Cloud Exchange 2023: Cloud TSA Yemi Oshinnaiye Drives CX Improvements | Federal News Network

The Transportation Security Administration is making better customer experiences a central part of its broader IT transformation goals.

TSA Chief Information Officer Yemi Oshinnaiye said one of her top priorities is to improve the customer experience across all of the agency’s missions.

One of the things that keeps me up at night is making sure we can help secure transportation and make people’s journeys safe. We work very hard to be innovative, keep our systems up to date, make sure we have a great customer experience,” Oshinnaiye said during the Federal News NetworkCloud Exchange 2023.

The agency’s cloud infrastructure is helping the agency make better use of its data and enables the agency to continue to make iterative improvements to the way it delivers services.

Customer experience is beyond IT, but IT is here as an enabler. So let’s look at each area from a customer experience perspective, Oshinnaiye said.

How can I help you, from the moment you go through the checkpoint to be shorter and a better experience? How can we help technology track and get feedback on what we can do better? And also, how can we ascertain what you feel when you pass through a checkpoint? he added.

In addition to its public role at airport security, TSA oversees a broader travel portfolio that includes pipelines and railroads and is improving the customer experience across its missions.

When we take user centered design and customer experience, to really bring home that holistic understanding of what it means to automate, what it does for the user whenever you come back through an airport, or if you’re on a train, or if you are also in the subway, you have a better experience every time, Oshinnaiye said.

TSA operates in a hybrid of on-premises data assets and cloud environments.

Even though we have some on-prem environments, we’re looking to connect them back to the cloud, so that we can take information from on-prem into the cloud and move it back and forth. It’s almost seamless for the user, Oshinnaiye said.

TSA is transforming the way it builds and implements systems, using human-centered design and incorporating user feedback into the products it releases.

Oshinnaiye said TSA relies on software as a service (SaaS) platforms to support rapid builds and interactive changes that are critical to improving customer experience and citizen development.

While we choose the right SaaS platforms, we allow users to build their own products, as long as they’re safe and follow guidelines, he said.

TSA also relies on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) tools to ensure the agency is getting the right data in the right place, at the right time.

When we build systems, we can build systems on demand. We replicate good systems more easily, and then we can experiment, find out what’s the safest way to build a system. What is the safest way to transport data? These cloud providers have been doing this for a while, so they have best practices that we leverage. We can share [those] among other agencies, and it gives us an edge to be able to move forward and stay modernized, Oshinnaiye said.

TSA is also looking for low-hanging fruit for automation and sees some opportunities to streamline some back office functions

We can automate and use a lot of analytics that [we] our back office staff no longer have to crunch numbers in Excel. I think this helps us a lot and allows us to use our brains for the more tactical and more complex tasks, Oshinnaiye said.

TSA can automate the scaling of your cloud environment as your data volume grows.

Understanding what data to put where, how to access the data, and how fast you need it helps us redesign things. Just like using the cloud, it allows us to be better and faster with data.

TSA is also building strong security into everything it distributes.

We don’t post anything we don’t think is safer. We test incredibly, because we want to make sure we’ve tested everything we believe the opponent can do. It changes the way we think and it changes our investment in security and the way we look at things.

TSA is also working on new ways to provide mobile technology for frontline transportation security officers.

As travellers, as mere individuals, we have started moving faster and expect more, Oshinnaiye said. TSOs are working very hard to communicate, to support people going through that environment, it becomes increasingly necessary for them to be able to communicate in a more mobile way.

Oshinnaiye said TSA is still in the process of rapidly building and prototyping new tools for TSOs

TSA is also seeking to train and upskill its workforce to understand the role emerging technology is playing on agencies’ ability to improve service delivery.

“When it comes to cloud technology, [were] actually involving the vendor, because they know their product best, and organizing these meetings and trainings so they can let us know as much about us as possible, so that as we leverage the technology, we know where it should be leveraged and how make the most of it, Oshinnaiye said.

TSA is calling on a large part of its executive team to improve the customer experience.

Oshinnaiye said he provides a supporting role to the agency’s chief innovation officer and chief of delivery to continue rolling out new CX improvements.

The chief innovation officer really looks broadly at the whole TSA and says, How do we innovate? How can we eliminate the fear of innovation and bring the spark of ideas back into people, he said. The Chief Delivery Executive will make sure they are reviewing all the products we are posting. Sometimes we need to consolidate, sometimes we need to separate some products, [theyre] keeping an eye on that trajectory of how software is built.

The TSA is also hiring a chief technology officer and chief data officer, but Oshinnaiye said the agency is leaning to hire an executive to handle both roles and have the position filled by the end of the year.

There are CDO/CTO concepts, because the CTO also has to look at the data, so we’re inclined to do that and make it a combined position, he said.

To read or watch other sessions, head to our Cloud Exchange 2023 event page.