Andrea Fletcher became the first Chief Digital Strategy Officer (CDSO) at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) earlier this year while retaining her role as the agency’s Director of Digital Service. She’s held that post since June 2022.
“My role now is helping to transform the way we use technology to implement our programs,” she said. We asked her to share what she’s learned as CDSO.
Andrea Fletcher
How do you translate policy into management goals?
For Fletcher, putting policy into action is all about having the right people. “I joke that I’ve become a reluctant hiring hacker,” she said. “I never thought that so much of what I do would be recruiting new talent and new skillsets for the federal government.”
For instance, to help put the federal zero-trust cybersecurity strategy and other cyber safety programs into practice, CMS has hired its first zero-trust cybersecurity architect and is looking to fill an insider threat cybersecurity position. “These are really difficult positions to hire for,” Fletcher explained. “They [call for] top-tier talent in the country and in the world, and yet you’re also competing against other federal agencies to get people into these roles.”
Her efforts are paying off. “Up until a couple of years ago, we didn’t even have any data scientists at CMS,” Fletcher said. “But this summer, we had 25 candidates make the cert [list] for 21 positions. We had more people wanting a job as a data scientist at CMS than we had open spots, which is amazing for us.”
How do you create an environment where employees feel like they belong?
“We’re trying to make it fun and exciting,” Fletcher said. For technology experts, that means doing cutting-edge work and having access to like-minded colleagues.
Her team works with human-centered design specialists and project managers to find ways of linking digital experts across the agency’s three centers.
“We have a really robust data science community,” she explained. They meet regularly and hold open office hours during which they help one another with difficult data analysis problems. While there is always the need for formal training, sometimes “all somebody needs is an hour to answer some questions and get some feedback. So we’re building that community.”
The digital services team has significant autonomy in the projects it’s working on, making the work more self-directed. “We’re like an in-house consulting firm of technologists,” Fletcher said. Leaders bring the team tech-related issues to resolve. But the group also is proactive.
“In working with various communities, we’ll see everybody’s running into the same problem. We have this pattern,” Fletcher said. “What’s something we can do to help all these different teams across CMS?” The issues are often a combination of technology and process, and the team works with end users to identify and remove the roadblocks.
How do you keep up with evolving technology?
There’s a saying that deploying technology in government should be boring. “We should be using things that we know work,” Fletcher said.
But that loops back to her emphasis on getting people with the right skills who are familiar with a variety of applications. “[Large language model] AI is the topic of the day, right?” she said. “But as somebody in public health, I’ve been working with models my entire career.”
Fletcher’s team is standing up what may be the first open source program office in federal government and hired an open source lead with experience at X (formerly called Twitter) and Spotify. The office will help CMS control the fragmentation of its software and data and get a better handle on the work other contractors have done.
“They’ve created templates so that every project, every repository, has a description,” Fletcher said. That will allow CMS to make the best use of code it already has, reduce duplication of effort, and enhance cybersecurity not only within CMS, but with the entire Department of Health and Human Services, and even the federal government.
This article appears in our guide “Conversations With CXOs: Lessons Learned in Management, Workforce and Technology.” For more insights from the C-suite, download it here:
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