Politics
From COBOL to cloud, Burton reflects on four decades in government
When Adriane Burton joined the federal government nearly 40 years ago, the IRS trained her to work on Unisys mainframes using COBOL.
Burton, who retired in April after 37 years of federal service, had a front-row seat for all the major technology changes the government went through since the late 1980s.
Burton, who spent her last 11 years as the chief information officer at the Health Resources and Services Administration in the Department of Health and Human Services, said the evolution of networked systems and data centers may have been the most significant advancement during her career.
Adriane Burton (left), the former CIO at the Health Resources and Services Administration in HHS, retired earlier this year after 37 years of federal service.
“That’s the foundation for a lot, and especially in terms of being able to communicate. I remember when I started working at IRS, they used to send out tape to service centers. That was the file transfer, putting a tape on a plane and bringing it out. So without that network infrastructure, you could never do some of the things that we do now and that we’re just so used to having,” Burton said during an “exit” interview on Ask the CIO. “When I first started my federal career, of course there was no internet. So you can imagine it’s life before the internet and after. So the internet became mainstream, and it really revolutionized the ability to communicate outside of your specific silo and your mainframe environment. That just really opened up the opportunity to collaborate with anyone throughout the world, which was pretty amazing during that time. Then I remember we used to send Buckslips around, and now email transformed everything as did virtual private networks, Wi-Fi and smartphones. I remember when I went to the National Institutes of Health and they had BlackBerrys, and I thought, ‘wow, this is so cool. I really want to work here, look at all this new cutting edge technology that they have.’ Then came cloud computing, being another game changer, where you’re not focused on building data centers, but really procuring those services and using them and software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service, and moving from custom code to low code, no code environments.”
Burton said all of these transformative technologies came to the forefront during the pandemic for HRSA. She said one of her biggest accomplishments during her career is how the agency responded during the crisis, in part because of the technology modernization she helped usher in.
“When we got the call stating that the federal government needs to work remotely, we were really able to pivot quickly with that, especially in terms of the infrastructure. So we were already there. Folks already had laptops. We had our VPNs that were sized at the appropriate capacity. So we were able to transition without skipping a beat,” Burton said. “I don’t think very many things escalated to that level in terms of the emergency, during COVID in my 37 years of federal service. We were able to expedite grant funds to healthcare providers, and then we got that $175 billion for the provider relief fund that we needed to disperse, and we didn’t have a system to disperse that. Within two weeks, we were able to push out $40 billion to healthcare providers.”
Customers, mission drives IT upgrades
Burton said thanks to the infrastructure modernization HRSA has been pursuing, a lot of the capabilities they needed were in place or could be put in place with the help of a contractor fairly quickly.
Burton also pointed to how HRSA improved its management of data. It created a data lake a few years before the pandemic hit and the agency seamless was able to share data across different programs and with private sector partners.
“We always have been able to embrace security and different things and still not let that prevent us from actually doing the work that we needed to do within our organization,” she said. “One of the great things that I loved about HRSA was it was a right size. It wasn’t too small and too big, so that we could actually implement new technologies fairly quickly. I’m really happy with the progress that we made over the 11 years, and I’m really proud of my team.”
Coming out of the pandemic, Burton said HRSA also adopted business intelligence capabilities to take further advantage of its data.
All of these modernization changes, Burton said, were driven by the needs of the mission and her customers.
“I think that I’ve always, even if I supported mandatory services, treated folks as customers that they didn’t have to use our services. I think that that really helped to improve the services over time and to really listen to the customers to find out what do they really need, what will really help them?” she said. “It may be process improvement. It could be some of the technology or it could be educating them on the technology or it could be supporting their meetings for them. The key is trying to figure out how can we partner and how can I make their lives better by with the use of technology?”
Burton said understanding that aspect of her job was among her most important lessons learned over her career. While a CIO may come in as a technologist, she said being a top level technology executive is more about strategy and meeting mission goals.
“Technology is always going to change, but the overall goal for delivering healthcare doesn’t change. So then for us, because we were limited in funding, we really have to be practical about how to fund things, to be creative and that means that sometimes you’re not going to get this big budget for this whole thing that you want to do, and really to think about it in different segments so that you can implement things like a foundation and build on it over time,” she said. “That’s what we did with our data lake. We implemented for one program, and then we were able to expand it for other programs along the way. I think that’s important. It’s also really important to invest in your people. I spent a lot of time mentoring folks, developing them, allowing them to go on different types of details so that they grow because if your people are happy, then usually, they’re able to produce more.”
As for her future, Burton said she plans to take some time off for a vacation and then enjoy the summer. She said she will continue to work with two non-profit organizations and reassess what she wants to do in the fall.
The post From COBOL to cloud, Burton reflects on four decades in government first appeared on Federal News Network.
