OPM tries a shift-left approach to anticipating the costs of new tech projects

Melvin Brown: Well, we just finished our two-year sprint to the cloud where we’ve moved about 90% of our applications to the cloud. And now our focus over the next couple of years is going to be around modernization and optimization. How do we get the max that we can out of our cloud investment? How do we optimize at scale? And then how do we reimagine or modernize our applications with a focus on AI and envisioning what that application will look like now as we reimagine that in an AI environment.

Tom Temin: So this is something you had to do in that order, get them to the cloud, then work in that way rather than the other way around?

Melvin Brown: Correct. We had to get things into the cloud so that we can take advantage of cloud services. And so now that we in the cloud, we can now take advantage of services that we could not have taken advantage of when we were in an operating environment.

Tom Temin: And to optimize in the cloud, does that means spend control, data flow control and also functionality updates?

Melvin Brown: Yeah, it’s a little bit of both. And so it’s becoming cost-aware. And so now, we’ve adopted what we call our FinOps Framework, which is an open-source framework for cloud optimization. And within that framework, we’re using what we call cost aware. And so that’s moving cost. It’s shifting at left such that now at the form of ideation, when we’re starting to ideate around a problem, we’re starting to think about what is that going to cost us. And so then we can now have a better idea about the cost of that solution. Once we start to build and deliver that. So that’s one strategy. The other strategy is how do we start to refactor existing applications that are already in the cloud so that we can optimize that spending and get it down. And then the last thing that we’re looking at is around our ability to get to unit cost economics. And so I’ll use USA Jobs for an example. What we’re trying to do right now is reimagine or reenvision what that would look like in a future state so that we can determine what the cost of hire looks like. And then with that unit cost economics, how do we lower the cost to hire so that we could start to maybe now bundle our services going forward and deliver more value for our customers and stakeholders?

Tom Temin: And you mentioned artificial intelligence is something you’re using to optimize in the cloud. What is that all about?

Melvin Brown: So right now, one of the things that we were focusing on, from an AI perspective, is we’re looking at how do we take our legacy code or how we’ve got mainframes, and so how do we take that legacy mainframe code and optimize it now in the cloud? And so we’re going to be exploring using artificial intelligence as a way to do code conversion and putting that into the cloud and then decommissioning our mainframe hardware going forward.

Tom Temin: Right, because the number of lines of code, the number of execution cycles is sometimes less with the legacy code. And once you’re in the cloud and you’re paying for cycles, does that increase the cost?

Melvin Brown: Well, we know one thing’s for certain, it’s going to decrease the cost around just the hardware itself. What we’re still trying to figure out is, one, what does that optimization look like? Getting rid of code that hasn’t been used in years. And so taking away that kerning code and getting down to just the core code and code functionality that’s going to be used to deliver that business application. In addition to reimagining what that would look like going forward, the biggest challenges that we see are going to be our existing APIs and data connections that we have to make sure we get those right going forward. But that’s pretty much where we are. We’re kind of in the early stages of that but that’s the direction that we want to start going.

Tom Temin: And you don’t hear the word business process reengineering very much. But if you are going to refactor code, isn’t that the time at which you should say, ‘Well, let’s think about how we’re doing this in the first place before just converting the code that’s been running for 30 years.’

Melvin Brown: That is correct. And so understanding the new business process and the new business pain points, if you will, and understanding what are those key pain points to the business and how do we alleviate those pain points with a new or reimagined code set going forward?

Tom Temin: All right. We’re speaking with Melvin Brown. He is the deputy CIO at the Office of Personnel Management. And you have also been dealing in the low-code no-code zone, which is actually low-coding, no-coding because code is always produced. Why is that and what are you seeing the benefits of?

Melvin Brown: So there’s a couple of things. I think the biggest benefit to us is help us to get to scale very quickly with some of our mundane back-office support services. And so even though these services aren’t necessarily delivering to our customers, improving how we operate and manage internally with some of these low-code solutions, even around our governance model for some of our approvals for acquisitions and meeting off our obligation around reviewing the acquisitions that are $250,000 and above. We’ve now taken what was a manual paper-based process and we’ve digitized that in a way now that is automated. And regardless of where I am, I don’t have to sign anything manually anymore. I don’t have to manage it in my email anymore. And now we’ve got a set of data and an archive strategy to where we can go back historically and look at what our acquisitions were, what are our costs, what approvals have been made. And that’s all because of that low-code environment that we have.

Tom Temin: It sounds like a lot of IT shops are like the children of the shoemaker, that your own processes are kind of antiquated, signing paper documents, paper workflows, that kind of thing that you’re trying to get around.

Melvin Brown: That is correct. When, we first took on this project, sad to say that we were still before COVID routing around the signatures in a manila folder and that was kind of shocking to me. Then when COVID hit, they just took that manual process and moved it into email. And so now we’ve taken what would have been gone from a manual to an email to now a digitized process in a low-code environment that has now streamlined our governance around how we invest in our acquisitions.

Tom Temin: And one of the ways that OPM touches every employee, of course, eventually is the figuring of their annuity when they retire. And this is a process that causes a lot of pain. What is the status of modernizing that, of automating that? I mean, some people have very complicated employment histories in and out of the government or many different agencies. Is it automatable?

Melvin Brown: It is. So I can say that we have a great partnership with our retirement services colleagues. We’ve got an IT modernization road map that we’ve put together with them. We just recently launched a pilot that’s coming to an end about our online retirement application, which is designed to allow federal employees to submit their application electronically now, thus streamlining that part of the operation. We’re still in the middle of that pilot getting our lessons learned. And so we’re going to be iterating on that going forward with the goal of a true end-to-end automation of the retirement services process.

Tom Temin: Yeah, because you know, someone just to make it up maybe 30 years ago, they spent 10 years as a career in the military uniform. Well, then they left and then they came back as a civilian in one of the civilian agencies. And I mean, this is how complicated it gets. What would be incumbent upon the original agencies to help you automate that or is that something that you can make APIs to the Army from 30 years ago?

Melvin Brown: Well, I think as I said earlier, we’re still in the early stages of this pilot. Data is going to be a key. Yes, there will have to be APIs that are going to be built, but that is all a part of the design of retirement services modernization that we create an end-to-end process to streamline that operations for our retirees.

Tom Temin: And let’s talk about the front end of this USA.gov that you mentioned in the beginning. I haven’t looked at it in a couple of years, but it can be a challenging website. CX Front, what’s going on there?

Melvin Brown: We are recently working on launch what is going to be. We just recently launched our one OPM, which as our new intranet. We got approval from the TMF board to redesign an OPM.gov site. So OPM.gov coming soon.

Tom Temin: Technology Modernization Fund.

Melvin Brown: That is correct. We used technology modernization funding about a couple of years ago now to redo and relook at how we do OPM.gov. And so that’s going to be coming soon.

Tom Temin: And you’re also doing a few things on the talent front.

Melvin Brown: Absolutely. I mean, one of the one of our major initiatives was around our intern program. I mean, when we took over, our average age of employees was somewhere around the mid-50s. And now we’ve gotten that down to below 50. And we’ve done that through our early career talent strategies around our intern program. And so we’ve been able to, successfully our first year, we brought in about 18 interns and we’ve been able to convert just about half of them now to federal service. One of the focuses that we want to try to partner with our HR colleagues around is extending that now to high schoolers. And so we want to start to get that talent even earlier so that we start to continue to build a pipeline of talent coming in.

Tom Temin: How long have you been a federal employee?

Melvin Brown: A little over 30 years now.

Tom Temin: So you’re going to be looking at that annuity piece someday, but you got a few years to go.

Melvin Brown: I’ve got a few years to go. Even though I’m eligible to go. I can go today if I need to. But right now the job’s not done. We still got a lot of work to do and I want to see it through.