When the US Navy and Marine Corps, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency want to modernize their operations, they often turn to CNA for analysis and support. This work has given us a deep understanding of the benefits of modernization and fuels our efforts to modernize CNA itself. Today, we are modernizing our own operations for speed, accountability, and efficiency, so that our own processes make it easier for us to continue to provide groundbreaking results on matters of national and homeland security.
At the beginning of this decade, our CEO, Katherine McGrady, set a long-term vision for CNA as a modern and resilient organization. Recognizing that many of CNA’s business processes and IT systems had become outdated and inefficient, she brought in an outside consultant to identify where we could streamline and automate processes and modernize our IT infrastructure.
The consultant’s report was only the first step. Soon after, a new role was created at CNA: Business Transformation Director. It’s a role I have served in for three years, after more than 20 years as an analyst helping federal, state, and military organizations become more resilient. I work with our chief information officer, chief financial officer, and others to improve our business processes, implement new technology, and manage the change that comes with rapid modernization.
We began by identifying and reviewing key business processes, stripping out unnecessary steps, and introducing automation to reduce the amount of manual labor required and increase both efficiency and effectiveness. Many processes like client invoice approval, completing security forms, and requesting editing support were formerly carried out over one-to-one email conversations and tracked using ad-hoc tools like spreadsheets. Today, they are automated within an electronic business process platform. The benefits we have realized include:
- Time savings: employees spend less time carrying out tasks, searching for information, and communicating through email.
- Increased visibility: employees and process owners can easily monitor the status of their requests and tasks.
- Increased accountability: process owners can track performance through dashboards showing performance metrics and other information.
As we continue with business process improvement, our chief information officer is implementing a complementary digital transformation roadmap that is reducing our reliance on legacy systems and ensuring CNA has a resilient, secure, efficient infrastructure to support our mission. For example, in 2023 CNA converted our printers to a leasing model, saving $500,000 over five years. We decommissioned $1.9 million of legacy IT systems, processes, and vendors that no longer fit within CNA’s digital transformation. We upgraded an ineffective and expensive security information event management system with a new and more effective platform, saving more than $500,000 over the next three years and providing significantly more functionality. Additionally, CNA consolidated three legacy firewall hardware devices into two new and faster firewalls, saving another $120,000 per year. These savings help us to control overhead costs.
Our modernization efforts are not limited to back-office functions. We also seek to ensure our analysts have access to state-of-the-art tools and technology. For example, last year CNA launched Morse Code, a secure, large language model (LLM) that analysts can use to work with internal documents and data sets. Unlike popular public LLMs such as ChatGPT, Morse Code complies with Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) security standards. Analysts use this tool to assist with time-consuming, routine research tasks such as searching data sets, summarizing documents, generating data tables and lists, proofreading text, and drafting administrative documentation. We continue to add functionality to this platform to enable our analysts to innovate as they incorporate artificial intelligence into research methodologies. But we don’t implement technology for technology’s sake. We work closely with CNA’s chief research officer to evaluate technology, develop guidance for its use, and institute guardrails to ensure we maintain our high standards for rigorous, objective, data-driven analysis.
Change can be tough. Employees get used to doing things the old way, and it can take time to learn how to use new technologies and tools. These concerns and challenges can derail modernization efforts and prevent organizations from realizing their intended benefits. We’ve also had our share of rocky rollouts, and we have learned from these experiences. We manage change by engaging a broad set of CNA stakeholders into the planning and rollout of initiatives, providing training and job aids, and leveraging our managers to help communicate with and coach employees.
Finally, we assess and evaluate our modernization efforts to ensure we are achieving the desired results and are continuously improving. We set targets and monitor key performance indicators with the goal of achieving long-term success and resilience. Continuous improvement never ends, but three years in, we’re pleased to see that the metrics tell us CNA is indeed a more modern organization.
