting kinda well-known and kind of an honor to have him in the studio and talk about some of the success he’s had, and most importantly, how some of his experience in life can help my listeners.

That’s what I told Rusty before the show. I said, “Rusty, my listeners are frustrated federal IT professionals. They show up for work at 9:00; they’re dialing suicide hotline by 9:15. And if we can just toss them a bone, if we can just give them a website, maybe a blog they can read to help them out, well, geez, and how we can accomplish all our goals.”

And that’s why I wanted you in the studio, ’cause I know your background. You come from a humble background and through grit, determination, and street fighting skills, you climbed up to the top of the ladder. And you’ve worked at the White House and now in the Department of State. So, I think there’s a whole lot of lessons in your career that my listeners can figure out and say, “Well, geez, maybe you can start at the bottom and work your way up through grit, determination, certifications, education, working long hours.” So, tell us about your background, Rusty, how you wound up working at EOP or the White House, down there.

Rusty Pickens (RP): Sure. Hi, John, and good morning to you. So first of all, you’re giving me way too much credit there on the world famous.

JG: World famous, you are…

RP: Maybe low-key famous is what some of my old co-workers say.

JG: Plus maybe you’re zip code famous, zip code.

RP: Yeah, just around my own block, really, that’s about it. Now, so it’s great to be with you this morning and happy to come on the show and talk about this stuff. You talk about humble beginnings and background, yeah, I guess, gosh, I’m going on 18 years of IT experience at this time. Which is a long time in technology years, right? But I’m from Oklahoma.

JG: In dog years, it’s 100 years.

RP: Yeah. Oh, man, I know, x3 if you’re talking IT. So, I’m from Oklahoma, and, you know, “Rusty Pickens”, people have asked me, “Are you a real person?” and I’m like, “Yes, I’m actually a real person.” No, it’s an Indian name (Pickens) from way back in Oklahoma. Unfortunately, not related to T. Boone in any way, so I’m not gonna be a part of that inheritance.

JG: Yeah, with a name like Rusty Pickens, people are thinking it’s like a big cowboy hat on, and boots on.

RP: And T. Boone, he’s the front-runner Pickens out there. Owning half of Oklahoma, probably. But no, I cut my teeth on, I guess as most people starting out in the industry would, with an internship to do tech support and PC building. So, back in 1996–97, in our little hospital there in Ada, Oklahoma, and building those things from the ground up. Gosh, we were running Windows 3.1 in those days, and Novell NetWare 3.1 way back there so…

JG: Before Windows for Workgroups, yeah.

RP: Yeah, they were white box PCs - barely - that you almost had to assemble and put together. So the world has changed drastically. There wasn’t even an idea of Cloud at that point. And then, sort of working my way up through the ranks, doing IT ops, networking, and network operations there for my Indian tribe, the Chickasaw Nation, way back in Oklahoma. Sort of felt the urge to get out of Oklahoma and move to DC, to take an internship to do Indian Affairs work here on Capitol Hill. And that was a blast, really fun. Did that for about a year and then ended up really getting out there and knocking on doors for this start-up, sort of upstart guy named Barack Obama, who…

JG: Who’s he?

RP: Was a long shot at that point. Having a blast, man, knocking on doors, talking to voters, getting sort of engaged in political activism and the democratic process; which is thriving here in DC. I mean, we’re the heart of politics. And then the next thing I know, I get a phone call asking me to come join the Obama for America ‘08 crew in Pennsylvania - in Philly. They wanted me to start on a Monday, and I got the phone call on a Thursday. So I literally had to shove everything in a suitcase, in a rental car, and, best decision of my life, move to Philadelphia there to help the team. And just bring my IT ops skills to bear on helping our community organizers win that state and carry 21 electoral votes for the boss.

JG: But if you listen, you have this whole…it’s not just accidental. The technical skills that you have aren’t just… He’s earned Scrum Alliance certifications, PMI, MSCE…all along the way. And he also must have developed some interpersonal skills along the way. Maybe it sits with your political background, but if you take this combination of Yin and Yang, all of a sudden, you get a person with technical skills that can work with the White House, that can work with OMB, that can work with GSA, that can work with HHS. So, I don’t know what’s more important, if it’s your people skills or your technical skills, but I think it’s both. It’s the balance.

RP: Yeah, it’s definitely a really healthy balance there and, these days, when we talk about what used to be New Media and now we’re calling Digital, half of that equation is team-building and interpersonal skills and strategy. So it’s all of the, sort of through, “soft skills” and not the technology at all. You really have to work on assembling the right groups of people and talking your customers through: “How are we going to use all these technology tools, that are changing every minute — there’s a new one every day- to sort of empower and build this arsenal of things that you want to do for your social media presence and what have you.” So it’s very, very important. You can’t just be about the programming and the engineering. Even though that’s absolutely critical and that’s sort of the heart of what we’re building for a product. But if you don’t have a strategy, it’s gonna fail ultimately anyway. So half of it is just technology and tactics, and then the other half is the strategy and the people side of it. So you can’t really have one without the other if you’re gonna be successful.

JG: I keep thinking of parallels in the medical community. Last night, I was giving away some awards for a healthcare IT conference and there were a couple of physicians on stage. Now, physicians, of course, go through grueling education and then they have to know the blood and they have to know so many technical things. But, they have to have a bedside manner. And so you have some physicians who get out away from that human side because maybe they don’t have a bedside manner, and maybe they go into research or something. And so, it’s skill sets that are combined and we had people like Greg Downing on stage last night. This guy’s got an MD and a PhD and he’s got great people skills too. He works with innovation over at HHS, it’s great, so. I wanna talk today about innovation and moving to the Cloud and some of the lessons you’ve learned in this wide background and maybe you can share them with some of our listeners. Now, we’ve had Vivek Kundra sit in that very seat and pound on the table and go, “25 points!” Everybody knows about that and he talks about moving to the Cloud. And for you, who at one time was a lowly government worker — a lowly govvie, and you got your marching orders. And so how did you did you do it? How did you even put those in practice?

RP: Yeah, sure, so that’s a great question and I like to tell the story that we came off of a really successful campaign, grassroots fundraising online, using Twitter for the first time. So some of this stuff hadn’t really existed at that point. Leveraging it in the political aspect was really unheard of. And then, boom, you get to government and the first thing we realize is: “Wow you might as well have taken a 10-year step back in time in terms of technology.” And so Vivek, of course, was the first federal CIO and the “25 Points of Light”, as we call them at this point, have sort of become legendary all on their own.

JG: It is, yeah.

RP: But we needed those orders to get started — a framework of how to do this. My first foray into federal agencies there was with the U.S. Small Business Administration during the height of the recession and the economic recovery when we were in the Recovery Act mode. Just trying to bring some help there in terms of infrastructure and customer relationship management, really, for small businesses. How do you find resources to get these loans that you need to sort of help dig the country out of the hole that we were in. And that was sort of Job #1. It was: go to ground-zero of the recovery and help them with the IT work there. And it was really fun and it was great. We encountered an area with lots of really big on-premise systems and the concept of even getting to the Cloud seemed risky at that point. And it was all about virtualization and data center consolidation. So, things I’m sure your listeners are probably still struggling with, right?

But we had to stand up to those groups and just try to figure out how do we reduce the footprint of data centers writ large and that was step number one. So, we developed a plan there to get SBA out of that (infrastructure) business and implemented a CRM solution there for tracking those small businesses. And did a little bit of virtualization and some of that. But we didn’t quite get to the Cloud by the time I had left in 2011 and then made the jump over to the White House.

And that was where we really picked up traction. At the White House, while it’s a very highly visible, very top tier agency, it’s really pretty small. So it’s about 4,000 employees there. And they have this really special quality where there is a lot of risk tolerance that you wouldn’t think would be necessarily so. But if President Obama, who is the tech-savvy Commander in Chief, is wanting to do this stuff and use iPads and have the Blackberry, that gave us a lot of flexibility to try new things and see if they work or not.

And really so I was able to come in there as a project manager for the CIO at that time, Brook Coangelo, and he just sort of handed me this project of: “Hey, we’ve got a correspondence system here that needs some help. Do you think you can fix it?” And we knew we wanted to get it to the Cloud but partnering with our contracting folks, our lawyers, the security team, and figuring out how you do that in a proper manner, following on under Vivek’s guidelines, was really an interesting and really cool project.

JG: Well, we set the stage to take a break, didn’t we? We’re gonna tease into this break. So, young man walks into a situation, thrown bunch of stuff on his desk: “We gotta do this — we gotta do that. The big dog wants to do this. How are you gonna accomplish it?” So we’re gonna talk about that after the break. That’s a position I think many, many listeners are in. They get to work early, they work late, they’re dedicated, they’re thorough. They really keep up and they have this monumental task tossed on ’em, and now what? Go home and cry? I don’t know, it’s a tough situation. Let’s take a break and come back.

JG: You are listening to Federal Tech Talk with John Gilroy here on Federal News Radio 1500 AM. Our guest today is Rusty Pickens, Digital Platforms for Public Diplomacy at the U.S. Department of State. We had him in the studio ’cause he’s from a humble background. Kind of fought his way up and got all kinds of technical certifications; technical training. Really solid grounding in the bits and bolts and bytes. And he knows it well. However, he has an unusual skill, the ability to get along with people. And he can work and put teams together and accomplish things. Which I think more and more people have to learn how to do. You have to have the Yin and the Yang, you have to know the technical competency, and you have to have some of the people skills as well. One skill that people like to do is like to read more. Maybe they’re listening to the interview going, “Well, gee, this guy has worked at the White House, at State, he knows some stuff maybe I wanna read some more about…“ Have you ever written anything? Maybe our listeners can read or get more details from?

RP: Yeah, sure. So just a quick Google search and there’s a couple. There’s a good blog that I wrote on the White House Blog about correspondence and getting in contact with the President. And then most recently, sharing some more of those lessons learned of how do you get your correspondence system in the Cloud? I partnered with Acumen Solutions there to post that blog. So go check that out, there’s probably more to come. I have a Medium site as well. So there’s gonna be more things being published out there all the time. So hopefully more good things to come. I’m just getting started on it, really.

JG: In my world that’s called Non-domain Content. LinkedIn and Medium is non-domain content and it helps tell the story. And it’s a great story. And the story I wanna tell too is this, I talked about the Yin and Yang and the tech and the people. Tell me about the Salesforce Community of Excellence, so the Community of Excellence. How did you get these wide groups of people together? OMB, GSA, HHS. These are pretty divergent sets of people.

RP: Yeah, sure. So Salesforce kinda became a point of, I wouldn’t say concern, but we were all very interested in it and trying to get started with it. And sort of following along on the coat-tails of some things we were doing at White House pretty well. But we sorta just reached out and cobbled together a very initial coalition of folks there who were interested in getting to Salesforce. But ironing out those security concerns and establishing a relationship with the vendor.

And then, the thing sort of took on life of its own. So in the beginning it was very tactical about: “How do we get this platform at the White House and in use properly to do this really tremendous job?” And then from there, we started partnering with GSA and OMB and sort of making the thing a little more operational. And now, really great stuff is coming out of that. So we’ve got a community of about 200 different federal employees out there, from all walks of life, and all other agencies, interested in doing this. The name of the game is sort of meeting every other month and just sharing best practices. Safe space, no contractors, no salesmen, nobody’s on the air there. And we’re just talking about what we’re doing with the platform and how we’re sort of moving the ball forward.

And then that’s starting to bear some fruit. So in December, we awarded a contract that GSA carried all the water on, that literally awarded a $500 million contract ceiling for Salesforce services for the entire federal government. So that’s a great example of how this organizing ability within the federal space is sort of bearing fruit. So we’re reaching out there and sort of saying,

“We’re having trouble getting services for Salesforce. Let’s take a model we used in our small scale at the White House, put it in the hands of GSA and OMB, and really scale that out federal-wide.”

So I hope to see a lot more of that. And that group is just getting started and sort of engaging on, like: “What is our roadmap looking like going on into FY17 and ’18 here.”

JG: Let me, kinda sketch this out for some listeners. Let’s say you’re working over at Commerce. And you have to manage correspondence. Now I know and you know that there’s some sensitivities to correspondence because it could be subject to FOIA; subject to discovery. So you have to be very, very careful about it. There’s all kinds of solutions. You can use bar napkins, you can use 4x6" cards, you can do it efficiently. And so if you are listening to this interview, or you maybe read one of his blog posts, and you say, “My boss just told me we have to manage our correspondence more effectively. I don’t wanna just jump into anything.” What you can do is, you can go to one of these Community of Excellence meetings and you’re just there with other govvies. And the doors are locked and there’s no jerkfaces like John Gilroy taking notes. And so you can say, “The problem I have is with digital signatures.” Or you can say: “Hey, Rusty, you don’t know what you’re talking about. My problem is with this specific move to the Cloud where we can’t do that.” And so, all of a sudden, you get 200 people with shared experiences and then everyone wins. I think it’s a big win.

RP: Yeah, and correspondence is something that we’ve learned is a common problem. Every agency’s struggling with it. Everybody has to do it. But the technology, frankly John, has been solved.

“We’ve done this. There are some really good integrators and Cloud platforms that know how to do this work.”

JG: So if you’re listening to this podcast, this radio interview, how can we find out about this Salesforce Community of Excellence?

RP: Sure, so the first thing to do is check out GSA Labs. So that’s the way to get started. That’s where we are organizing the community. You can go out and find that and self-sign up. We’re going to verify that you’re a federal employee, or a state or local, even. And then beyond that we’ll just get you invited to the next meet-up. We try to do them every other month and it’s sort of heavily email-based at this point, but we’re gonna start to do more of that and hopefully grow a little bit bigger online presence there. But the easiest way is just come to one of the meet-ups or dial in virtually and check it out with us.

JG: And because this is radio, I’m asking you to repeat it again. So what would they have to type in to find it?

RP: GSA Labs. So that is where we are organizing everything, GSA is sort of the broker for technology.

JG: So you go to Google, type in “GSA Labs” and they can sign up there. And the question: “Are you frustrated?” “Yes.” “Okay, you’re a govvie.” That’s the screen!

RP: We take all frustrated government employees, yeah.

JG: I go to events all the time. I was at one last night. And the best thing about events is that if you’re sitting in the audience and someone next to you, let’s say, Cristina Miller, raises her hand and she says: “Well, I have this problem with digital signatures.” You go, “Well, I have the same problem too. But I’m not saying anything about it.” And all of a sudden I can find out what her answer is and go, “Well, maybe I’ll take…and I’m not the only one.” I think that’s the best thing about small groups, is that I’m not the only one, and maybe the big mouths in there contribute, but there’s always people in the back room who come up to me afterwards and go: “Well, I didn’t wanna say anything, but we had the exact same problem, and where can we find, and how did you do it, Rusty?” That’s what they wanna know.

RP: Oh sure. And it doesn’t have to have anything to do with the headliners, HHS, GSA, OMB, White House, right? Just making those people-to-people connections among the group have been tremendous. So all of a sudden we’re starting to self-organize and little teams are doing other things. You can’t cover it all in a two-or-three-hour segment every other month, really. So having other demos, going to other agencies, bringing in the people who are smart in their respective areas, contracting, security, those are two common themes, right? It’s just sort of taken on a life of its own and it’s really nice to see how that grows when good people, good government workers, are trying to do better things to move the ball forward a little bit on technology.

JG: I was at an event the Hamilton Loft with just 15 CISOs, security officers, and me. And they made me sign a piece of paper, Chatham House Rules. Is that, “John, you gotta shut up about this.” And so I shut up and I learned if you shut up you get to learn a whole lot more than when you talk.

RP: Sounds like security people, though, “Of course! Here, sign this NDA, John.”

JG: ’Cause they were talking about sensitive things, but they could share in a room like that. And I think that’s the strength of, “Well, I’m not the only one who has this challenge. And my boss wants to move to this. But I don’t want to make a mistake. I’ll let old Rusty make a mistake.” Now tell me about your mistakes, Rusty. But you haven’t made a whole lot of mistakes, must be ’cause you keep up with technology. So what kind of stuff do you read? People are going, “Okay, this guy’s had some success.” What do you read to keep up?”

RP: Sure, so, I will offer upfront that it’s a challenge. Technology is changing really fast. And all these sort of Silicon Valley-based startups, it’s a new world everyday. So for me, as a political, I always start my day with POLITICO Playbook. The best/worst thing about Washington DC. Just keeping up with the politics and what’s going on. So that’s where I start. And then from there, the rest of it is just completely being obsessed with Twitter. Following a whole lot of different folks out there like Fast Company or Vox.com and some of those places. The Next Web. Inc.com. Some of those other outlets that are really talking about what’s going on in technology that may not be specific to the federal government, but maybe how can we think about applying that over here? And then from there, it’s like following Medium and watching Meet the Press and just getting plugged in in all of these different ways. But you have to be a voracious reader and then you’re gonna find that little nugget here and there that you wanna jump in to and expound on. At least in my experience, my short experience, six years here in the federal side, private sector’s probably gotten there first ’cause they have a lot more leeway to experiment. And then you can take those things and apply it to government and scale it out.

JG: I use Twitter as almost like a filter. Years ago, I’d go to a library and go to the librarian and she would say, “Well, this is where you start, here, here and here,” and I didn’t know those were in the stacks. And in graduate school you had, “I didn’t know these stacks or these stacks. I didn’t know we had that.” And I think with Twitter, you can filter through and go, “Oh, so Colin Powell is at an event? Now, what that guy have to say? I respect that guy. What’s he have to say or he doesn’t have to say?”, or, “I don’t respect that guy,” and you can filter it so you don’t have to waste time reading a blog post or Wired Magazine and it’s almost like a filter for a lot of people, I think.

RP: Yeah. That’s why I love Twitter so much, and some people still today, they come to me and they say, “How’d you get started with this?” But if you’ll just spend a little time curating who you follow on Twitter, the news that you want to get is gonna come right to you. So that’s the greatest thing about it is you follow the things that you’re interested in and the stuff just shows up in your feed. You don’t have to read it all, but it’s coming to you instead of you having to go on search and find it.

JG: Well, last night I was at an event. This big guy, six foot seven, big beard, came up to me and said, “Hey, you should start following me on Twitter. Why did you stop following me on Twitter?” And I was thinking, “Because you’re boring. Because you don’t say anything that moves the ball.” But I couldn’t tell him that. I said, “Well, I have to go back and review your tweets or your retweets,” because if it’s all self-promotional, how boring is that? “Hey, I’m the greatest. Hey, I’m the greatest.” Nope, Unfollow that guy.

RP: You have to do a little housekeeping here and there and unfollow some of that stuff. So, if you have a Twitter handle: retweet interesting things. Make sure that you’re contributing to the actual dialogue out there. But it’s not that hard.

JG: So well, I’m gonna take a break and come back. I think we talk about challenges that you faced and how you overcame them. And maybe some of the challenges that my listeners face and maybe some learning points or lessons learned that you can help our listeners maybe accomplish some things that they didn’t think were even possible.

JG: Welcome back to Federal Tech Talk with John Gilroy here on Federal News Radio 1500 AM. In the studio, Rusty Pickens, Digital Platforms for Public Diplomacy at the U.S. Department of State. Quite a background for this young man. Kinda came up from nothing; from a support desk. Got many certifications, hands-on training, moved up and up and up, experience at the White House, experience at the Department of State, and he was instrumental at putting together a Community of Excellence to help who? My listeners. That’s who we’re trying to help, my listeners. If we can prevent our listeners from calling suicide hotline then we have a big, fat success here. That’s all about. Before we took to break we talked about Twitter, and I forgot to ask you what your Twitter handle is, Rusty. What is it?

RP: Sure. It’s @RPickens, P-I-C-K-E-N-S, and it’s a grab bag. There’s gonna be a lot of technology in it and please bear with the occasional cat GIF. So if you see that out there, but I hope we try to be informative.

JG: It’s timely too. This morning I went through all your tweets, in my show prep.

RP: Oh, no, I’m on the record.

JG: And Obama is in Flint, Michigan — it’s right there. You’ve got a quote from Colin Powell right there. If you want someone to filter your information, have Rusty filter it. Why not? Hey, have Rusty do it. It’s like remember the TV commercial? Have Mikey and see if it’s poison. Have Rusty eat it and see if it’s poison and if it’s any good he’s gonna put it up on Twitter so that’s what I think the listeners should use it for, just as like a place to filter information. I don’t think you’ve been successful by just waltzing into easy situations and having it handed to you. So, tell me about challenges you’ve encountered and how you’ve overcome some of those challenges in moving to the Cloud?

RP: Yeah, sure. Gosh, that’s a really big topic, John, and we explore it every other month on the community side. I think two recurring themes that we see a lot are contracting and security. I’ll tackle security first. We’ve come so far. There’s the FedRAMP Program now, risk management, that gives you an 85–90% solution to just be sure that whatever data you’re putting in the system is gonna be safe. So, most of the big-name vendors out there are pursuing that certification on their own. So you can know that yes, it’s okay to put government data in the Cloud. That conversation, we almost have to have every time we’re talking about a new Cloud product. So, lean on FedRAMP, lean on other people who have done it. The technology challenge has largely been solved for anything that’s sort of even pseudo-sensitive data out on the Cloud.

RP: So, security is always a challenge. Contracting is also a challenge as well. I mentioned earlier the GSA Salesforce Integration BPA that’s available as of December, so that is a powerhouse of six different vendors out there. They’re all really high level certified, vouched for by the platform. You can be sure that it’s gonna be cost-effective and also very high-quality work. The third part I think we’re gonna focus on probably in the upcoming months is licensing. We joke with Salesforce that it takes a PhD in Salesforce licensing, sometimes, to figure all this stuff out. My recommendation to people is, partner with a service provider first. Have them help you define the solution. If you don’t know anything about Salesforce or Amazon or Microsoft, go out there and work with an integration team and have them target a solution for you. And then you know what to buy so you don’t have to worry about wasting any money and that kind of stuff. So licensing is still a little bit tough and we’re working with the vendor on making it easier to streamline that process so that it’s easier to figure out.

JG: I’m trying to think. My wife and I went to San Francisco last year and so we asked friends who lived in the area where we should go. It’s like, “I’m not gonna go to any guidebook, I’m going to ask personally.” And I think that’s the advantage of working with trusted local companies, you can sit down there and you can have an honest discussion and say, “Well, what’s the best deal with this? What options do I have? I’m confused about these options.” And even in the commercial world they’re confused about options. There are companies that are sprouting up right now to help you manage your services with Amazon web, help your services with Salesforce, and that’s their sole reason for being is just to help you manage your services. So, if you’re a govvie and asking this question, it’s not an unusual question to ask, it’s what people all over the world are asking. It’s just trying to understand, “Okay, Cloud. Now, what are the purchasing options?” And it’s just… It is tough, isn’t it?

RP: Yeah, it’s a very wide world and what I’ve found is that some of these folks, especially the ones here on this new BPA, have a vested interest. So there’s plenty of work to go around. They’re not trying to sell you vaporware. They know that if they come in and partner with you there’s a win-win scenario here of if they do good work and they do right by the government, they’re gonna get that next contract, or that next task order, or the next project. So, it’s been my experience that they’re not trying to sell you extra licenses and they really want to target what you need at this moment. And even though sometimes, and this sounds a little surprising, there have been tough conversations where they’ve come to me and said, “No, you’re buying too much” or, “You’re doing the wrong thing here. And yeah, we could go ahead and let you do that and spend that money. But as taxpayers, we’re not gonna really do that in good conscience.” So, it’s a very healthy back-and-forth dialogue and the way I think about it is a nice triangle here of the government/federal needs, the systems integrator on one side, and then the platform team on the other side. And if you can keep that relationship healthy in a nice back-and-forth there, you’re going to get to a good solution very easily.

JG: And I wanna bounce back to this Community of Excellence that you put together. If you have 200, 50, 60 govvies in a room, the doors are all locked, no salespeople around, you can say, “Well, tell me about ABC company. Did they lie to you? Oh, really? Tell me about GXA company, what about ABC, ABD?” And this is where a lot of reputations are made, is by mouth-to-mouth referrals on, “Well, I couldn’t put this in writing but let me tell you something, that old Gilroy guy steered me bad when it came to getting a used car,” or whatever it happens to be and I think… And this is really the strength of face-to-face networking is that there’s some information that’s not conveyed in the email and not conveyed even on the telephone but it’s conveyed face-to-face or through a nod, look of an eye or a look down or… “I wouldn’t do that.” It’s great, isn’t it?

RP: Yeah, sure and that’s the number one selling point for this group is it is a safe space for government people. So, my co-chair and I, Megan Schmith from GSA, we really just encourage people to talk to each other. And so sometimes you need the GSA perspective if this thing is really, really big and you’ve gotta do 10,000 licenses, or whatever. Or maybe you need the White House perspective. Or maybe you need FDA’s perspective. Everybody has a little different take and a little different mission, but you’re gonna be able to find people who are in a similar circumstance to you and you can get to the right place ultimately there very quickly.

JG: Let’s pound away at this, if you’re listening to this interview and there’s snow on the ground, how can you find out about this Community of Excellence? What do you search?

RP: Yeah, sure, so again look for GSA Labs, just do a quick Google search, and that’s where we’re organizing the community. You can self-sign up. We’re gonna verify that you’re from a federal or a state and local government domain out there. And then get you plugged-in so you’ll get the next invite to the next group. And then periodically we do things like special sessions around contracting and security here and there. So, for example, we just did a special session for the Salesforce World Tour that was in DC last week. But really bringing in some of those folks from the platform side to talk about us or talk to us in a safe space with government about new offerings that maybe aren’t publicly available just yet.

JG: It just dawned on me that I have Gene Kim in the studio next week and he’s the world-famous guy for Agile. If I could get him to speak to your group the next time he’s in town, “Hey, Gene, the next time you’re in town, hey, have a little coffee with these folks.” And he’s not a government contractor, he’s completely different from the government community, but if you got him in a room with just 50 or 60 govvies, and locked the door, and said, “Okay, Gene, what’s the real deal with this, how can we learn this?” I tell you, that’s really magic.

RP: Yeah, powerful stuff. It’s funny that you mention Agile. So, Agile’s sort of the secret sauce out here. You’re moving these things to the Cloud, you can’t really do that in the old PMLC or Waterfall way of doing things that we have been. So it’s cultural transformation and moving over to the Agile methodology as you go to these platforms, because the Cloud really demands that. It’s so flexible and it can move so quickly and that’s been a challenge for some of the agencies. So, periodically, we’ve had demos or quick presentations about, “How did you implement Agile in your agency?”, and walking through some of that. But it’d be great to hear from the subject-matter expert in the field, right?

JG: It would, and this is the big dog, yeah. And you gotta catch these guys when they’re going through town, “Hey, if you’re coming through town, why don’t you stop by?” And they’ll all do it, but you just have to ask them.

RP: And you’d just have so many people who’d be interested.

JG: And of course, and these meetings are free, and they’re only morning meetings, so you can show up, get a cup of coffee and not miss any work. I think it’s a wonderful idea. I’m going to read a quote from your Twitter feed and then we’re gonna go to break. Here’s a quote I found from your Twitter feed from a guy named Colin Powell, of all people. What he said was,

“Agencies aren’t in the business of managing IT operations. They are here to serve citizens.”

My, my, my, that’s an interesting concept, serve citizens. Well, to think about that, we take a break and come back, talk more about overcoming hurdles and burdens in moving to the Cloud.

JG: Welcome back to Federal Tech talk with John Gilroy here on Federal News Radio 1500 AM. In the studio, world-famous Rusty Pickens from Oklahoma to Washington, DC all the way. He works with the Digital Platforms for Public Diplomacy at the U.S. Department of State. What’s your Twitter handle again? We gotta find out, you got some good tweets, buddy.

RP: Sure, @RPickens, P-I-C-K-E-N-S.

JG: Yeah, and before the break I read a quote that I wouldn’t have found this. I couldn’t have read federal… How many things can you read? I mean, there’s a certain number of hours in the day. You gotta eat; you gotta sleep. But if you can have them filtered, and this is a great quote from, I think it’s really good, especially applying to some of the frustrations that my listeners have. “No, no, maybe it’s not your job to pull a cable; maybe it’s not your job to understand all the rules for firewalls.” Maybe someone else has done it before. Why not reuse the lessons that someone else has learned and you can worry about serving your citizens? Rusty, what I do with every one of my guests, is I have them take a 10-question test to find out if they’re in fact a card-carrying nerd. And we’re gonna give you this test, buddy, and we’ll see how you compare with some of your other colleagues.

RP: No pressure, okay.

JG: No pressure here, no pressure. Number one: Do you have an Instagram account?

RP: I do, but it’s never had one photo posted to it. So I don’t think you can count it, okay.

JG: Oh, that doesn’t count, that doesn’t count. So how many cellphones have you impulsively bought for yourself in the last year?

RP: I haven’t bought any for myself, but I have two from the State Department.

JG: No, no, no, no, you’re not a nerd. Do you have a personal Twitter feed?

RP: Yep, @RPickens, you got that one.

JG: Have you ever used Blab?

RP: Blab? No, sorry.

JG: What kinda smartphone do you have?

RP: IPhones.

JG: Okay, what’s most popular app in that guy?

RP: Gosh, so the new one that I really like is Swiftkey, so it’s a sort of drop-in keyboard that helps you text and get things done faster. I have fat thumbs, so it’s very helpful.

JG: Fat finger. Fat finger that stuff in. So if we break into your house tonight, how many tablet devices do we see floating around there?

RP: Gosh, just one: an iPad.

JG: Just one? You’re not much of a nerd, buddy. You’re getting weak on this nerd scale. You’re more normal than nerdy, I tell you.

RP: I have a really big gaming computer, does that count?

JG: No, no, no, no, no, no, that’s okay. So when was your most recent post on a social networking site?

RP: Gosh, so probably the Correspondence Blog last week. If not, something on Twitter in the last couple of hours, probably.

JG: And looking at your wrist there, when is your Apple watch due? Is it in two weeks or?

RP: No Apple watch, I’m sorry. I haven’t gotten on the bandwagon yet.

JG: No Apple watch? Well, you’re way too normal for this audience.

RP: Maybe I’m a normal guy, yeah.

JG: Last book you read, was it electronic or paper?

RP: It was paperback.

JG: Well, I don’t wanna call up your boss or anything but, you’re a nerd wannabe, buddy. You’re a nerd wannabe.

RP: Oh no, why? I need a self-improvement plan, John.

JG: Oh yeah, order one of those $17,000 Apple watches, that’s the first thing you can do. You get a lot of respect in the federal community there. You walk up in the community meeting with one of those watches and they’re gonna go, “Hey, this guy came up from nothing. He worked his way up to here? There’s no way.”

RP: They’ll think I’m crazy.

JG: Yeah, that would confirm it then.

RP: Yeah, I confirm it, yes. They already suspect it.

JG: Well, you’ve seen a lot, and done a lot, and I think you’ve overcome a lot of challenges. And so this is really the crystal ball time. Okay, five, eight years from now down the road. We’re going have some transitions here in the next few months, we know that. We know the calendar, 2016, the big transition. Is it gonna be a peat and repeat? Is it gonna be more of the same? Whether you’re Republican or Democrat, whatever we’re gonna say when Obama came in, there was a lot of change. Things changed and we moved to the Cloud and done a lot of things so, where do you see the whole idea of moving to the Cloud, Cloud security, agile development, working with govvies, helping them change. Where’s it all gonna head in the next few years?

RP: Yeah, sure, so I think if you just look back on the last six or eight years now, John. It was really an evolution from client server to all this, I guess we’re headed towards the Internet of Things now, they call it, right. The government is perpetually lagging a little bit behind and that’s okay. I think the country wants the government to be big and stable and move a little slower. So we need to take things that private sector’s tried and then employ those in a stable manner. I’d like to see the government get to a place where we’re really using Cloud properly. So, no more on-premise data centers, no more big IT contracts that the government tries to be good at, security, or development or infrastructure. It’s funny that you mention Secretary Powell’s quote there. The government’s in the business of provided these services and these basic things out to the citizens of the country. We don’t need to be super great at all the very little niche market things, software development, some of that stuff. Let other people handle that. Let the Cloud service providers handle the infrastructure and the security and keeping the lights on for this technology. Because they’re good at that, they have incentive in that.

I’ve had a little bit of a soap-boxing, you’ll notice some of this if you read some of my blogs but,

“What would we do if we weren’t spending all that money and time and effort on infrastructure and security and contracting. If you really put that money and effort and time into making the citizen services that we provide smoother and a better user experience for those folks.”

That’s really where I hope the government is gonna get in the next couple of administrations now. Because we have the tools to do it. And we sort of got a foothold in the Cloud and we have varied examples and a spread spectrum of stuff out there. But consolidating and doing it right and well. And sort of putting the user, the citizen, in the driver’s seat of getting to this stuff quickly and easily. Making it like TurboTax but for every other avenue of government, regardless of which agency you’re working through.

JG: I don’t wanna bore my listeners but I wanna repeat, how can we find out what this Community of Excellence again? What do you have to type into Google?

RP: Yep, sure. So look for GSA Labs and there’s a community out there and you can sign up and get the invites to the next event.

JG: Great, great. GSA Labs, that’s interesting. So you’ve been in bunches of different situations. They toss you in there; you rise to the top. They toss you over here; you rise to the top. Your most recent toss was tossed to the State Department. “So, here’s the new guy, we’ll just throw him in the middle of the fight over here.” So tell us about your challenges at State and where you’re at right now, and how you maybe applied the lessons in the past to what you’re doing now.

RP: Yeah sure, so this, I’d spent four years there at the White House and we were doing a really great job with Cloud and sort of citizen engagement. The next challenge came along, and I rejoined some old White House colleagues who had moved on to the State Department. We’re in a really cool bureau called IIP, the International Information Programs, and they have one purpose in life and that’s: give tools and really good content out to our diplomats. Supporting public diplomacy from the back end, like, “Here’s the things that we’re gonna give you to do, your social media strategy” and some of that stuff. So, taking my skills and experience that I learned at White House for CRM, and correspondence, and public engagement, and dropping that into a global presence was an awesome challenge that I could not refuse.

But we’re just getting started. So I’ve joined another agency now and the State Department is really big and they’ve got a lot of stuff going globally. And so it was a little bit of a wake-up call to see just how big this thing is and it takes a while to move an agency like that. So we’re just getting started and we’re approaching it in a way that I would recommend others approach it: pick a smaller, lower visibility project, and get your toe dipped in the water of Cloud and Agile out there and that’s exactly what we’re doing for public diplomacy. So, information that’s not really sensitive. Very large audiences all over the world. People who are interested in American cultures and values. And just engaging with them, but doing that in a nice Cloud-friendly, digital first, mobile first kind of way. So we’re piloting that and we’re actively moving it through it. We hope to have some success under our belt come December and January and then pass the baton off to the next team and hopefully, they can build on the successes that we’ve gained for them.

JG: A quick win, that’s interesting. Big news in my world is that six billion hits on Google every day, we know that, but what’s interesting is that most of the searches now are mobile. And so what Google’s doing as far as search engine optimization going is they’re penalizing you if you’re not a responsive site, if you’re not a mobile site. And so if it’s Rusty’s Donuts, hey, Rusty’s Donuts is gonna make sure it’s mobile friendly. He wants to sell donuts. Sure. Now Rusty at the State Department, if you have an initiative with providing information to people oversees, what about responsive design? How does that all fit into your plan?

RP: Yeah, oh, sure, so that’s a great question. So my project is the CRM project and sort of the email back end of all that and those things are baked in the sauce. So when we send out an email, it’s nicely branded, it looks like the government, there’s a consistent look and feel. But it’s also responsive. So it’s factored to any device that you’re looking at. The Salesforce tech that we’re running the platform on is using Lightning, so that’s their new user interface. You build a thing once and it looks the same way in Safari or Internet Explorer or on any other browser or computer.

JG: That is important.

RP: Yeah, totally.

“It’s portable across all those presentation layers and it doesn’t mean I have to build the same thing nine times, right. “

But our sister project is another team in my bureau that’s running the embassy websites and so they’re doing the same thing. They’re collapsing all this into a really nice Cloud solution and making it responsive so that everything looks the same. That stuff’s bubbling up to the top of the search engines. And it’s sort of a consistent look and feel, no matter where you’re sort of entering into in experience with the government there looking for this country information.

JG: And maybe five or eight years ago, there would’ve been three vendors competing and one person saying “Chrome’s the best,” one person saying, “This other one’s the best,” and “Ronco’s the best.” But I think if you reach a solution that is responsible in multiple platforms, well then, why reinvent the wheel? Just move on from there and say, “Okay, my job isn’t to evaluate web browsers, because they’re gonna change anyway. Let someone else worry about the change, updating operating systems. My job is to make sure the people in Western Europe are informed about what we think about World Cup,” or whatever happens to be… Or American football being played in London, that’s probably more important than anything.

RP: Yeah, absolutely.

JG: Yeah, great. So well, we’ve covered a lot of topics today and hopefully we’ve given some listeners some ideas to improve the way they handle Agile software development and maybe handle correspondence and we’ve given many, many places to read and all kinds of support groups. Support groups; that’s what it is. Well, actually it’s a support group.

RP: It’s definitely a support group!

JG: “Hi, my name is Rusty. I survived the government for five years.” “Hi, my name is John.” But it’s really what it is and people are supporting it.

RP: Yeah, “I’m an Agile addict,” yeah.

JG: Yeah. I’ve dialed suicide hotline too and all kinds of problems. Great. I’d like to get you back in a few months and maybe have one of your colleagues. I think Traci (Walker) would like to come in and talk to them too.

RP: Oh, sure. Yeah.

JG: Yeah, maybe come around maybe in six or seven months and…

RP: To talk about Agile Acquisitions.

JG: Agile acquisitions, that’s really important. You’ve been listening to Federal Tech Talk with John Gilroy here on Federal News Radio 1500 AM. In the studio we have Rusty Pickens, Digital Platforms for Public Diplomacy at the U.S. Department of State.

Originally posted to Federal News Radio by John Gilroy on May 17th, 2016.