IT Strategic Plan in Action

The CDC IT Strategic Plan for FY 2021 – 2023 will help enable the agency to thrive in a changing world by improving infrastructure and capabilities, taking advantage of emerging technology and providing tools for CDC staff to meet the challenges of the public health mission. Through each step forward towards implementing the plan, OCIO will work closely with CDC’s C/I/Os to ensure collaboration as decisions are made and detailed steps are made clear.

Actionable steps to implement this strategic plan include:

• Coordination Across the Agency to Support DMI and IT Modernization: For these fundamentally important and complex initiatives to succeed, coordinated involvement from individuals across the agency is necessary to ensure requirements are well understood, adequate resources are made available, and duplication is avoided across workstreams. CDC IT and Data Governance (ITDG) has the important responsibility of leading and providing oversight for these critical efforts, making clear that successful completion of the initiatives will bring significant benefits to the agency and its programs.
• Prioritizing the Construction and Use of Enterprise Platforms: Investments in IT infrastructure will permit increased development of tools specifically designed to meet the needs of CDC scientists. The agency will be prepared to work to discover new ways of meeting technological needs, such as improving connectedness or upskilling predictive analytical capabilities. As we continually enhance and introduce new enterprise platform capabilities, OCIO will focus on providing support to the C/I/Os looking to establish new tools on these platforms by providing guidance, training, or fully-tailored end-to-end service.
• Communicating and Managing Change: For this strategic plan to be effective, CDC will need to effectively communicate changes across the agency and to our partners to ensure broad understanding of new capabilities and must carefully measure the impact of changes to monitor and validate their effectiveness. Together OCIO, ITDG, and the C/I/Os will work to communicate change, support user adoption, and enable performance measures that accurately describe the impact and value of modernization efforts over time. Communication channels will be used to provide a regular dialogue across the agency to develop comfort and familiarity with technological changes underway.
• Strategy Execution, Integration, and Oversight: Key responsible parties will work closely together for the benefit of the agency and to monitor the steps undertaken in pursuit of strategic plan implementation. Input will be gathered from across the agency to ensure relevant voices are included in the discussions and all applicable stakeholders are identified.

The challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic have made abundantly clear the need to invest in our public health infrastructure, particularly the rapidly advancing technological tools that will improve the capabilities of our public health workforce. CDC is moving forward to embrace these new technologies and stands ready to address the next pandemic.