The Defense community has always been on the cutting edge of technology adoption and deployment. From Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) role in laying the groundwork for the Internet, to the investments that developed today’s AI technology, and weapons systems, drone capabilities, and even medical technology to name just a few areas where the defense community has led the way in digital transformation. And this IT leadership shows no signs of stopping as we enter 2026.

On our next two episodes of the Clickthrough podcast, we are fortunate to have three defense community experts who will guide our listeners through upcoming changes and important topics to consider in the coming year. Today, we welcome Donna Settle, Vice President, Federal Defense at Maximus as a podcast host along with guests, Leslie Beavers, who served as the Acting Chief Information Officer for the Department of Defense and is a retired Reserve Brigadier General with service on the Joint Staff J2, and Mary F. O’Brien, who is a retired United States Air Force lieutenant general. Lieutenant General (Ret.) O’Brien served as the Director of Command, Control, Communications, and Computers/Cyber, and CIO J6, Joint Staff at the Pentagon.

The powerhouse panel had such a rich and thought-provoking conversation that we needed to create two parts to Episode 8 of the Clickthrough podcast. In the first part of their conversation, Beavers, O’Brien and Settle focused on the Fulcrum Strategy, the DoD’s Information Technology Advancement Strategy that has guided the agency since June 2024. With a new administration in place in 2025, it’s an important moment to review the accomplishments thus far and then build an understanding of how the strategy is evolving with new leadership in place.

Following that discussion, the team tackled cybersecurity challenges and Zero Trust wins. With the defense community under near constant attack and vulnerable to insider threats, managing risk and mitigating attacks is always top of mind. Top of mind for our experts is credential and identity access management, which helps the agency comply with mandates and manage risk amidst a complex and highly distributed organization. For O’Brien, one of the key discussions that must occur within the DoD’s cyber teams is how to balance risk, usability, and accessibility to ensure the organization is both highly responsive and highly secure.

Caring for veterans is a job that for the most part falls to family members who, until the moment they start caregiving, have had no prior experience. As well as the physical act of caregiving, these family members suddenly need to become knowledgeable in navigating medical care and interacting with a formidable bureaucracy.

Even though caregivers are a vital link between health systems and everyday life, the traditional caregiving model has cast the caregiver as a secondary stakeholder. Being outside the central loop results in the caregiver being left out of how care is designed, delivered, and improved. While this caregiving model has functioned, with today’s focus on user experience and the technology and data available to drive that change, it seems like an ideal time to explore a different model of care.

In the latest episode of the Clickthrough podcast, brought to you by Maximus, Monica Rosser, Executive Managing Director of Federal Health for Maximus and Steve Schwab, CEO of the Elizabeth Dole Foundation, joined host, Hillary Fredrick to discuss the role of the caregiver and how technology and focus on whole health experience will improve the caregiver experience. A whole-health approach to caregiving is designed to give caregivers great access to services and information driving better outcomes for caregivers and those whom they support.

A whole-health approach to caregiving starts with user-centered design. As Schwab explains in the podcast, user-centered design means involving the caregiver directly and not treating them like a secondary stakeholder. In practice, including caregivers involves creating feedback loops so they can continue to improve all aspects of the caregiving system through surveys, usability testing, and journey mapping.

But there’s so much more to learn about building a whole-health approach to caregiving and supporting our hidden heroes, so why not clickthrough to listen to the podcast?

Generative AI has quickly become fundamental to this next generation of service delivery excellence, and now, the next generation of AI, agentic AI, is poised to help agencies further refine their service delivery capabilities. In this new episode of the Clickthrough podcast, brought to you by Maximus, host Hillary Fredrick and guests Mike Kuentz, a principal solutions architect from AWS, and Sam Frederick, Senior Director of Customer Experience solutions at Maximus, discuss how agentic AI is reshaping service delivery for federal agencies.