The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a new IT Strategic Plan for fiscal year 2024 through 2028, which highlights workforce training, technology modernization, and addressing customer experience challenges as priorities.
According to DHS, the plan will guide the department through the next few years “by serving as the touchstone for [its] modernization efforts.”
“For the first time, we’re fully incorporating workforce diversity, equity & inclusion, customer experience, and responsible use of AI as key parts of our IT strategy at DHS,” DHS Chief Information Officer (CIO) Eric Hysen said in a LinkedIn statement introducing the new plan.
“The plan also lays out how we will continue to build modern, effective, and secure software across the department and use flexible funding vehicles provided to us by Congress in order to modernize our IT portfolio, retire legacy systems, and lead the rest of the Federal government by example in our cybersecurity practices,” he said.
Investing in the DHS IT Workforce
The DHS IT workforce is made up of thousands of IT professionals whom the department considers their “greatest asset.” In its new IT plan, DHS outlines how it plans to invest in “developmental and training opportunities to help employees develop new skills in emerging technical fields.
A key to this effort will be the establishment of a DHS IT Academy, which will create standard technical orientations for all DHS IT employees, develop a rigorous training and rotation program for entry-level hires, and offer upskilling opportunities for employees to learn new and emerging skills.
DHS also highlighted how the department needs to hire more IT professionals on its team to meet expanding needs.
“We will expand partnerships with diverse academic institutions, professional organizations, and communities and strengthen internship, rotation, and developmental programs that promote equitable access to career advancement for all employees. We will also expand our distributed and remote hiring to reach more diverse qualified candidates across the country,” the plan states.
In addition, the plan also highlights DHS’s commitment to fully adopting the Cybersecurity Talent Management System (CTMS). CTMS a cyber-specific personnel system launched in November 2021 has been slow in reaching its hiring goals.
The plan states that DHS will “implement CTMS across all components” and will also expand its use to a “wider array of cybersecurity professionals, to include support for data science, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies.”
Improving CX at DHS
Like many other agencies in the Federal government, ensuring improved customer experience and service delivery is a priority for DHS.
Earlier this month, DHS established a permanent customer experience office, which is part of the DHS CIO office. After President Biden’s 2021 executive order to help improve the quality of customer experience across the Federal government, DHS has been working on improving CX and reducing “processing times for immigration benefits, improved timely access to employment authorization documents, and digitized additional forms.”
The plan highlights several objectives aimed at improving customer experience and service delivery at DHS, including tools for DHS personnel that are accessible and easy to use to ensure efficient service delivery, as well as customer experience designs, including accessibility, that go beyond compliance.
Tech Modernization: Responsible Use of AI
DHS plans to adopt AI technology to transform operations. But as it adopts AI, DHS plans to do so in a responsible manner that will ensure the department’s use of AI is rigorously tested to avoid bias and disparate impact and is explainable to the people DHS serves.
Part of that effort is building an “AI-ready workforce” that has the necessary AI and data skills “to harness AI systems effectively and responsibly and proactively defend against potential AI threats.”
In addition, the plan highlights how DHS plans to develop and enable an AI infrastructure. Under this line of effort, DHS will deploy AI foundation models or common services to connect to external models, along with building operations pipelines to prepare, test, and deploy data for use in machine learning.
“We will update policies to promote responsible AI adoption and explore common procurement actions to give all parts of the department access to modern AI technologies. We will ensure that our AI implementations are interoperable across the department and minimize vendor lock-in in a rapidly evolving space,” the plan says.
