How Female Leaders are Shaping the Adoption of Technology in The Public Sector

Three Takeaways from GovCIO's Women Tech Leaders Event

GovCIO's Women Tech Leaders event brought together women from a diverse set of backgrounds committed to a career in serving our nation through public service. At the event in Washington, D.C., I joined the Leveraging Data to Promote Equity panel to discuss how data modernization in health-focused agencies can deliver critical services more efficiently and advance health equity.

Here are three key insights shared during the panel discussion:

There is no one-size-fits all solution in data modernization. Each solution should be tailored to the client or partner and the specific, unique problem they are aiming to solve.

Through our work with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on their Helping to End Addiction Long-term® (HEAL) Initiative, we at RTI have built a comprehensive data ecosystem to empower researchers, people, and communities working to address the opioid crisis by supporting data sharing and reuse. For the HEAL Intiative, the strategy leverages existing investments in the community repositories, while modernizing the approach to ensure that data assets are well described and centrally referenced as a resource to serve the opioid community.

I frequently tell my staff, and my clients, that while these are technology and data problems that we are tackling, including COVID-19, the opioid endemic, hospital capacity issues…it’s really a people problem at the end of the day. And I really firmly believe that. Making the data and technology work for the people who are trying to solve the problems is something I feel strongly about.

Making data broadly available through a highly secure system allows for workspace and computation analysis anywhere.

We’re proud to support NIH’s National Health, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) as the coordinating center for BioData Catalyst. The NHLBI BioData Catalyst program is a community-driven advanced cyberinfrastructure currently hosting 3.5 PB of high-value data in one place with supporting analysis tools to accelerate scientific discovery. Additionally, the BioData Catalyst Fellows program has provided salary and resource support for early-career researchers to pursue novel data science and data-intensive investigations in heart, lung, blood, and sleep science.

Within research, there's traditionally been divide between the haves and have-nots when you talk about computational biology and what's possible. BioData Catalyst democratizes access to crucial data. By making this kind of data understandable and accessible via the cloud, it doesn't matter what kind of university you're coming from or what supercomputing resources you have at your institution.

The importance of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (EDIB) in the world of technology.

More than a decade ago, RTI began the EDIB journey, believing that continued success depends on the diverse skills, experience, and backgrounds that employees bring to the organization. Over time, RTI has made several commitments that include an inclusive environment as the foundation for improving the human condition.

During the interview process for my job with RTI demonstrates, I could sense this institute’s commitment to making all employees feel welcome and included. It was the first time I had ever interviewed for a job with my wedding ring on. I had never done a job interview before where I wanted to admit that I was married or have children because I didn’t think it was something I wanted to be sharing with a potential employer during that process. I am optimistic that RTI has overcome biases related to employees’ family situations embracing our experiences and what we bring to the job, valuing that very intentionally. This comes through in our relationships with HBCU’s, as well as in team interactions and our approach to project work.

We look forward to attending more events that focus on women leaders in STEM! Learn more about our mission.