2024 Government Innovation Show - New York

The mission of the Department of Civil Service is to “build tomorrow’s workforce today by promoting a diverse, inclusive, and talented workforce.” Each day, as the Department of Civil Service seeks to carry out this mission, the Department is focused on better meeting the needs of our partner agencies by building a workforce of public servants to provide the critical services that New Yorkers rely on across the state. The Department is also focused on better meeting the needs of jobseekers and is working on several fronts to embed the agency in the very communities where jobseekers live and work. This keynote address will highlight the many innovative initiatives the Department is undertaking to provide exceptional service to the many stakeholders we serve.

Delivering seamless constituent services requires removing digital obstacles and empowering employees through integrated, intelligent systems. This session will cover how automated & augmented solutions can reduce friction, mitigate the digital divide, enhance accessibility and make every interaction a step toward a more responsive, constituent-focused government.

In this session we hear from the State Accountability team at Office of the NYS Comptroller discuss their approach to innovation, leveraging technology and AI in both their own work, and in the audit of others. They will share recent process improvements, and the challenges and opportunities that have come with those, as they work to create user-oriented internal processes.

In this technical session we will hear from New York City Council’s Chief Data Scientist on how his team of data scientists and web developers are creating efficiencies, reducing inaccuracies, and enabling teams to focus their time more productively across the NYC Council department through building RAG and LLM models in-house. Alaa will cover his learnings on what is required from a resource and technology perspective, as well as the importance of prioritizing an education and learning team culture.

In this session, we will hear from the New York State Department of Civil Service on their journey to transform the Civil Service Merit System. The session will cover the evolution of the Civil Service process over the past twenty years, including how the agency has implemented technology components to better ensure accessibility for all New Yorkers. We will hear from three different program areas that are implementing meaningful change across the Department. While much work has been done to date, the agency continues to look toward the future and is working to implement new innovative systems to better meet jobseekers where they are to build a public workforce that is welcoming to all and is reflective of the communities we all serve.

In this session, hear how the Digital and Media Services team is bringing together teams across New York State to transform the way residents access services and benefits.

• Share details on how the team first focused on building relationships to create a community to collaborate and share best practices.
• How the team uses data, analytics and human-centered design to improve access to some of the state’s most critical services.
• Learn more about the first-ever digital standards to serve as the blueprint for innovation.

• What are todays Modern User Expectations? People expect seamless, intuitive digital experiences similar to those from tech companies they use every day, but current state services often fall short of these expectations.
• User research helps us better understand the needs of real people and the ways in our which our products and services are not meeting those needs or creating bad experiences.
• How do you ensure you have consistent UI components? Unified user experience and building trust with users, and a shared component library that provides developers with reusable design elements and utilities.

Roundtable 1: Human-Centered Government: Lessons from the Private Sector for Transforming Public Services, Facilitated by: Jeromey Farmer, Americas Data & AI Advisory Lead, and Christy Nelson, Americas Modern Work Lead, Avanade

Roundtable 2: Building Tomorrow’s Workforce: The Role of AI in New York State Training Programs, Facilitated by: Tim Egan, Senior Sales Account Executive, Anthology

Roundtable 3: Ask Me Anything about AI Security Analytics, Facilitated by: Lisa Jones-Huff, Senior Director, Solutions Architecture, Elastic

Roundtable 4: Unlocking Government Potential: How Innovation and Collaboration Drive Better Results, Facilitated by: Cynthia Bowles, Senior Account Executive, Atlassian

Roundtable 5: Modernizing Public Sector IT: Navigating Digital Transformation with Next Generation Service Management, Facilitated by: John Gambaro, Sales Director, Freshworks

Roundtable 6: Citizen-Centric Innovations: Co-Creating Solutions with Citizens to Address Societal Challenges, Facilitated by: Dan Santangelo, Field CIO & Senior Executive Strategist, ServiceNow

Roundtable 7: Bringing Clarity to Complexity: How Observability Can Transform IT for Government Agencies, Facilitated by: Geoff Butsko, Senior Account Manager – SLED/NatGov, SolarWinds

Roundtable 8: The Future of Digital Transformation: Managing and Protecting Data in a Hybrid Environment, Facilitated by: Iron Mountain

Roundtable 9: Empowering Leadership in Public Service: Crafting a Human-Centered Leadership Philosophy for Transformational Impact, Facilitated by: Mallory Thaut, Senior Enterprise Account Executive, BetterUp

Roundtable 10:  SOC as a Service | Preparing for the Inevitable, Facilitated by: Richard Gengel, NY State and Local Account Executive, Rapid7, and Jason Cheng, SOC Customer Advisor, CISSP, Sec +, MSCS, B.S. CyberSecurity, USMC Veteran, Rapid7

This panel session will host government leaders from New York who will share why collaboration is important and why everyone in the audience should look for collaborative opportunities. The panel will share their own case studies of working to overcome obstacles within IT through leveraging collaboration opportunities with New York State, New York City and local IT business and government communities.