CIA's Andrew Hallman Discusses Digital Futures at FedTalks 2019

[Music]

and you’re welcome thank you so we’re

gonna start off with a few questions

today about what’s happening at the CIA

and what they’re doing to innovate and

they’re doing a lot and they’ve been at

this for a while so a long time but in

the cloud side since 2013 so what’s

going on there so let’s jump right into

it Andrew so let’s talk about increasing

choice

how does increasing choice enable

real-time access to a wide variety of

services and solutions positively how

does that positively impact the mission

great question and first thank you

Goldie in the whole scoop family of of

events these are really impressive and

thank you Teresa for the opportunity to

speak with you so when we think about

the contours of the global threat

landscape and how those are evolving

increasingly they have a digital

dimension so that can be extremists

propagating their content online in

social media mobilizing followers

inciting them into action cyber threats

illicit finance state actors and their

proxies distorting our daily political

and social discourse affecting the

integrity of our electoral institutions

so all of those threats increasingly

have a digital dimension and when you

think about the diffusion of Technology

in a democratization of data and

technology that puts a premium on the

intelligence community the CIA having a

speed advantage over the adversaries the

quickest to sense to characterize to

counter our adversaries and that most of

the time comes back down to data and so

this is particularly true when you look

at the convergence of 5g artificial

intelligence machine learning Internet

of Things advances in computing

generally and all of those again are

challenging our operating environment

and putting the element of speed first

and foremost in front of us

and so we have to be we have to be

masters at a jali enabling our mission

through digital means and increasingly

that’s about forms of compute at the

edge tactical edge in the field so when

we think about our digital architectures

the cloud foundationally provides us

with that strong base kind of

architecture to then give us the

opportunity for commercial parity with a

technical parity with a commercial

sector for driving our mission users to

the higher levels of the stack where

they have more choice and they have more

input and say over choosing applications

of value to their mission to their

intelligence tradecraft and that’s

really the important thing is giving

them bert unburdening them from the

burdens of having to manage IT or do IT

but drive them to the higher levels of a

stack so they get more choice and more

discretion over what’s mission enabling

for them in the field it’s also like

moving fast I know one of the things

that every group I ever talk to in the

intelligence community now talks about

just that ability to move really fast

and we have choice you can also do that

faster and you guys are constantly and

rapidly looking for new tools that are

going to help you both understand and

target the threat that’s out there so

let’s talk about kind of staying ahead

of evolving threats because the

continuous evolution and rapid adoption

of intelligence is really key there and

how are you all using tools like AI and

machine learning and how do those tools

actually help the intelligence community

stay ahead of the threat so we’ve you

know as core to our mission now because

it is really about apply applying that

kind of machine human interface to

elevating our human cognition enabling

it and enabling a higher intelligence

tradecraft

and so you know we we you often hear of

the kind of schools of thought of well

machines are going to take over the

world and I don’t subscribe to that it

really is about enabling the human mind

and that’s especially true when you talk

about this be dynamic so we see a lot of

application of AI ml technologies to our

mission and beginning with the most

simplest of forms of simply automating

routine tasks that free our intelligence

officers up to do what they do best and

their intelligence tradecraft whether

that’s analysis or operations or

counterintelligence our logistics around

the world so that basic automation helps

them focus on the highest value

activities to the rapid ingest

processing triage of high volumes of

diverse data types often in foreign

languages pattern recognition to

identify not only new features of

existing threats that we know about or

to discover new and emerging threats and

deeper and more accurate analytic

insights and moving to more of an

anticipatory predictive posture in

detecting detecting and mitigating

counterintelligence security threats

especially in cyber arena so these are

all core kind of enabling technologies

that we’re embracing significantly and

investing significantly or significantly

over the next several years so

interesting I mean everything that’s

kind of happening out there and security

is always top of mind from day one that

we’ve worked with you all security has

always been something that you know we

have to think about consider and

continually looked at look at and for

you Andrew you spent almost your entire

career dealing with security issues and

highly sensitive and classified areas

and environments and also I would say

for many years not just the intelligence

community but most agencies have had to

choose between kind of security and that

a space of innovation how has commercial

cloud helped the agency kind of merge

those two between security and

innovation so the historically the

agency like many government institutions

have viewed introduction and

assimilation of advanced technology by

treating our CI and security partners

candidly as obstacles to get through and

when we started this director at more

than three years ago and undertook this

digital campaign and which cloud journey

is a core component of it we changed

that paradigm to say we need to treat

our CI and security partners as they

should be which is their indispensable

partners to our collective intelligence

tradecraft and what we found is by

involving them early on in our

development they make us more effective

they make us more secure they inevitably

make us faster overall because as the

risk profiles change as the threat

landscape changes they move with us and

in the process they also innovate their

own counterintelligence and Security

tradecraft as part of that process so we

have now a very workable scalable model

for how we employ them in our overall

development efforts and make them

critical partners in that so that we

don’t have this artificial choice of

security or innovation they’re

inextricably linked you have to view it

that way yeah and I would say just on

our experiences working with the IC

we’ve really evolved even the way we do

security with our own services where we

do that in real time so by the time you

launch a service you have it ready and

accredited and it’s ready to go so

you’re not kind of spending all that

time so I think you all have done such a

phenomenal job and how you think about

and look at new technology like

commercial cloud and how it comes into

the agency and the ability to kind of

get it going yeah in complementing that

kind of tradecraft angle of how we

employ our experts in C and security

that the technological aspect as many of

you know the inherent features of cloud

technologies simply by virtue of how

data is distributed how it’s moved

the instrumentation by which you get

more insight into how behaviors may be

anomalous how you can detect patterns in

those activities how you can use

software to find networking to to become

more ephemeral moving targets within a

digital environment those are all

inherently empowering for our leveraging

of cloud in the execution of our

intelligence mission around the world I

mean so true so true now let’s jump to a

topic that is really kind of near and

dear to my heart which are kind of

digital skills technology skills you

know it’s funny I when I go around the

world no matter who I talk to there’s

always these things when I talk to

customers and partners and a big theme

for me is digital skills cloud skills

it’s literally the number one thing I

get asked about from customers this how

do I create a digital workforce what can

I do to actually get these skills

because they worry about training and

losing people now because we just don’t

have enough people trained so in the

intelligence community because you’ve

been at this now since 2013 I mean

literally in the innovation of

commercial cloud how are you all both

thinking about digital skills at the

agency what are you kind of doing if you

can kind of give the our audience here

some insight in what it what are you

doing to really change the course of the

skills there and how do you think about

it on a daily basis just in that

transformation of skills across the

agency yeah we first I’m in continually

impressed and and awed by the workforce

that we work with and they inspire me

every day they’re just truly remarkable

people so the one of the charges I was

given when I stood up this director it

was elevate the digital acumen of our

entire workforce and that’s just basic

digital skills 101 for for everyone in

the agency and we have highly varying

degrees of digital acumen in the agency

and we have from the basic knowledge of

how you become digitally proficient all

the way to really deep technical skills

in the digital

Fields including in in artificial

intelligence machine learning so we have

a digital acumen program aimed at doing

both elevating all boats raising all

boats and deepening the core digital

skills of our digital workforce but I’m

I’m reminded of a conversation I had a

couple years ago when I went out to

Silicon Valley and I talked to a

prominent headhunter out there and I

went out with this assumption that we

could not compete for the same kind of

digital skills fresh out of college with

the digital Titans in some of the

startup community for the developers the

coders the data scientists systems

engineers and and she said you know for

most for many college graduates you may

not be able to compete because they’re

going to be looking for those high

compensation packages they won’t gonna

want to work for a platform or go try

their hand at a startup she said but let

me assure you that for those who have

either done a start-up or two made some

money failed a few worked at one of the

major companies platforms your brand

identity is very strong and she said

what you do is you appeal to a continue

in quest of any of those individuals for

a higher meaning and what they do and a

higher meaning in their work in this

higher ideal of defending the country

defending the shared values of

protection of democratic ideals

protection of free speech protection of

civil liberties you you appeal to that

and your brand identity is very strong

so you’re gonna find that the market of

talent for the kind of mid-career

individuals is very strong and we find

that is actually accurate now we get

great applicants right out of college in

high numbers but that middle kind of

core is is also important to us and so

and we do a lot of recruiting but even

those who come and work with us start

with us maybe leave after a few years we

find often that they want to come back

and again because they they continually

yearn for

intoxication of mission that once you’re

exposed to it it never leaves you so we

have we have them come knock on the door

and say I want back in I miss that

mission element but we’re also changing

how we think of careers at both CIA and

the intelligence community and it’s true

that when you start with us or anywhere

in the intelligence community but

especially I think it’s CIA you enter a

number of careers and you can work your

entire career at one agency or one

community and have a multitude of

careers within that career and so but

even with that we recognize that we have

to create a more permeable membrane

between the public and private sector

and so we’re working with the office of

Director of National Intelligence on

their right trusted as a workforce

initiative to try to make that membrane

more permeable because when you look at

the at the nature and the magnitude of

the threats facing the nation those are

not addressed by any one single agency

are not addressed by just the government

it’s got to be a whole of nation

approach so that ability to move talent

in and out of government and the

commercial sector is key because we’ve

got to keep their skills sharp we need

to continually bring them in not just

with the innovative platforms we have

but have them continuously innovate as

they come in and I do that so we’re

really excited about opportunities there

and it’s one of the reasons I come speak

to events like this because that that

public-private partnership is so

critical to to address these threats

well and I hear a lot from agencies that

they say around the world they say that

having cloud computing is one of the

number-one recruitment tools because

when you’re you all have now the benefit

you have the latest and greatest

technology so you have the tools that

they can actually use so not only do you

have a great mission but you actually

are bringing them into an environment

you’re not offering them old

technologies to use you’re offering them

the latest and greatest and tooling that

they can take advantage of DevOps all

the way creating rapid application doing

you know

trial and experimentation that used to

was non-existent in most the agency so I

think also you’re way out there in terms

of your ability to bring those

individuals in we just launched last

year at Northern Virginia Community

College our first two year AWS cloud

computing associate’s degree which has

really taken off and we’ll have our

summit next week

AWS summit we’re going to be announcing

new degree programs because one of the

things we’ve found is those digital

skills really aren’t being taught

they’re still teaching how old skills

even in coding so I feel like I’m on a

mission to make sure I have every

educational institution really teaching

the latest and greatest skills so when

we bring them in we’re not having to

retrain themselves that’s that’s a good

good point and the what we find with

officers who come individuals who come

and become intelligence officers in our

business they have a cloud platform that

allows them to it’s real exciting for

them because they have not only the

tools but they have really wide open

challenging intelligence problems to

work and so that’s a green field for

them to be able to come in with really

the services that they need to to do

innovative work and against a constantly

changing threat landscape so it’s never

boring and they’re always always on the

on the cutting edge of that aspect

because they have the tools to do so in

Drive one last question for you so you

know in in in this kind of world it’s

not easy to pioneer be a pioneer it’s

not easy to bring in kind of innovate

innovative solutions do you have any

suggestions kind of for the audience on

ways that leaders should be thinking

about moving into a new innovative

environment prior to taking on that

journey because it’s it’s a little bit

of a landmine sometimes because you’re

trying to do something new and you’re

trying you know your acquisitions

officers your legal camp like every

reason why don’t know if we can do that

but you all did it so what kind of what

do you have as suggestions for folks as

they take on this new journey a few

thoughts so the first is we have

relentless focus on value this is true

not only in government and CIA but but

any commercial endeavor a continually

focus on value and we find that our

innovation theater which we’ve all been

a part of it

various points of innovation for

innovation sake tends to die slow death

because if it if it doesn’t have that

core value that core of need that it’s

addressing it will die but also point to

is you’ve got to be thinking about

empowering the grassroots mobilizing of

the grassroots because the creativity is

really the day-to-day work on the lines

and if you don’t mobilize that broad

scale you won’t get the full reach out

of the organization and so you know

you’ll often hear organizations who will

they’ll create chief innovation officers

and they’ll create dedicated innovation

units and okay you need precipitators

you need incubators you need disruptors

but you need you can’t other the role of

innovation it has to be tied to the core

of what you do as a business or as an

intelligence agency in our in our case

well that’s a point two third is you’ve

got to embrace disruption and shape it

to your advantage so don’t fear

disruption as that’s going to put us out

of business

actively seed disruption and then shape

it to your advantage because the you can

either have it done to you right you can

actually use it to your advantage and

gain because in the commercial market

you gain market advantage if it’s in our

case we gain an advantage over our

adversaries you have to constantly be

shaping that disruption and then I think

finally treat this as an innovation

lifecycle that’s not only through the

problem curation the ideation the

scaling also known as Labrador Factory

but think of it as an entire lifecycle

so when you think about As Leaders how

do we cultivate those environments that

get the ideas from idea scale all the

way to idea generation all the way to

scale what are those then chokepoints

prototype phase pilot stage what are

those choke points where you enter the

valley of death and you then you then

have activity die so you’ve got to think

of the entire lifecycle we find that

it’s offered in that pilot stage where

you just don’t get the lift you don’t

get the scaling the programmatic because

you haven’t thought through what’s the

acquisition piece what’s the security

piece you’ve got to have that entire

lifecycle in mind when you begin that

process you all have been such

innovators when I look back because of

the work you have done around the world

it really got enterprises and other

agencies saying if the CIA can go and do

commercial cloud why can’t others you

all have been a leader around the

security compliance piece you’ve leaned

into that so it really is amazing and I

think the world you know they already

know that you’re an innovator but you

really did take this leap and there’s so

many individuals that have been there

that really did pioneer a new path

forward and I believe that you are

really benefitting from what you’re

doing from a mission perspective so

thank you for being here Andrew thank

you for the agency’s leadership in being

a real innovator and I think you have

really imparted a lot of amazing lessons

for the audience today so thank you all

and don’t forget to come to the AWS

summit next week Tuesday and Wednesday

all right thank you guys thank you

[Music]