"THE GREATEST CHALLENGE FACING ALL OF US AS WE
MOVE FORWARD WITH TECHNOLOGIES THE CLOUD
ENABLES—ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND MACHINE
LEARNING IN PARTICULAR—IS OUR IMAGINATION."
computing is being widely adopted across all jurisdictions of
government for every imaginable workload with meaningful
impact. We see this adoption directly at AWS with more than
6,500 government agencies, 11,000 academic institutions, and
more than 29,000 nonprofits around the world utilizing our
cloud platform for their digital transformation initiatives.
CITIZENS AND AGENCY STAFF REAP THE
BENEFITS OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION.
Citizens are able to directly benefit from an agency’s digital
transformation initiatives. The Centers for Medicare &
Medicaid Services (CMS), for example, tapped cloud to
better understand how its funding was being used and
whether treatment was reaching the correct individuals:
in particular, the vulnerable populations covered under
Medicaid and the Child Health Insurance Program.
In the past, CMS was providing funding to the states, but it
didn’t have detailed data on how states were distributing the
funding nor who was benefiting from it. At AWS, we worked
with CMS to pull together relevant data, and today, with all
of that information, CMS can now answer questions such as,
in a locale, how many below-poverty pregnant women are
getting the right prenatal care? CMS is able to look at whether
or not the right people are obtaining mental health coverage,
or whether those that need opioid treatment have access to the
funding they need to obtain it. Identifying and assimilating
available and relevant data via digital transformation—data
that heretofore was filed and sitting idly—enabled CMS to
more effectively understand and reach target populations.
CLOUD IS A CENTRAL ASPECT OF WHAT’S
MAKING THESE TRANSFORMATIONS
POSSIBLE FOR GOVERNMENT AGENCIES.
In minutes, an agency or department can now spin up
resources and gain quick, efficient access to technologies
previously more challenging to utilize. We are seeing
organizations able to iterate their applications and
workloads at greater speed and efficiency, ultimately
delivering more responsive service to citizens. Faster,
more efficient, and better service is the bottom line.
20 • CESGovernment.com
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is another
example where cloud migration is making a difference. USCIS
processes large amounts of information for citizens each
day. In order to improve and expedite processes, USCIS has
tapped cloud resources to implement a DevOps environment,
and regularly—almost daily—USCIS rolls out new code
aimed at improving operations and better serving citizens.
The cloud is also helping to set the stage for future
initiatives and innovations—artificial intelligence
and machine learning, to name two of great interest
to IT and mission professionals everywhere.
Only a few years ago, machine learning was expensive, and
agencies required a specialized workforce of data scientists
and others in order to implement it. But new products, like
Amazon SageMaker, make it possible for software developers
without specialized skills to implement and maintain impactful
machine learning initiatives for agencies. Indeed, it is an
exciting time to work with government IT organizations
in identifying new applications that can improve both
service and mission performance—applications enabled
by harnessing the cloud and its expansive capabilities.
Already, government organizations are putting machine
learning to use to improve citizen experiences. In Colorado,
for example, a Congressman whose staff was overwhelmed
with the need to transcribe each constituent call participated in
a pilot of a machine learning tool on AWS that automatically
transcribed calls. The result was that it cut the time necessary
to transcribe by a full minute per call, a number that amounted
to more than 20 hours of staff time during the 16-day pilot.
As digital transformation initiatives take hold, however, and
new tools and capabilities are introduced, it won’t be a simple
task for government leaders to ensure they’re effectively
putting the tools to use. Throughout the federal government,
agencies are establishing commercial cloud enterprise-
wide governance models, standard operating procedures,
and acquisitions to make it easy for any program area to
quickly and securely use the best-of-breed technologies.
These models and procedures are important to maximize
both the impact and value of cloud migration strategies.