How workforce priorities shape ICF's modernization strategy

For technology transformation to work well in government, the federal workforce must be at the center of everything that agencies roll out with the assistance of their industry partners.

At least, that is how the government’s overall agenda for improving the user experience says it should work.

In asking ICF’s digital modernization business leader David Birken about where agencies are on their journeys, the people aspect of technology became front-and-center in the conversation.

Birken singled out training of employees as key to helping them be a part of, and perhaps lead, their agencies on the modernization path. That includes how they bring together data from different cloud environments and use it for making decisions.

“It's not enough to clean the data and make it accessible,” Birken told WT. “Whether you're an employee in Washington (D.C.) or on the ground in the field, fighting forest fires out west, everything needs to be in a way that is ready made and ready to go for the workforce so that they can execute it.”

The same idea of being people-centric with tech also applies to how ICF is working with artificial intelligence, particularly with generative AI products that continue to move full-steam ahead.

Can an ICF employee take one of those tools to work? Birken said it depends on the situation and what that staffer wants to do with it.

For instance, ICF’s corporate governance and guidelines spell out some of the places where the tools do not belong. In other circumstances, they can be integrated into already-existing technology offerings that are in step with standards laid out by ICF and the federal government.

“We do a lot of experimentation here, right in our own sandboxes, with our own dummy data,” Birken said. “That's a critical function of any healthy organization that wants to be innovative, so that is a huge investment that we make. It is critical for us to be able to see what's real, what's vaporware.”

In that same interview, ICF’s chief executive John Wasson said the company is looking at several use cases for itself and working with agencies on finding the same.

“We see the potential, both in terms of improving productivity and on the innovation front and we're certainly seeing some federal clients who want to explore the potential impact of AI on our programmatic work,” Wasson said. “Governance is  quite important and we pay attention to that, and we work with our clients to help them think through the governance of AI, how to use it and deploy it responsibly.”

One of ICF’s internal use cases involves the use of chat bots to make information assimilation go faster, while the second sees employees use generative AI to create personas as part of idea testing in more secure spaces.

Birken said the idea is to both better link the tools to mission sets and quickly stand up beta tests to look at how different systems will impact uses and productivity.

“We're able to do that all in a safe and secure space without access to client data , right now that’s a really interesting space that we've been experimenting with.”