Stuart McGuigan, chief information officer at the State Department, said a new “reimagine taskforce” completed a 90-day sprint to explore ways on how the agency could apply lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic to address information technology challenges, Federal News Network reported Friday.
“We can’t lose our agile and iterative approach to learning and continuous improvement,” McGuigan said Friday during an ACT-IAC event. “What things do we find remain barriers to effective flexible workforces that, with a little focus, we can remove and prioritize those more than maybe they’ve been prioritized in the past.”
The State Department had invested in cloud platforms prior to the pandemic and McGuigan said the move enabled the agency to improve identity management, provide remote employees access to emails and virtually onboard 430 personnel.
Michael Mestrovic, deputy CIO at the State Department, said the agency’s bureau of information resource management adopted an Agile approach to develop and field 10 applications during the pandemic’s early phases, which helped the agency repatriate U.S. citizens overseas.
