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.

What do hackathons have to do with national defense? More than you might think.

In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Arun Seraphin of NDIA’s Emerging Technologies Institute and Derrick Pledger of Maximus to explore how hackathons are helping government and industry tackle complex challenges in real time.

From accelerating emerging technology solutions to breaking down silos between agencies and vendors, these events are evolving into powerful platforms for collaboration, experimentation, and rapid innovation.

In this episode of the Clickthrough podcast, host, Hillary Fredrick is joined by Jonathan Shapland, who is Senior Director of Technology at Maximus and Cathy Muha, Senior Director of the Customer Experience Accelerator at Maximus, to learn more about digital health services and what these newer, patient-centric solutions can offer to caregivers and providers alike.

In the third episode of Season 2 of Clickthrough, host Hillary Fredrick is joined by MaryAnn Monroe, Vice President of the Maximus CX Accelerator, and Mike Kuentz, Principal Solutions Architect, to unpack the promise – and the pressure of building a connected citizen-first future through AI, the cloud, and Total Experience Management tools. It’s a fascinating discussion, and one that anyone attending an AWS Summit this summer will definitely want to listen to.

There’s no doubt about it, 2025 is the Year of AI for the federal government. From predictive AI to generative AI there are so many examples of how AI can help federal agencies and workers be more efficient.

But have you heard of Agentic AI? Agentic AI, where autonomous AI agents can understand and interpret customers’ questions using natural language and with minimal human intervention, is an easy way for agencies to connect with their end-users to triage and solve common problems. Agentic AI makes services more accessible and makes agency workers more efficient by enabling them to focus on more complex and high-value tasks. Moreover, AI Agents are available 24x7, are infinitely scalable and are consistent and accurate because they run on data driven insights.

With the federal government under increasing pressure to modernize service delivery while ensuring efficiency, security, and accessibility. AI-powered agents are emerging as a game-changer, enabling faster, more intuitive, and scalable citizen interactions. But how can agencies successfully integrate AI into their workflows? In this episode of the Clickthrough podcast one of Salesforce’s leading experts in Agentic AI for government, Mia Jordan, joins Mike Raker, Chief Technology Officer at Maximus, and host, Hillary Fredrick to answer that question and discuss how Agentic AI can improve customer experience and drive efficiency in the delivery of government services.

Investments in constituent experiences (CX) are a key part of agency modernization strategies today across the federal government. But while most of these CX investments are directed towards external end users of agency services, the Department of Defense’s embrace of CX improvements is slightly different. For the DoD, their end user is the warfighter and their family and the need to improve their experience in interacting with the complex bureaucracy has never been more important as part of retention and recruitment goals.

While much of the public conversation has focused on access to IT, training, and recognition, one of the other areas in which the DoD is improving CX is in healthcare. Investments in patient centric modernization are rising and in this episode of the Clickthrough podcast on Government Technology Insider, Hillary Fredrick had the opportunity of speaking to Seileen Mullen, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs. Ms. Mullen has spent nearly 30 years within the military healthcare ecosystem and shares her insights on the strategies that are enabling military health agencies to rethink, redefine, and reimagine integrated health services that are critical to warfighter readiness to ensure that customer experience is at the center of innovative care models.

During the conversation Mullen shared that our “patients are now the drivers. They get to decide how and when they want to be seen, and not the other way around. It’s no longer about the number of times we get them in the waiting room. It’s about meeting the patients where they are in their lives at the time they need care ... Under My Military Health, which is a comprehensive blend of self-guided care-on-demand and scheduled virtual care and interactive messaging to better manage care plans between medical appointments. Today, we have five pilot sites, and we're rolling them out system wide, beginning in 2025.”