Behind the Census Bureau’s digital transformation

Agencies need new tools and new process efficiencies — not just to curb costs, but to meet the rising expectations of their constituents. The answer lies in digital transformation.

“It is going to be very important, moving forward, that organizations modernize to be more effective and more efficient,” said Dr. Darren Pulsipher, chief solution architect for public sector at Intel. And it’s not just hardware that needs to change. “It’s people, process, and technology.”

Creating the future

Cultural resistance can stand in the way of efforts to drive greater efficiency. “People will drag their feet; they don’t want the change,” Pulsipher said. But in reality, “we can’t compete as a country with the rest of the world if we just stay where we’re at.”

At the same time, technological change sometimes seems to outpace an agency’s ability to adapt. “There’s so much going on in R&D right now that’s way ahead of what organizations can ingest,” he said.

In his role as chief solution architect, Pulsipher works to overcome those hurdles, to “help organizations focus on their changes, so that they’re headed in the right direction,” he said. “The stuff that Intel’s developing today, you’re going to see five to seven years from now. I know the future. I don’t have to predict it: I’m creating it.”

‘Look at it holistically’

From that vantage point, Pulsipher argues that agencies need to take a hard look at their processes, in order to overcome the obstacles to modernization. Too often, “organizations come in and just automate a process they already have, thinking that that’s going to be more efficient,” he said. “Turns out, all you did was automate something that was inefficient.”

Intel encourages leaders to instead “look at it holistically and across the whole system,” and to leverage quick wins to build momentum, he said.

As a partner to the government, “we identify where the biggest pain points are, and we identify where we can make the most effective change,” he said. “As people see things happening in a positive way, then that momentum — that culture — starts building up and more people want to be involved.”

One example of how this works in the real world comes from Intel’s work with the U.S. Census Bureau and AWS. That effort illustrates the power of an effective public-private collaboration.

Bringing modernization to life

The USCB faced the enormous challenge of gathering, aggregating, and managing vast amounts of information using manually-driven processes. Intel engineers and AWS experts collaborated with the bureau to bring forward an AI-ready, cloud-based solution that expedites USCB’s information gathering and helps leaders plan for the future.

Strong leadership at USCB helped to make that solution a reality. “We had executive air cover to do the right thing — and ‘to do the right thing’ was not to go spend $50 million in buying hardware. That’s the wrong thing. The right thing was to sit down and take a little bit of time and look at where the problems really are,” Pulsipher said.

That deliberative approach generated both speed and savings. “Instead of saying — Hey, I need to go build all my own language models to help the US Census — we found that using hybrid, on-premise, even on-laptop Large Language Models was sufficient for what they needed to do,” he said. That helped accelerate the delivery of an improved solution.

“We were able to do this very quickly by stepping back a second, taking a look at where we were going,” Pulsipher said. And Intel helped USCB to chart progress at every step. “We came up with these deliverables: Every six weeks, we’re going to show you progress. We’re going to show you how we can do things differently.”

Going forward

Pulsipher sees the role of AI continuing to evolve in the public sector, and he encourages agencies to start preparing now. That means leaders need to change the way they position AI. 

Rather than put the focus on cost savings, which workers may hear as a threat to their jobs, “the narrative needs to be: How can I be more effective with generative AI?” he said. “How can I serve the constituents, the citizens of the United States, better — more effectively and more efficiently — without getting rid of headcount?”

Generative AI is here to stay, and it needs to be presented in a positive light in order to gain rank-and-file adoption. The message: “We want to augment the work that they do, so that they can be more effective, provide better services,” Pulsipher said.

If leaders can position AI in that light, it will help to drive the cultural changes that, in turn, form the bedrock of both modernized processes and modernized technologies. See how Intel is helping public sector agencies meet mission needs through modern technology solutions.