Thank you to Peter McCarthy and Jim Hallihan for inviting me to speak today at the Video Forum.

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Elaine Leonard
5 years ago
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1 Thank you to Peter McCarthy and Jim Hallihan for inviting me to speak today at the Video Forum. Good morning They don t get it, they just don t get it. That s what I said about 2 years ago because I couldn t understand why my former management simply didn t just buy the solution that I designed a month earlier. The design had everything EOIR needed to be an efficient, cost effective, and well-oiled VTC super machine. Unfortunately, at that time, due to budget restraints and not being fully informed, those former managers, and no fault of their own, could not share in my enthusiasm and my agency transformational thinking. So, I needed to regroup not to simply convince management to procure a product but to develop a VTC strategy.

2 The steps we took to develop the EOIR VTC strategy were: Business Case, Solution, Upper Management Buy In, User Input, Budget, Installation, Training, Evolution First of all, what is E-O-I-R, or simply EOIR. Essentially, EOIR is the Immigration Courts including the appellate level. There are 59 Immigration courts located throughout the continental US, Hawaii, and San Juan, PR. Also, we have VTC units installed at our Saipan location. We have 276 Immigration Judges located throughout our agency. Our Main Office is located in Falls Church, Virginia, which is about 10 miles from downtown Washington, DC.

3 I was hired as the VTC Manager in My job was to manage the VTC environment, deploy VTC endpoints, support our customers, and lead the agency in its video and communications endeavors. The question for me at that time was, how? Business Case: In order to proceed in a purchase of a video, PC, and/or telephonic solution, It had to align with EOIR s overall strategy and mission and it had to make sense. This was easily solved by leveraging the IHP Program What is the IHP Program? It is the Institutional Hearing Program a

4 cooperative effort of EOIR, the Department of Homeland Security, and participating federal and state correctional agencies to complete immigration proceedings for criminal aliens while they are still serving their sentences in prison for criminal convictions. There are several different layers of law enforcement working together with EOIR to achieve the goal of hearing immigration cases. The decision to leverage Video conferencing made sense as it allows multiple entities to collaborate from various parts of the country. For example, a scenario for a video hearing would involve having an EOIR judge residing at our Kansas Court, ICE who is the

5 prosecution, appearing over video from Chicago, and the respondent alien appearing over video from a state or local facility. By utilizing video conferencing for our hearings, we could benefit by reducing travel costs for our judges, DHS Attorneys, and eliminating the costs associated with the transportation of an alien from their hosting facility to the hearing court. Also, the prosecution does not have to travel to the court or the holding facility. This was our Business Case justification. Now, we needed

6 an infrastructure, something to tie it all together to make it work. Solution: We purchased a solution that was cost effective and efficient. It had to effectively address and solve present challenges, yet, have the flexibility to evolve as the agency grows. From the beginning, the solution had to save the government money, period. As stewards of US tax dollars, we knew that there was no other option. We had to be absolutely sure that we were designing for all the different widgets that we needed. Because, you cannot come up with a solution and 10 months into implementation your vendor or contractor says, oh, if you want to do that, you need to buy this. As stewards, we must

7 be sure of our design and what we are buying before we buy it. Therefore, we reached out to our vendors and utilized demo equipment, reached out to other government colleagues on how they were using video, and we reached out to our vendor s competitors. I m proud to say that today, we have a VTC bridge solution that not only can support VTC at EOIR but in the future we intend on allowing other DOJ components and other agencies federal, state, and local to leverage our equipment as well. Upper Management Buy In This is the most important step. Perfect example, our CIO Rick Chandler is in the audience today, not because he s worrying about what I m going to say next, but he understands the power of video and comprehends how it strategically aligns with his vision on how to make video conferencing

8 pervasive, not only through EOIR but throughout the entire Department of Justice. Therefore, to get management to buy in, you must provide cost benefit analysis, demos, proof of concept, and any other information you can provide to them to make an intelligent decision. It would be irresponsible for me to ask our CIO to signoff on a new technology because it does something really cool, or because we have had a long relationship with the company who makes the product. Bottom-line, if you want upper management to take your solution serious, you must demonstrate to them that you take your solution serious. User Input With most projects we forget the most important person, the user. When I first

9 started, I asked the users what they liked about their video experience and what they didn t like. They loved the concept of video and its ability to connect all over the country with the click of a button. In contrast, they wanted to have stable connections, reliable equipment, and someone to assist when something didn t work. So, I knew we needed a solution that monitored our endpoints, provided connectivity stability, and ensured our helpdesk had the knowledge, skills, and abilities to assist the users when they called. In 2009, I had James Aguirre and Luis Velasco come to our Immigration Judges Conference in DC. We gave the Judges and clerks the opportunity to ask questions about video. This was great and it was a success for us to receive so much user input both positive and negative. Afterwards, we were able to

10 effectively design our solution around, our customers. Budget As we all know, we have serious budget restraints that have impacted the entire federal government. So, our solutions need to bring immediate value and we must come to the understanding that funding may be here today but it can be gone tomorrow. At EOIR,

11 we have yearly conferences for our judges and our court administrators. We fly everyone in to Falls Church for a week long seminar but this year we don t have the budget to do it. So, to prevent these conferences from being cancelled due those uncontrollable budget restraints, and considering have VTC capabilities at immigration court, we intend to have these conferences over video. Another benefit from our VTC solution is that it will allow us to conduct our DOJ mandated immigration judge s training, judicial law clerk s training and other Human Resources initiatives over video. With video, we have begun a big video culture shift knowing that we still can

12 continue with our meetings, conferences, and training without regards to budget restraints. In the news, quite frankly, the Government gets a bad rep. On the contrary, the EOIR example of how to utilize video in its mission, its daily functions, and its conferences proves that Government is striving to be fiscally responsible and technologically progressive. Installation Installation can be the easiest step if planned correctly. Or it could be the step that dooms the entire project and frustrates upper management. To ensure the project s success I have briefings with management to keep

13 them updated on the project s progress, risks, and its schedule. One last thing about installation, it s very important to ensure that you have experienced people to install your solution and to ensure knowledge transfer by documenting, documenting, and creating as much detailed documentation as possible. Our IT Staff s collective motto is we do it once and do it right. Training How many of us have an application on our desktops that we don t know how to use or for that fact, know how it even got there? Most corporations and agencies spend thousands or millions of dollars on

14 applications and other solutions that their customers still don t even know how to use even a year or two after implementation. At EOIR, our VTC users are self sufficient because of our VTC training before and after endpoint deployment. Whether it s the clerk the Court Administrator or the Judge, most are fully competent on how to use and troubleshoot the VTC. We learned that the smarter the user, the less likely we were to receive calls at our helpdesk which in turn frees up resources and reduces cost. Therefore, with user turn-over, new technologies, and increased user interaction, we must make training an initiative that parallels an agency s growth and does not fall behind so far behind that it impedes that agency s progress.

15 Evolution Evaluating and re-evaluating Thought Leadership Evolution is: Over the course of time you have a well thought-out road map that s flexible and inter-operable with every aspect that s relevant to your agency. Being able to tie together your video experience from a courtroom, to the desktop, to the office phone, to your cell phone and to your home. At this point, we are not talking about VTC strategy or solution anymore. We are talking about unified collaboration. EOIR s unified collaboration solution will allow us to reduce its carbon footprint, continue fiscal responsibility and free up resources by:

16 enabling video on every desktop and allowing those users to share resources, enabling video at our user s homes to assist with our telework initiative, enabling video at alternate locations for COOP purposes, enabling video solutions that traverse the internal DOJ firewalls for agency collaboration, and most importantly, enabling video over IP to those IHP participants to not only reduce our cost but reduce cost to all levels of Government that interact with EOIR. Thank you,

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