 Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back everyone to AWS Public Sector Summit here in our nation's capital, Washington D.C. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We are joined by Daniel Castro. He is the Vice President, Information Technology Innovation Foundation, a think tank based here in town. Welcome Daniel. Thanks for having me. So, the theme of this conference is all about modernizing government IT. I want to just start by asking a think tank analyst, how do you define IT modernization, particularly as it relates to the public sector? Yeah, I mean, I think a lot about how we've had this evolution and how we do e-government, right? And we've talked about the stages of e-government before, you know, for a long time. And it used to be that you had this very basic model. You put some information online and then you had the transactional model. So you'd have some communication. Then you'd have something that was a little more interactive. So maybe you'd get some more back and forth there. And now I think we're getting to this new model of e-government, right? This next stage where we can possibly start automating a lot more. We can start using AI, we can use IoT. I think that's where there's a lot of excitement now because there's so much possibility with what we can do with government that didn't exist before, even five years ago. And so, I mean, to me it's exciting to see things like where you can ask Alexa to do something with government and you can start, you know, seeing this next wave that didn't exist even a few years ago. What kind of efficiencies do you see? Because that seems to be a theme. Using data, undifferentiated, heavy lifting tasks. Where do you see the use cases in government for being more efficient with cloud and data? Well, one of the things that I have a little bit of experience in government, I used to work in government. And, you know, one thing that a lot of people tell you is that there's a lot of really boring things that you have to do when you're in government. There's a lot of really exciting things and then there's a lot of, you know, really great things you can do when you're in government. That's what attracts I think great people. But what I see is the possibility to take a lot of those boring activities out of government, the paperwork associated with, you know, your leave and, you know, filing a claim, all these things that people don't like. To me, that's the possibility. Can we get rid of the boring part of government and just have the really value added part? And with data, I think that's where we're moving because it's not about moving papers around and, you know, tracking. I mean, government is a big information problem. It's can we really get to the core problem, which is the analytics, the decision making, the problem solving, and that to me, you see so many companies on the floor that are saying, we'll take care of the security problem for you. We'll take care of the storage problem for you. We'll take care of these applications and leave you to do the work that you actually wanted to do when you came to government. Get rid of the manual tasks and leaving more room for the creative and as you said, the analytical, the problem solving. Right. So the thing I want to ask you is that, you know, I'm old enough to see the original internet wave and the U.S. did a great job on the Department of Commerce when the internet came out, the domain name system. They worked internationally with ICANN, variety of other organizations. You see this nice growth of the internet. Now it just seems like it's highly accelerated. You got Facebook, you got YouTube, you got all these things going on. You have Amazon, these big whales of tech companies. There's a huge tech flash going on. There's a lot of tech for good as well. So, you know, we were just talking on our last day with the pile of tech for good opportunities a lot higher than the tech for bad, but everyone's focused on the bad actors right now. And these are private companies. These aren't public entities, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon. So they can't arrest anyone. They can't, like, they do what they do, right? Right. So where's the new way to get this under control? What's the think tanks perspective? What's the community perspective in DC around this knowledge? So what strikes me is that the level of optimism we see around technology has changed significantly and part of that's driven by the tech clash. But, you know, if you go back to the 90s, I mean, people were excited about the potential of the internet and what it could mean. And I mean, we've done some analysis looking at even just the reporting in the media and we did sentiment analysis of, you know, how technology is being described, not just IT, but technology overall and innovation overall. And you see a downward trend in the last 20 years and it's been steady. It's been, you know, faster in the last 10 years. And, you know, that affects, I think, the ability to get the public on board with the new technology, it affects the ability of government to say, we're using technology for these new purposes and it affects the policies. I mean, when you mentioned ICANN, I mean, that was when Department of Commerce said, you know, we're going to do something fundamentally different with the internet. We're going to help create it but keep our hands off of it. And, you know, that idea was radical and new and exciting and innovative. And now we have all these new technologies like, whether it's Jones or IoT or AI, where we don't have government necessarily saying, you know, this is exciting and new and maybe we should do things different this time. We should think about a creative way of ensuring that we're not in the way of innovation, that we're putting in good guardrails to protect people and instead they want to do kind of the old model of, well, let's regulate the technology or let's, you know, focus on how it can go wrong instead of really focusing on how it might go right. Well, I got to say, we need more think tanks like what you guys are doing because my personal feeling, not being very political person and being from California is you can't regulate what you don't understand. So if you don't understand it, then get out of the way. And a lot of people that I see in DC, certainly elected official sites, they really don't know what they're talking about. They're mostly either lawyers or not tech savvy. And the ones that are tech savvy seem to be kind of oppressed like, where are they? Where's the revolution? So what's the answer then? I mean, I mean, they need, I, I, I, I, I, I think we have to educate more about what the potential is. I mean, I think when you see people start to understand, here's the technology, here's the benefits, but these are the 10 things we need to do to get there. They understand they need to do more. The problem is some of the technology, it is kind of confusing to policy makers. I mean, you try and explain what machine learning is to, you know, a 70 year old elected official and not all of them are familiar with it. Some of them are, but you look at the, Congress has an AI caucus. Congress also has a blockchain caucus, which do you think is bigger? Blockchain, of course, right? Because people think there's money there. It's maybe a little, but I mean, AI is going to be the one. Infrastructure dynamic around supply chain, which is a data challenge because now you got encryption and you have all kinds of immutability. So again, this is exciting time, but what do you do? Do you jump in, nurture it, regulate it? I mean, I think government, see what, what traditionally people think about government is the laggard in technology. What I like about this conference is I think it's the pinnacle show that government can be the leader in technology. And when government is the leader in the technology, it de-risks it for both the private sector and the rest of government. So it can say, we're going to be on the cutting edge. We're going to show how can be done. And by being an early adopter, we can also help shape the technology. So when people are concerned about, you know, bias in AI or something, if government's an early adopter, they can help address some of those problems, whether it's by making their own data sets available or showing way. When government makes, is experimenting with the algorithms and then makes some mistakes and it builds more bias into it, it has more consequences. It feels like that at least. No, I think that's true. But I think the difference is nobody expects the private sector to necessarily put citizens' interests first. But that is government's role, right? Government's role is to say, how can we make our community better? So when it has a primary seat at the table, it can shape the technology to get to those types of concerns. And now, of course, you have to have a good government. And so it's also important that we elect people who are excited about technology and protecting all people. The CIA and now the DOD with Jedi and a variety of other contracts going on, I think can be that leader again. If you look at the CIA has done, I think that is a great use case example, a leader now again, just dating since 2013, DOD now on it. My friend John Markoff, former New York Times columnist, wrote a book, What the Door Mouse Said. It was about how the hippie counterculture created the computer revolution, really from the buildup of technology around government funding to institutions and academic institutions. The counterculture developed, AKA the computer revolution. So I see a similar kind of thing happening now. It feels like you have all this tech out there, yet there's a counterculture of people saying, why is there all this red tape? Why can't we use this data? Why is LinkedIn a siloed of data? Why is Facebook doing with it? So I think the question should be asked, but the question is how should we take that position as the government to foster innovation, curb the bad, accelerate good, reward good, so the incentives could be that's digital. So I think this is kind of, I'd love to get your perspective on reaction to that. Right, no, I think that's a good point. What I see, so we had a panel this morning on open data and one of the big themes there was around the idea of collaboration. It's about partnerships between government and industry, whether it's government providing the data or industry providing data and also focusing on specific problems. I think that's how you get out of the siloed approach, which is the concern that you have, one federal agency, for example, focusing on this is my problem and I had the blinders on and not looking at how it affects everyone else and arguably that's the critique that a lot of people have about companies, but they're focused on one problem, they're not looking at the effects they have on the rest of the economy or society. I think when you have collaboration on specific problems, whether it's the opioid crisis or healthcare or energy, then you start getting people from lots of different backgrounds saying here's the resources we can bring to bear on these problems and here's how we're going to fix it and here's how we're going to do things differently. But a lot of that gets to, do you have data that you can share? Do you have IT infrastructure that's interoperable? And do you have just kind of an organizational structure that allows and encourages that type of collaboration? And so I think when you keep kind of pushing at that and saying this is the future we want, these are the problems we're going to solve, then it forces even governments that are traditionally rigid to start reorienting around new ways of solving problems. You know, open-source software really could be an indicator of where this could go because you look at the generations of evolution in open-source software. Collaboration that come out of that could be applied to data. Absolutely, and it forces, I think government agencies to rethink how they operate, right? Let me force them to say, well, maybe this traditional procurement model doesn't work. How else can we do things? How can we move to more service support, right? And those types of changes came about from, you know, a change in licensing to software, right? Exactly. Well, Daniel, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It's always, it's been a pleasure. We look forward to having you again on Zoom. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming on. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have much more from AWS Public Sector Summit here on theCUBE. Teresa Carlson is coming up next. Stay tuned.