Open Comments, hosted by The Open Group

Open Comments: S2 Ep. 9 - Strategic Intelligence: AI in Government with Dr. Darren Pulsipher

• The Open Group • Season 2 • Episode 9

Share episode

Dr. Darren Pulsipher shares his journey from Silicon Valley Software Engineer to Chief Solution Architect for Intel's public sector and Chair of The Open Group Government Enterprise Architecture Workgroup. He discusses the Government Digital Transformation Architecture framework and explains why successful Enterprise Architecture must balance technical innovation with human-centered design.

Highlights from the Episode:

• Growing up in California with an early passion for computers that fueled his career in technology
• Moving from medical imaging software to founding a startup during the dot-com boom that eventually became part of Eclipse
• Developing the Government Digital Transformation Architecture that examines transformation holistically across people, processes, and technology
• Emphasizing multidimensional learning that includes technology skills, cultural understanding, and process methodologies
• Learning cultural awareness through firsthand experience establishing business in Japan
• Warning that generative AI is eliminating traditional junior engineering tasks, requiring new professionals to develop communication and systems thinking skills
• Explaining why technology solutions that ignore human factors or organizational culture typically fail
• Building international collaboration to develop enterprise architecture standards that incorporate diverse global perspectives
• Advocating for governance that provides guardrails while still allowing innovation to flourish
• Recommending finding mentors outside your current organization and dedicating daily time to learning

Dr. Darren Pulsipher, Chief Solution Architect for the Public Sector, Intel
Dr. Darren Pulsipher is a technology strategist, storyteller, and trusted advisor to government and enterprise leaders driving digital transformation at scale. As Chief Solution Architect for the Public Sector at Intel, he partners with organizations to align people, processes, policies, and technologies—delivering sustainable outcomes through clarity, structure, and cultural alignment. His approach emphasizes that transformation begins with people and is enabled by shared language and architectural thinking. 

Dr. Darren Pulsipher's podcast: https://embracingdigital.org/en/home/index.html

Send us a text

Copyright © The Open Group 2023-2025. All rights reserved.

Speaker 1:

Welcome back to Open Comments with me, ash. Today we have the distinct pleasure of welcoming Dr Darren Pulsipher to the podcast. Dr Pulsipher serves as Chief Solution Architect for the public sector at Intel Corporation and is Chair of the Open Group Government Enterprise Architecture EA Workgroup. In this episode we'll discuss the evolving role of enterprise architecture in the public sector, his leadership in launching the government EA reference GEAR framework and the importance of systems thinking, people-first architecture and lifelong learning. Welcome to Open Comments. Dr Darren Paltzifer, please can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Speaker 2:

Hey, thanks, ash, for having me on the show. First off, and a little bit about my background. I'm a native Californian, third generation California, which is very rare. I grew up in the Central Valley of California, which is a farming community, and I just had a love for computers really early on. Anything I can get my hands on, I was just devouring. I needed it right. And that love of learning, that love of tinkering has done well for me in my career, because especially in technology, you gotta constantly be learning, can't ever stop, ever, ever stop, because it's changing all the time. So it makes it a lot of fun.

Speaker 2:

But from there I went on to college and got a computer science double E degree and I started my career off in medical imaging of all places, which I loved because my father is a dentist and so I always thought I'd go into medical or something like that. But I just love that area. But I found out really quickly as a software engineer that no one knew how to manage software engineers. This was in the nineties, and so I actually went back to school and got my MBA in the late nineties during thecom boom, which was an incredible time to get your MBA, because that's when the craziness of of investment into thecom era was happening. So with one of my pals, christian Buckley from MBA school, we did a startup. It did not have a web presence, so we did the wrong startup at the wrong time, right, but we did raise some money. We ended up selling that company to a big company, rational Software Corporation. That got bought up by IBM and was kind of the foundation for what people have today and what people use today as Eclipse, which is an integrated development environment, which is kind of cool. When I go back and look it says, hey, what we developed was kind of the foundation of these things that we see most software developers using today.

Speaker 2:

So, and that you know, I spent 10 years in Silicon Valley chasing the brass ring, as they used to say. The brass ring, as they used to say. Anyone that was, uh, in silicon valley at that time had a lot of fun. Um, moving from job to job about every 18 months. Uh, you could not stand still. You couldn't let the grass grow under your feet. You had to keep moving and exploring and it was. It was an exciting time, very exciting time.

Speaker 1:

And delving more into your career so far. Please can you tell us a little bit about a recent presentation that you gave at the Open Group Riyadh event very recently?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So this is really interesting because my career moved from software engineering into more systems engineering and enterprise architecture. I ended up finishing up doing a PhD in technology and innovation management, with emphasis in cybersecurity, but really systems thinking. So recently, when I was in Riyadh with the Open Group, I presented an architecture that we've developed and that we're standardizing now, which is the Government Digital Transformation Architecture, at a government agency, holistically, across the board, by looking at people, process strategy, digital assets like software, and physical assets like devices, buildings, ships, tanks, cars and looking at it holistically, because no one really looks at it at that level.

Speaker 2:

And what we found is, when we do, we start understanding the whole system a lot better and we can make better decisions on which technology we're going to leverage and which processes we're going to change and which cultural changes we need to make in the organizational structures. So it's a really exciting way of approaching these problems and people go well, darren, this is going to take forever to fully model a big organization, and this is where the art of enterprise architecture comes in, because this is where the art of enterprise architecture comes in. This is where you want to have a really good enterprise architect that can look broadly at the whole system and identify the areas where we need details and where the problem spaces are, and all that. So it turns out to be an invaluable tool to help enterprise architects articulate what's going on in an organization more effectively.

Speaker 1:

And from what you just spoke about just now about lifelong learning, can you tell us a little bit about the role that lifelong learning has played in keeping you effective and adaptable in such a fast-changing landscape?

Speaker 2:

And how would you say that's evolved for you within your career so far? Well, yeah, that's a great question, because a lot of times as software engineers we really focus just on learning a new language or learning new techniques or design patterns, and if you don't, then you become irrelevant. You really do. I mean, if you're just stuck in, if you're still programming in C, then you're limited on how much you do. But if you program in multiple languages, that broadens your horizon and new ideas of thought. But just understanding technology and learning about technology is not all that's needed.

Speaker 2:

A great example when I was in Riyadh at this event, I always when I visit a new country, I always go to their museums and people go. Well, why are you doing that? Right, you could go, you know, ride a camel or zipline or do something fun. I said well, because I want to understand the cultural biases that people have in that country, because everyone has a cultural bias where you grew up, right? So I go and I try and explore and understand the people that I'm working with by visiting their museums of all places, going to their shopping malls, going to their shopping district, eating their food right, and all these things become really important in that learning right, because we can't just be one dimensional in our learning, just technology. We also have to understand cultural things and people, and then we also understand process. So I constantly am learning new process techniques and new. I do a lot of research in new techniques on process automation and process re-engineering and things like that as well. So it's you've got to be multi-dimensional.

Speaker 1:

uh, today and um, I it's just, I just love information, right, so I'm constantly researching new things would you say as well that helps with uh awareness with what you've said, is, you know, with uh, immersing yourself in the environment that you're in, whether you know you go to a place abroad or even the hometown that you're in, whether you go to a place abroad or even the hometown that you're from, in terms of also understanding people better as well with the different settings that you're into.

Speaker 2:

Oh, absolutely, and I learned this early in my career, when I was a CIO, I was opening up new offices in Japan. It was the first time I'd ever been to Japan and luckily I had a director of IT that was. He was American, but he'd been living in Tokyo for 10, 15 years.

Speaker 2:

So he understood the culture really well. And I show up, american, I had, the company we had was flush with cash and I show up and say, all right, we need to rent a building, we need to open up bank accounts, we need to establish ourselves as a business here, we need to go get all all the business stuff going. And, um, I hit a brick wall. Yes, because I went in not understanding the culture and how things were done there, and so I called up my director of IT and I said what is going on? And he goes first off, you have no idea what you're doing. I said wait, wait, I've done this in other countries. I know what I'm doing. He goes no, you don't, because the culture here is different. So he spent a good two or three days with me coming up with our strategy on how we were going to open up this business and sit down and understand the culture a little bit more.

Speaker 2:

Understand how business is done in these different cultures is extremely important, and once we did that, we were able to establish things within a couple of days. And which before was? It looked like it was going to take weeks and months because the roadblocks were put up, because I did not understand the culture I was working in and I see a lot of especially American businessmen that go abroad and because I am American and I've got money, I can do whatever I want. That's not true, and if you immerse yourself in the culture, you can understand how business is done Everything from gift giving to the proper way to hand over a business card to you know how to do banking. You think banking is just money, right? No, it's different in every country, so understanding those things ends up being a huge plus when you're doing business, both on the business side and technology side too. It's a really fascinating thing, this world that we live in.

Speaker 1:

And moving on to career advice, how would you advise early and mid-career professionals in government or industry to prioritize continuous education or certification, and do you see a growing need for architects and technologists to also develop leadership and communication skills?

Speaker 2:

oh, this is. This is a huge with, with generative ai coming up in becoming an important tool which and I use generative AI every single day. I still program for fun and for other things. I really enjoy it. So I have some open source projects I work on and some products that I'm releasing and things like that.

Speaker 2:

Generative AI gets rid of a lot of the minutiae grunt work that I used to give to junior engineers, which means this is going to become very important for junior people. You're going to have to level your skills, you're going to have to start thinking more systemically, more architecture driven, and you need to be able to articulate and to communicate with humans. Be able to articulate and to communicate with humans Now this is really hard for some high tech guys, right? Because it's like, well, they used to just put me in a closet with some pizza and Coke and a computer and I can program for weeks on end. Those days are gone. Now we're looking for junior people that can build interpersonal relationships, can communicate effectively, and I think some of the reasons why we need that is because, if you don't, you're going to become irrelevant in the work that you used to do before, because Gen EI do that work for for me more effectively.

Speaker 2:

So there's some things that, jenny, I can't do very well, and that is there's nuances in language, there's nuances in communication. There's a lot of non-verbal communication that goes on understanding that and understanding and working with people, and that's going to be crit, that's going to be critical moving forward. So for those that are in college right now, there's hope for you in getting jobs. I teach at a university, I teach at Vanderbilt University, and I'm trying to help my students with their skills on critical thinking, on designing and architecting big solutions and utilizing generative AI to move forward quickly and to become truly gen AI augmented that's the word that I like to see start being used. So there's hope out there. It's constant learning, but the learning needs to be multidimensional.

Speaker 1:

It can't just be one thing anymore learning, but the learning needs to be multidimensional. It can't just be one thing anymore. And you've emphasized that architecture is not just about systems, it's about people. So could you elaborate please on what that means in a?

Speaker 2:

government context, oh, especially in the government context, because in government you're dealing with a very interesting dynamic. You're dealing with um constituents or citizens, um, and they they're they're an interesting bunch because they're not paying for these services, they're expecting these services, um, they are paying through taxes a lot of times and things like that. So they're they're an interesting constituency or customer because it's it's very, it's a very different um customer base, so you have to understand them very well. The other thing that you have to deal with in government is the workers. A lot of them come in unions and things like that, and so it's a very different mindset than in the commercial space.

Speaker 2:

So, understanding how people work together and what these structures are, government tends to be much more bureaucratic. They tend to not be able to move very quickly. So you've got architect solutions that play on the strengths of organizations and not combat against those organizations, a culture and constraints, and because I've seen several products that were wonderful products in the commercial space, just doing awesome in the commercial space, but when they move into government it's contrary to the government culture and they're not used, they fall apart. So, really understanding people, organizational structures, process, and understanding bureaucracy and how to leverage bureaucracy and technology together to get things done more effectively. That is a sweet spot.

Speaker 1:

If you can figure that out, you're going to go really far, and in your experience.

Speaker 2:

What are some of the common pitfalls when architecture loses sight of the human element? Oh man, that's a good one. I'm trying to think of a story that tells this better than I can. You know. I would say you can see it in the building construction. Sometimes, um, and and there's lots, there's lots of funny examples out there where an architect designs this beautiful building but, um, forgets to put a door at the ground level or or in in the software space.

Speaker 2:

I create this beautiful, you know, very complex algorithm that does things, but, as we call it in technology circles, it's got a double E UI or electrical engineering UI, which is all command line based and you need a PhD in order to run it. But once you can run it, it does incredible things, right? We see this in areas like high performance computing, where it's amazing what a high performance computing computer can do, but to get it started you need a PhD to understand just the command lines to get things to run. So architecture, if you ignore the person part of it, you can really build these really cool, complex systems that no one can use.

Speaker 1:

And moving on to future vision and international collaboration. Looking ahead what are your goals for the government EA work group through the remainder of 2025 and beyond?

Speaker 2:

So thank you for asking that.

Speaker 2:

So right now, with the working group, we've got a draft model that we're working through right now and our goal is to get it ratified next summer, which is a very aggressive goal for standards work, because we need a lot of input to make sure that we're covering things appropriately. And right now my real goal is to build a collaboration, a team of people from government and industry all over the world, so that we can produce the best standard that we possibly can, so that it's not one dimensionaldimensional, so that we do understand aspects from developing countries, already developed countries, from different parts of the world, because there's cultural bias in all that, so that we're using the best from all over the world instead of it just being company or one country. So that's our goal this year, with the ratification of the standard happening, hopefully next July. So we got a lot of work to do and we're moving as quickly as we possibly can to build up as many voices into the working group as possible and then coalesce those voices. It's hard work but enjoyable work at the same time.

Speaker 1:

That's great. And what's your perspective on balancing innovation with governance in high-stake sectors like defense, public health and critical infrastructure?

Speaker 2:

So I think governance I'm a big fan of governance as long as it fosters innovation. I've seen governance being used to smack down innovation and to thwart change, because people are kind of scared of change. But we're seeing innovation get in front of governance, sometimes like generative AI is example. It's way so far ahead of the governance around it that some countries are like just smacking it down completely and the genie's out of the bottom of it. I mean you can't get it back in. So to me it would be great if they worked hand in hand. You want governance to put some guardrails on things, but let it ride a little bit. Let the technology and innovation ride within the guidelines that you can establish. If you clamp it down too tight, you'll choke it, and if you choke it out, it will die in your area, in your region, and someone else will overtake you.

Speaker 2:

This reminds me a lot of what happened with the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s and then the second Industrial Revolution or the third I guess it'd be the third Industrial Revolution after World War II in the 50s and 60s, the, the countries that let innovation ride really far, really quick. The ones that had too much constraints, um, their manufacturing fell behind, um, and so we're in. People say, oh, we're in the fourth industrial revolution, I think we skipped it. Um, we're in the fifth information revolution that's happening today. The fourth one kind of stuttered a little bit and that's because too much governance over some things there. So it's interesting what's happening today. It's very fascinating. So the future is bright, for sure, around AI and the direction that it's heading. But we do need some guardrail, we need some caution there too.

Speaker 1:

And on that note, before we close, I'd like to return to a theme that runs throughout your career continuous development and mentoring. How has your mentorship, both giving and receiving, shaped your leadership philosophy so far?

Speaker 2:

Oh, first off, find a mentor that you can trust. That's not in your current company. That's the first thing I would tell everyone. Find someone that you can talk to about your career, that you can bounce ideas off of, and then also reach out to other people that are outside, that are more junior than you, that, hey, you want to help foster their career and help them move forward. It will be amazing as you see your mentees progress and then also as you see your mentors continue to grow and you grow with them. It's an amazing, amazing thing to do. So continuously learn. Find some good people to learn from and someone that you can confide in, but make sure they're outside of your current work. It never works inside your current organization. It doesn't work.

Speaker 1:

And finally, how do you personally stay current and motivated in your field? Are there specific practices, books, communities or routines that you recommend similar to the question that we've just asked.

Speaker 2:

You know what. I spend probably about an hour and a half two hours a day. I set aside for myself to learn something new and I try and learn things that interest me, that I'm excited about, even on vacation. It drives my wife a little bit crazy. If there's a new algorithm or a new technique and we're sitting on the beach in Costa Rica, she'll be reading a book on the beach and I'll be on my computer programming up a new genetic algorithm or, or CNN, or you know whatever it is. To me, it's just that if you feel like it's a chore, it's a chore. For me, it's just a love of learning new things and constantly trying to find new things to learn. Follow your passion and you'll go a long way that way.

Speaker 1:

Perfect. Thank you so much, and thank you for your thoughtful insights and for your leadership in helping governments build agile, citizen-centered and secure digital architectures, and we've really enjoyed talking to you about generative AI within this episode. And for those that would like to learn more about you or follow you on any social channels, please can you let us know where they can reach you?

Speaker 2:

Oh, the best way to follow me frankly, is through my podcast, because those are where my thoughts are every day. So check that out at Embracing Digital Transformation, at embracingdigitalorg. If you go there, you can see me, you can contact me through there.

Speaker 1:

That's the best way to do it and to all of our listeners out there, part of the Open Comments community. Thank you for tuning in to this episode and we hope you enjoy future episodes as much as this one, and we'll be bringing more episodes to you very soon. And thank you once again, Dr Darren Pulse-Furbel, speaking to us today on Open Comments.

Speaker 2:

Hey, thanks a lot Ash.

Head Shot

Ash

Host