When Rory Schultz first joined the US. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) in 2010, the agency had just begun work on its goal to consolidate data centers to reduce costs and avoid data duplication in compliance with the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI) established by first Chief Information Officer of the U.S., Vivek Kundra.
Schultz, the agency’s deputy chief information officer, has since stood with the organization as it closed and consolidated two of four FNS data centers and moved the applications to the USDA National Information Technology Center (NITC).
“When I got here, the IT side of the house was in pretty good shape structurally, but it really kind of needed a push to document processes,” Schultz said, noting that the agency, because it is small, must efficiently leverage financial and personnel resources to complete its mission.
“We’re a really small agency so to do all the things we want to do does take resources…The more that I can do to help that mission and make our industry partners understand what our mission is, and make them more effective, then I think that’s the effective thing to do,” he said.
NITC began introducing centralized, shared computing services to USDA agencies in 1972 and by year’s end expects to consolidate 32 additional data centers within the administration to scale up efficiencies and continue to drive down hosting rates.
Schultz, a self-proclaimed beer and fine cigar enthusiast, has also since his start at FNS spearheaded a “one call is all” customer service initiative to encourage his IT team to offer solutions to any all individuals requesting assistance so as to advance that mission.
“What that means is no matter who you talk to in our organization, you ought to get some level of satisfaction,” Schultz said. “It’s really more about tweaking the culture of the IT staff… we’re here to get us to where our goal is. And that goal is be one of the best small agency support teams in the government,” Schultz said.
FNS supervises 15 nutrition assistance programs, which positions the group to assist an estimated 25 percent of citizens through its supplemental nutrition assistance program, school nutrition programs and the supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children among other programs
And that’s where Schultz and his team come in, again.
“It’s really about making sure we have the resources on the IT side of the house to support our program folks who are out working with the states and the local communities,” he said.
In the future, that means ensuring the agency stays ahead on emerging technology. His workforce is equipped with laptop docking stations, Citrix , tablets and boasts a successful teleworking program.
“We actually have a reputation within USDA as being one of the agencies that likes to adopt early,” Schultz said. “We bring in a technology that we’re using or we’re about to use, we invite the other USDA CIO’s as well as some of my contacts in industry or other government agencies. We come in and demo the technology at a strategic level in the morning and at the technical level in the afternoon.”
And while the 28-year public service veteran certainly exhibits an affinity for technology, it’s not always the cutting-edge gadgets that he’s interested in.
When Schultz is not overseeing FNS’s network, systems and support, he also collects #oldtechnology as teaching props. He’s pocketed everything from a 286 Compaq portable computer — state of the art in about 1987 — to old pagers, clamshell phones and some of the original BlackBerrys and Palm Pilots.
“When I’m talking about technologies, I bring them with me and show people what it was like in the past,” he said. “If I’m talking to a group of millenials, they’ve never seen half this stuff. They don’t realize the computing power we have today in an iPhone or a BlackBerry.”
He said he enjoys teaching because it harkens back to his youth and hopes to ultimately combine all of his old phones into a diorama that documents the “evolution of mobile phone” – for teaching purposes, of course.
“Mentoring folks in professional development is kind of a giveback for me because when I was a young professional, I had some folks mentor me and point me in the right direction,” Schultz said, noting that he works with ACT-IAC professional development programs.
“I really like working [with the programs]because it allows me to help those folks in their career and [help them understand]that government and industry should be a partnership and it’s not an us vs. them. It should be a ‘we.’ The more folks get it, it means that we in the government get better contracts, the American people get better services, we get better pricing in the government and we can have an honest dialogue and discussion.”
