“While some agencies scrambled to scale up their IT infrastructure as mandatory telework became the new normal — at least for a few months — the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services haven’t let the coronavirus pandemic slow down momentum on IT modernization.”
“As part of that modernization agenda, the agency’s Office of Information Technology will hold an ‘upskilling summit’ Wednesday to encourage employees to take courses in human-centered design, product management, cloud technology and cybersecurity.”
“CMS Chief Information Officer Rajiv Uppal, a former digital services expert at the U.S. Digital Service, said the upskilling summit aims to build a workforce of ‘continuous learners.’”
“’We want to make sure that we are providing all of our staff with not just the training, but a support system where people are encouraged to actually go and seek these new skills. Because in the end, if we as an organization are going to be successful, we need to have a culture where people feel that they can go and try things,’ Uppal said Tuesday in a virtual ACT-IAC meeting…”
“That same mentality carries over to external customers as well. Uppal said OIT has developed a ‘minimum viable product’ for a governance orchestration system that would allow vendors working with CMS to build systems to interact with the system to determine what the needs are.”
“Those steps would make it easier for vendors to understand what’s needed for an authority to operate (ATO) and ensure 508 compliance for employees with disabilities…”
“CMS has a backlog of about 60 systems in the pipeline of moving to the cloud, but Uppal said OIT has spent time working with the teams behind each system to build a baseline understanding of cloud computing…” Read the full article here.
Source: CMS launches ‘upskilling summit’ for IT workforce to tackle modernization projects – By Jory Heckman, June 24, 2020. Federal News Network.
