 From Phoenix, Arizona, theCUBE at Catalyst Conference. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are on the ground at Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, a great little conference, about 400 people. It's going to be 600 next year, I think back in the barriots or fourth year. We're really coming down and seeing what's going on. It seems to be a hotbed of women in tech issues here at Phoenix. We're here two years ago for our First Grace Hopper Conference. And so we're excited to come down and get a feel. And our next guest, Laura Williams, welcome. Thank you. So you are, as we said off camera, you're the lone kind of government representative. You're the E-Diplomacy Officer at the U.S. Department of State. Right. So first off, what is E-Diplomacy? E-Diplomacy was founded by Secretary of State Colin Powell. I actually started on the same day as he did at the State Department. We took different cars to work that day, but I was a new hire when he was coming on as Secretary of State, and he very quickly identified that State Department needed a tech upgrade. But he also combined that with a culture upgrade. He said, you know, it's not just about needing new technology, but it's needing new technology that allows us to collaborate. And he sort of blew people's minds when he said, you know, it's not about need to know anymore, it's about need to share. State Department still is a very bureaucratic, you know, sort of hierarchical culture. So this initially didn't rest so well. People said, there's no way, you know, the first thing that E-Diplomacy did was to bring in a wiki into the internal part of the State Department's network. And I said, well, that'll never work. We're a clearance culture and all of this stuff. We have 22,000 Diplopedia articles, you know, running now. So it did work. We brought blogs into the department in order to tell stories across bureaucratic and geographical divides. I mean, if you think of the State Department, there's, we're working in 190 countries and we have 275 offices spread throughout those countries. So we needed collaboration. We needed technology like this. So that's really interesting coming from Colin Powell, you know, the head of the Joint Chiefs, right, just got off a war going into the State Department, which still today there's issues on Hillary's emails and this and that. It is a culture of need to know. So how did that barrier break down? Did it have like the security overlay on the wiki? Did everything kind of happen outside or at some kind of grade level in terms of clearance so that it could kind of spread? That's really an interesting story. Two things. First of all, when Colin Powell came to the State Department, most people didn't even have the internet on their desktop. It's probably. This is in 2001. Probably a security, was it a security thing? Well, that's what everybody said. That's what everybody said, right? Everybody said, we can't do that, it's not secure. Well, Colin Powell, right, the guy who knows all about security also happened to be on the board of AOL, right? And so he knew technology and he knew that you could make it secure. It's not like the Department of Defense didn't have access to the internet. He said, yeah, you gotta make it secure. So we're talking about hardening the Department's internal network and adding access to it, but of course adding a layer of security on top of it. So it took that kind of leadership, that personality to come in and say, oh yes, we will do this and you all need to figure out how to do it but we will do this. That's nothing compared to the cultural change though, right? The cultural change is the hardest. So was there a couple of people that just were wildly successful? I mean, again, it's a complete mind shift. I think that we haven't been totally successful even all these years later, 15 years later. There are definitely people that do not contribute to Diplopedia. There are people that definitely believe that information is power and they would rather share less than more. But if you look at the world around you today and State Department does a lot of that, right? It's our job to interact with people. Even that business of diplomacy has changed. It is no longer the Secretary of State meeting with the foreign minister of another country. Well, of course that happens and treaties are made but all of us now are expected to perform diplomacy. It's people to people diplomacy, not just envoy to envoy. And how do we do that? How do we do that on a massive scale? Of course, technology is a big part of that. Well, how do you do it with all the people that you're not interacting with at work? I mean, that's what we see over and over as a consumerization of IT, right? The expected behavior of things that work to behave like they are when I'm not working. I wonder if some of the younger people have come in to the government like, what? Of course, why don't you have these things? It's an awesome source of friction. Can I say that? I mean, it is definitely a friction like every other CIO of an organization as large as the State Departments. There is a constant worry about security, a constant worry about being able to manage a diverse tool set. But if you don't provide the technology that your organization needs, you're gonna create even bigger security problems. You're gonna have a shadow IT. People are gonna start using their personal Gmail accounts instead of their state.gov accounts. So we need to find ways to bring collaborative technology and technology that we use every day in our personal lives inside the safety of our network so that people have the kind of tools they need to do their jobs. That's great. We interviewed Michelle Kay Lee, who's the Undersecretary of Commerce at the USPTO office. She came from Google. So again, another one of these kind of moves from the tech world into the government. But let's shift gears a little bit. Why are you here? What were you talking about here at this conference? Right. So first of all, I've learned so much from being at this conference. I was a little bit unsure when Adriana, the CEO of Girls in Tech invited me to talk. As you mentioned at the outset, I'm the only guppy here. So I thought like, how is my story going to really resonate with the women that are present? And I spoke today, yesterday, story after story, presenter after presenter. I felt more and more confident. I said, oh my goodness, the challenges are the same in private sector. They're the same if you're at a startup or a big fancy company like Intel or IBM. A lot of the stories are the same if you're in government. So I'm just gonna be authentic and tell my story. So we did two things. We talked about IT innovation in government at the federal level and how President Obama has invited West Coast high-speed, low-drag people to come help us fix our IT systems. But then I talked about my story. I had a degree in international relations, but moved out of that field in the mid-90s when it seemed like everybody was doing something with tech. It was an uncomfortable move at first because I was really wedded to, well, I've studied international relations. I should be in this business. But I had one of those post-collegiate bubble bursting experiences where I was working at USAID and I thought, I don't know, this is the theory that I learned in school doesn't seem to be playing out in the field. And I shared an office with the IT guy, right? He was so annoying, you know? But, right, you know? So a few months later he called me up. He said, hey, you're still thinking about a career change, right? Three years out of college, we have careers, right? So I said, yeah, actually I am. And he said, well, I'm in a different embassy every month. We're unplugging the old computer system, putting a new one in and we need you. And I said, I don't know anything about tech. And he said, but you know about the business. You've studied international relations. You are a people person. We need somebody who can relate to people, who can sit at a meeting with the ambassador and explain to him what the importance, the importance of this tech rollout and explain it in plain language, not in dorky tech talk. And then we'll teach you the dorky tech talk after hours. I ended up really liking it. I liked that if there was a problem I could fix it. And that has led to a career in the State Department where I'm certainly in between the org chart. The hardcore zero and one techies, they don't consider me a techie. The international relation majors that are doing the business of diplomacy, they're like, well, you're not one of us either. But I've made a sweet spot out of being in between the org chart. And it's really worked out for me. It's such a great story on so many levels. Because you are still an international relation. Yes, very much so. You work in the State Department. You don't get much more international relations than that. But you found your own niche and I think a really important lesson for people considering a career in techies. You don't necessarily have to be a hardcore techie. You don't have to know coding to get a job and get paid to play in this really fun and exciting and rapidly moving world. Yeah, that's true. There have been a lot of stories here over the past couple days about that. There's a lot of people in that room that do not have a degree in engineering or computer science. And in fact, I got to a place in my career where I stopped being shy about being that person who spoke both tech and international relations and said, in the State Department you change your assignment every couple of years so you're constantly sort of lobbying or bidding for a new job. And I went to apply for a job in the Operations Center. That's the 24-7 nerve center of the State Department where we alert and brief the Secretary of State and other officials on events around the world. And the guy interviewing me who would later become my boss said, you know, you're not a traditional candidate for this job. But by this point in my career, I said, that's right. And that is exactly why I'm the best person for this job because I have this blend of skills that's gonna take this place to the next level. So... And you got the job. I got the job and we changed the way, you know, the department receives, you know, alerts and briefs about events that are happening all around the world. Awesome. Well, congratulations. Great story and really great inspiration for people looking for a good story. So I appreciate you taking a few minutes out of your time representing the government, representing the State Department here at the conference. And thanks for stopping by theCUBE. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. All right, Laura Williams. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We are at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. Thanks for watching.