Cybersecurity News Round Up with Willie Hicks

Unpacking the Biggest Headlines in Cybersecurity News

Carolyn: Today we talked to Willie Hicks, Dynatrace public sector CTO. He’ll unpack some of the biggest headlines of late from the Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Log4j. I know Willie, you're so sick of this topic, but we're going to cover it anyway, and then Zero Trust Thunderdome Awards.

I want to go first to the Executive Order requiring improving the digital government experience. Willie, will you give us the big takeaways from this Executive Order? What does it mean for our agencies?

Willie: First of all, I think that the Executive Order on Transforming is transforming the federal customer experience. It is going to impact the agencies, but I also think it's going to impact the digital citizens of the day, the real customers of the federal government. I think President Biden reiterated this, it’s supposed to be a government for the people, by the people.

We're trying to put people back into the equation. I think the big takeaway for me is that the federal government is coming back into or getting to a point where they're really understanding that customer experience, well, they already understood it. But they’re really starting to internalize and figure out how to make customer experience like the customer experience most citizens expect to see with anybody who shops on Amazon, anyone who does a Google search.

A Fundamental Shift in Customer Experience

Willie: They expect, with the push of a button, that they got all the groceries shipped to them the next day or the same day. That kind of experience you do not get with the federal government today. I think that we're seeing a fundamental shift now, not just that kind of digital experience, but I think across the board. Like when you even walk into a brick or a mortar building, when you interface on the phone with a government employee, I think we're going to start, hopefully, seeing more customer-focused, customer-centric type attitudes.

This is really long overdue. I've been in this business for many years. I remember one of my early visits to a federal agency that will remain nameless, but I was speaking to this agency about what we call our digital user experience. How we need to focus on the real metric who's the end user. Right now, you are focused on the back end. You're focused on, is the server up...