Senators push chamber for access to ’21st-century’ tech

A pair of Senate Democrats are campaigning to change chamber rules that impede the use of modern digital tools.

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, along with Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, wrote a letter to the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration late last week recommending rule changes that “would help update Senate services to 21st-century technology and better connect members with their constituents, while also saving taxpayer dollars,” the letter states.

Booker and McCaskill address seven technologies and best practices in their letter that they hope will blossom with a few rule changes.

“New technology is changing the way we all live and work, and we have exciting opportunities to harness new tools in the Senate to improve our work with constituents,” the senators wrote. “Pursuant to our shared commitment to exemplary public service, we are writing to bring to your attention several opportunities we have identified to update the Rules of the Senate pertaining to new technology. These opportunities include proposals developed to allow for innovation, consistent with best practices in the private sector. Our aim is to remove unnecessary barriers to technological creativity while best serving constituents and saving taxpayer resources.”

The senators advise the committee in the letter to establish new technology guidance rather than adapting to antiquated offline policies. Through such an update to the rules, they hope to modernize the way senators use email newsletters, which the letter says “should not be treated as simply an electronic extension of paper mail,” and third-party news and social media analytics.

Likewise, Booker and McCaskill urge the Rules Committee to reconsider technical restrictions that hamper accountability and transparency, and to continue down the path of bulk data publishing. Currently, the Senate publishes bulk legislation information in machine-readable format, but the senators are lobbying to advance that with tools like a Senate equivalent of Docs.House.gov, an accessible repository of pending House of Representatives legislation and scheduled meetings. (Contradictory to his advocacy, though, Booker published this letter to his website as a non-machine-readable PDF.)

Finally, the pair point to several technologies the Senate should consider to save taxpayers money. Despite a growing ubiquity of cloud use around government, the Senate still relies on individual servers to host its data. The senators say a move to the cloud could save money and improve security.

“[O]utside the Senate, virtual cloud-based server environments are industry standard — they are less expensive, more secure, and more reliable,” Booker and McCaskill wrote. “Virtual cloud-based server environments host some of the most sensitive information in the world because they are less vulnerable to many security threats than individual single-box servers.”

They also hope the Rules Committee will consider opening the Senate to using modern content management systems like WordPress, which “are powerful, secure, and easy to use — but are unfortunately blocked from use in the Senate,” the letter states.

Read the letter in its entirety below.

RULES COMMITTEE – Tech Letter by Senator Cory Booker

Can STEM save Sweet Briar College?

When the announcement came down March 3 that liberal arts haven Sweet Briar College would close because of dire financial trouble, shocking students and faculty in the middle of the spring semester, a light bulb went off in one professor’s head.

Tom Scott, chair of the business department for seven years, fired off an email to President James Jones and Vice President for Finance and Administration Scott Shank in a bid to save the school.

“I was hoping that you might have half an hour during this chaotic time to discuss a possibility that has arisen,” he wrote in an email obtained by FedScoop. “This option would not have been possible without an announcement of closing.”

Scott proposed redesigning the 114-year-old women’s college, known for its deep roots in the liberal arts and set in a bucolic campus at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, into a competitive three-year STEM program. The proposal is indicative of the changing landscape in higher education, with implications for education officials, as private colleges like Sweet Briar face increasing competition for prospective students.

Officials expressed interest – enough for Jones to request a more detailed plan to put before the Board of Trustees.

“We are having to spend a great deal of time coping with legal matters of all sorts,” Jones wrote back to Scott in an email on March 12. But, he added, “perhaps this is an idea that another incarnation of the campus might take at some point in the future when we get through all of this rough sledding.”

With help from about 20 other faculty, students and alumnae, Scott put together a detailed, 54-page proposal that significantly pares down resources and costs – but adds a much more focused, vocational experience that would help get more women into growing fields in which they are traditionally underrepresented. It also follows on the heels of
President Barack Obama’s push to get more minorities and women involved in STEM programs and, ultimately, careers.

As part of the academic plan, students would have to complete a semester-long internship and two intense two-week internships in their majors.

Science, technology, engineering and math “is a strong field,” Scott said in an interview. “Folks would still like a Sweet Briar graduate to walk into a room and talk about anything – they don’t want to lose the well-roundedness – but now there has to be a shift in focus in order for the college to survive in some form.”

Choosing STEM

Out of about 530 students, 34 in the class of 2015 are pursuing majors in biology, chemistry, engineering, math, environmental science and physics, according to college statistics. Nine more students in the class of 2016 are on track to complete degrees in those majors.

But right now, students are more worried about finishing their undergraduate degrees – more than 200 have applied to transfer to other schools – and professors are scrambling to find other jobs.

“The closure announcement was devastating news for all of us on campus,” said Steve Wassell, a mathematical sciences professor for 25 years.

“But several of us are trying to look to the future and trying to think about how Sweet Briar either could survive or come back resurrected after the closure,” he added. “The matter more is, how do we best attract external interest and external funding to make this college sustainable into the future?”

According to a draft of the proposal, which Scott shared with FedScoop, the new program would enroll about 120 full-time students, each paying about $45,000 a year, and 20 untenured faculty members.

The program would slice operating costs from $34 million to roughly $14 million, according to the proposal. About $3 million would come from the school’s $60 million endowment – if it remains intact – and the remaining $11 million would be drawn from tuition and fees, room and board, annual giving, STEM grants and corporate partnerships.

Scott said he has spoken with a prominent Lynchburg neurosurgeon, Dilantha Ellegala, who has relationships with potential corporate backers in the community who would be interested in providing financial support for the program.

Challenges for a ‘new institution’

Kenneth Wong, chair of the education department at Brown University, said he was impressed with the ingenuity of the proposal, which a reporter shared with him for an independent analysis.

He highlighted that the plan would target prospective applicants from STEM-focused high schools around the country, creating a natural funnel for students to pursue degrees in their specialized subjects, and would help to bridge the gender gap in math and sciences.

“The challenge for a new institution is, can you quickly build up your reputation and be able to connect your graduates to these STEM [job] positions?” Wong said. “I think it is critical for them to hire the type of instructors they feel would get their students into those networks right away.”

Wong said some concerns include creating a three-year versus four-year program, which would not align with most college calendars and may be a deterrent for students who would consider applying. He also worried that college officials would not be able to attract top talent if professors are not awarded tenure.

“They need to be mindful of the fact that this is going to attract a different pool of potential instructors,” said Wong, adding that the tradeoff for lower tuition costs could mean fewer experienced professors and a higher faculty turnover rate.

Wong echoed Jones’ comments during the devastating announcement that simply fewer students are choosing to attend a small, single-sex, private liberal arts college.

“The economy for liberal arts institutions is getting tougher and tougher,” Wong said. “A lot of small liberal arts colleges do not want to sacrifice the tradition of a very favorable professor-to-student ratio.”

He added that school officials can also be stubborn when it comes to looking at new models of teaching to attract students.

“They are very cautious in terms of online learning,” he said of established colleges in general. “They don’t want to sacrifice the reputation of an on-campus, face-to-face learning model as opposed to growing online so they can get more students around the world.”

Questions remain

More than a month after the announcement, faculty, students and alumnae said they are still reeling.

“It seemed like a fait accompli,” Wassell said of the news, despite students’ recent protests and a new lawsuit filed by Amherst County to remove Jones and the trustees, and block the college’s shuttering. “It’s hard to imagine how we would have enough students in the fall to really have a college.”

A spokesman for the Department of Education told FedScoop that the agency had no outstanding issues, findings or concerns about Sweet Briar’s most recent audited financial statements, and the school was not included in the department’s recently released list of more than 500 universities with questionable finances.

Faculty were aware that the school had hired a consulting firm called Art and Science Group in the fall to conduct “market research” to explore new directions for the college. By spring, they were expecting a different kind of announcement.

“When we all gathered in the chapel that day, March 3, we really thought worst-case scenario that they would be announcing some mission shift or fire a bunch of faculty to go in a different direction,” said Eric Casey, associate professor of classics.

The consultants’ findings and recommendations were not widely released, faculty said, but they recommended that the school would need a $250 million endowment to be financially viable in the long term.

Casey, who also serves as a liaison between the faculty and the administration, said Scott’s proposal seemed like a ray of hope for the otherwise doomed college.

“He put an incredible amount of work into an innovative proposal that seems way more creative than anything the consultants managed to come up with,” Casey said. “I would certainly hope that [the trustees] would give it serious consideration.”

Board Chair Paul Rice did not answer an email seeking comment, but he is expected to convene a meeting on Thursday to discuss next steps.

Christy Jackson, a spokeswoman for the college, said, “The proposal, and all others submitted, are under review by the board’s working group on proposals. All submissions are being taken seriously, but the group’s work has just begun, and it is too soon for us to offer an opinion on the viability of any specific proposal.”

Jackson added she does not know how many proposals to date have been submitted to save the school.

Scott hasn’t heard again from Jones about whether his plan may come to fruition – Jones’
recent comments have bluntly broadcast the college’s end – but the business professor has another job lined up, and he, too, will move on soon.

“If people want to use me for the basis of an idea going forward, that’s awesome,” Scott said. “But I don’t feel like there’s a way to avoid a litigious end to the situation.”

“My point,” he said, “was to get people talking about something before it was too late.”

Navy charts course for faster tech innovation

The Navy’s innovation efforts are picking up steam. Less than three months after forming a new Task Force Innovation, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus is expected this month to address plans for several low-risk but high-impact technology initiatives the service may fund for development.

After months of meetings by members of the voluntary task force and coming on the heels of a recent industry day highlighting the requirements of the Navy’s new Innovation Cell, officials have started reviewing and ranking proposed initiatives from across the Navy and Marine Corps. It’s part of what the Navy is calling the discovery phase of a new rapid acquisition experiment.

“What we’re looking at is taking some initiatives and just doing sprints,” a senior Navy official said. The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly ahead of Mabus’ planned April 15 speech, spoke to FedScoop on background. “We just went through an exercise where we looked at the cost, schedule risk and the impact to the department, and we actually rated some initiatives.”

The proposals from the fleet have been posted to an internal Microsoft Sharepoint site and divided into different areas. Among those enterprise challenge areas, which were highlighted during a March 27 industry day hosted by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command Innovation Cell in Virginia, are enhanced virtualized desktops, data analytics and unified communications architecture. Industry has until May 6 to submit technical solutions to the enterprise challenges.

“We’re looking at them now and ranking them. And what will happen is we will pull some of those initiatives, fund them and let them go forward,” the official said.

Virtualized desktop

The Navy is currently piloting a hosted virtual desktop as an alternative service for 2,200 Navy Marine Corps Intranet, or NMCI, users. But the challenge is finding products and services to improve the existing architecture, including increasing wide area network storage capacity, providing end-to-end performance metrics, integrating self-service application provisioning and developing an enterprise software license business model that can support software-as-a-service.

According to the Navy’s Innovation Cell, a virtualized desktop platform capable of providing users with an equal or better experience would include the following enhancements:

• Scalable to an estimated 119,000 users across multiple geographic locations. Minimum personal file storage of 30 GB per user.
• Customizable to support various user profiles. Configurable access to applications and general user privileges. Automated replication of user sessions across architecture.
• Wide array of user devices, including Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) — desktops, thin clients, phones and tablets.
• Compliant with Navy security requirements (Federal Information Security Management Act, DOD Instruction 8500, DOD 8510 DIACAP, and Security Technical Implementation Guides).

Data analytics

The Navy is drowning in data. It collects more than 100 terabytes of structured and unstructured data every day, and stores it across dozens of disparate databases. Despite the large amount of data it collects, the Navy lacks a digital analytics capability that would produce actionable insight and knowledge.

“Currently there is limited capability within the U.S. Navy to conduct detailed data modeling, mining and predictive analytics,” according to Laura Knight, the program manager for the Sea Warrior program in the Navy’s Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems. “An analytics capability must ingest large volumes of data, in various forms, and use statistical methods and visualizations in order to identify data relationships,” according to Knight’s March 26 presentation.

“An example is decision-making for retention and recruitment,” the presentation states. “Currently these decisions can be based on predictions regarding the force, while the Navy would like to add the ability to determine when and where to apply resources to reduce stress within at-risk personnel and their families. Such a capability is typical and implies use of new technologies to perform statistical analysis to derive cause-and-effect relationships.”

The Navy plans to leverage the challenge on behalf of workforce development, financial management, recruiting, training and education initiatives.

In a video posted March 3 on the Navy’s website, Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. Bill Moran likened the Navy’s current talent management system to “a ’57 Chevy” in need of a major overhaul. “Our current personnel system was built back in the 1940s. Fundamentally, it’s the same car,” Moran said. “The information system is cumbersome and slow, and people … do not have the data to make quick, smart decisions. And instead we rely, quite frankly, on using crayons and hammer and chisels to get information passed around.”

Network architecture

The Campus Network Architecture challenge seeks industry feedback on ways the Navy can deliver network services in a more cost-effective manner. The current NMCI base area network connects various buildings across individual Navy installations, providing access, distribution and core network services. A wide area network then connects the base networks together to form the NMCI.

The Navy now wants to modernize its approach to reduce total cost of operating and owning NMCI. The following requirements are outlined in the enterprise challenge:

• Provides support for Unified Capability Requirements, campus networks such as 802.1x.
• Quality of Service, and delivery of voice/video/data services to end user workstations.
• Aligns to strategic goals and objectives such as Unified Capabilities, the Joint Information Environment, and the Mission Partner Environment.
• Minimizes packet loss, jitter and latency.
• Supports Navy security requirements (FISMA, DOD Instruction 8500, STIGs and Unified Capability Requirements).
• Must be interoperable with existing technologies and capabilities (e.g., Network Access Control).

How a relaunched RedSeal wants to better secure your network

RedSeal and its CEO, Ray Rothrock, want to go beyond giving organizations the knowledge of where network weaknesses lie.

With the public and private sectors’ heightened focus on cybersecurity, cybersecurity certification company RedSeal is re-releasing its advanced analytics platform that will allow organizations not only identify weak points, but also create an interactive model of agency networks and better prioritize fixes.

“The essence of a good company, especially in the ever-changing field of technology, is to provide innovative solutions that meet not only the current market needs but those that are still over the horizon,” Rothrock said. “I’m proud to say that RedSeal exceeds that high bar, and that’s why I’m so committed to its future.”

RedSeal’s newly expanded platform not only measures vulnerable points on existing networks, but it also takes into account an organization’s use of cloud and mobile technologies. The security index will help agencies better secure public and private cloud instances, integrating with Amazon Web Services and VMWare’s vShield.

On top of network intelligence, the platform measures other instances of security products to determine if they are installed correctly while prioritizing what remediation or fixes should be instantly deployed.

This re-tooled security risk management software is part of a greater relaunch from the company, which announced a $17 million round of funding Monday from a host of companies and venture capital firms. Already backed by a number of firms, including In-Q-Tel, RedSeal’s service is used in a host of large federal agencies, including the Defense Department, Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Postal Service, and various places in the intelligence community.

“The network is the lifeblood between IT systems and the key security layer in IT. It should come as no surprise that our adversaries won’t hesitate to attack the network itself to siphon data, disrupt services or change the configuration for their own gain,” Cisco Chief Security and Trust Officer John Stewart, who uses RedSeal, said in a release. “Central to effective cybersecurity is knowing that network infrastructure, and having a deep understanding of how it works, how safely configured it is, and what changes are made day to day.”

Patent office rolls out long-awaited examiner system

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last week released a much-anticipated new system aimed at helping patent examiners more efficiently process applications, FedScoop has learned.

The Patents End-To-End system is a platform that provides one interface for examiners to perform a range of tasks while they’re evaluating applications. It replaces an older system that required examiners to run several separate programs.

“Our feedback was incredibly positive, even from some of the biggest naysayers,” John Owens, the patent office’s chief information officer, told FedScoop.

Owens said the 1,000 examiners who were involved in the new system’s beta testing are the first users. The agency will train staffers on the new system in groups of about 1,000 over the next several months. The patent office has more than 8,000 examiners.

“We have to roll it out in stages because there are only so many people to train” the examiners, Owens said.

The release comes as the patent office struggles to ease a bottleneck of nearly 600,000 pending applications, and as Congress and industry continue to search for a way to tighten controls on “patent trolls,” or companies whose priority is to use their patent portfolios to file suit against other firms.

Patents End-To-End, or PE2E, has been in development for several years. Late last year, a report from the 2014 Patent Public Advisory Committee noted that lower-than-expected fee revenues in past years have forced the agency to put development of IT — including PE2E— on hold. It urged the agency to continue to increase IT funding.

Owens has been an advocate for using agile development and DevOps, an industry concept referring to the continuous, automated deployment of new software, to put out the patent office’s new systems. And throughout development, the CIO office brought in the employees’ union early on to solicit feedback on PE2E, Owens said. IT staffers continuously used the responses to make improvements to the system.

The CIO’s office is continuing to take feedback, Owens said. By the end of the month, the agency plans to issue another release to fix bugs that initial users detect.

“We plan on releasing new features, after the new release, about once a quarter,” he said.

PE2E is one of several IT projects the patent office has in the works.

Recently, the agency released a new version of its public website. And looking ahead, Owens said the office plans to issue the first release of Trademarks Next Generation, a system for trademark examiners, in June or July. It will also release a replacement to its current fee-collection-and-processing system, called Fee Processing Next Generation, in June.

“Lots of stuff [is] being released,” he said.

Virus penetrates FAA systems

The Federal Aviation Administration acknowledged Friday that a “known virus” penetrated the agency’s administrative network in February, but it said no damage was done.

“In early February, the FAA identified a known virus on its administrative computer system that is passed through email,” FAA spokesman Lynn Lunsford told FedScoop in an email late Friday. “The agency immediately took steps to block and contain the virus and clean any affected computers. After a thorough review, the FAA did not identify any damage to agency systems.”

News of the incident came as a result of a contract award notice that mentioned “a recent cyber-attack” that forced a delay in the FAA’s requirements process for industry bids on the agency’s Cyber Security Management Center Security Operations Center support services contract.

The FAA awarded the incumbent, SRA International Inc., a so-called bridge contract that will remain in effect until Feb. 29, 2016, if necessary, the contract posting states.

“Due to a recent cyber-attack, the FAA requires additional planning time to determine the impact to the competitive procurement’s requirements,” the FAA notice states.

News of the incident comes a month after the Government Accountability Office issued a scathing report detailing significant control weaknesses in the FAA’s computer systems that potentially put the national airspace system at risk. The 18-month GAO audit ended just one month before the virus incident occurred.

“Until FAA effectively implements security controls, establishes stronger agencywide information security risk management processes, fully implements its NAS information security program, and ensures that remedial actions are addressed in a timely manner, the weaknesses GAO identified are likely to continue, placing the safe and uninterrupted operation of the nation’s air traffic control system at increased and unnecessary risk,” the GAO report stated.

OMB, CIOs must communicate better on IT reform – GAO report

In a report released Thursday, the Government Accountability Office said if the White House’s Office and Management and Budget wants to help the government effectively manage its IT portfolio, the office and agency CIOs need to communicate better.

GAO surveyed 24 chief information officers about the various reporting requirements OMB expects of them in accordance with the government’s IT reform initiatives. Of the 36 requirements found, a majority of the CIOs said two-thirds of them provide little help in managing IT while requiring a significant amount of effort to complete.

Among the requirements federal CIOs listed as being useful to “some to no extent” when it came to managing IT include reports related to open data policies, personal identity verification credentials, key Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program metrics, PortfolioStat, and cybersecurity performance improvements. Furthermore, open data and PortfolioStat reports were labeled as needing “very great to great” effort in order to be completed. GAO says the requirements found to be useless are costing agencies approximately $76 million to $144 million per year.

Even with the surveyed CIOs expressing their unhappiness with the requirements, GAO backed OMB by emphasizing the money saved and duplications eliminated under a number of initiatives.

“It is concerning that CIOs do not always see value in reporting information essential to these reforms,” the GAO wrote. “Establishing a common understanding between OMB and CIOs on the priority of these initiatives and their related reporting requirements will help ensure their success.”

In order to spur that success, GAO asked the CIOs what they would change about the current process. Recommendations included changing what information is sent to OMB, reducing the frequency of reports or eliminating requirements altogether.

Another key suggestion brought up by multiple CIOs was the need to clear up confusion related to what exactly was reported to OMB, as well as better feedback on why the White House needed the information required in certain reports.

“Having a process that consistently provides effective feedback is key to helping agency CIOs better manage their IT resources and improve reporting; it is also consistent with OMB’s goals to improve federal IT management, oversight and transparency,” GAO wrote. “Until an effective feedback process is in place, there is a risk that agencies are managing their IT in a suboptimal manner.”

OMB did tell GAO it is trying to streamline the process by changing the format by which requirement information is submitted and choosing to streamline where these requirements are being reported. However, OMB’s changes do not line up with the suggestions put forward by the agency CIOs.

GAO recommended that OMB and agency CIOs do a better job of understanding where the other is coming from to meet the administration’s overarching IT goals.

“By not addressing these challenges, OMB is missing opportunities to help CIOs improve the requirements reporting process and its use of information collected to effectively manage and oversee federal IT,” GAO wrote.

The White House’s reaction to the GAO report was a bit peculiar: OMB stated it neither “agreed nor disagreed with GAO’s recommendations,” and it took issue with GAO’s methodology, the list of reporting requirements and failure to note changes OMB already made to the process. OMB defended its findings at length, devoting nearly eight pages to its methodology at the end of the report.

Read the report, in full, below.

Hashmi isn’t done with government IT just yet

Sonny Hashmi has devoted his life’s work to improving federal IT. So it may have come as a surprise when he decided to leave his position as the General Services Administration’s chief information officer to join the private cloud storage company Box. But Hashmi said this latest industry gig is just the next step in helping governments fulfill their missions with the help of technology.

“It’s just the right time and the right fit,” said Hashmi, who officially left GSA Friday. “But I look at this not as a change for me but really as the next step in that continuum. I’ve always been in the government IT space, even when I was in the private sector for many years — I was always involved in government IT solutions.”
Despite the broad line that’s often drawn between public and private IT solutions, Hashmi said it’s critical to form a strong partnership between the two, especially if government hopes to successfully serve Americans.

“I believe that in the future of where federal technology is going, it’s not just about government or industry,” he told FedScoop. “Government and industry have to work together with the right solutions to make meaningful difference.”
So as Hashmi officially begins at Box, leading the company’s federal efforts as a cloud provider, he doesn’t see a huge change in his end goal.

“I think personally in my journey I can add more value in the private sector, especially because the adoption of cloud computing is taking off in the federal government, but many cloud service providers still are struggling with how to develop their products so they can meet government’s expectations,” he said. “I feel that at Box, it gives me the opportunity to do that. They are eager to play a significant role in the federal government’s success.”
The departing CIO’s main role at Box will be to develop the company’s federal strategy “for how Box can actually add meaningful value to agency missions,” he said. In doing so, he’ll be working with many of the same federal agency leaders he did while at GSA and some new ones on the state and local level. Hashmi will also support Box’s efforts to become compliant with the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program.

“Government is not in the business of buying products,” Hashmi said. “Government is in the business of fulfilling its mission. And as part of fulfilling that mission to the American people, the government needs many technology solutions that industry can provide. So my hope will be that I can help on the industry side to find those solutions that make sense for government agencies, help build those solutions and then add value in the process.”

GSA innovation after Hashmi

Appointed acting CIO in January 2014, Hashmi was named GSA’s official CIO last May, a capacity in which he managed a $600 million IT budget. Before that, he served as the agency’s deputy CIO since 2011 under then-CIO Casey Coleman.
While he didn’t serve as CIO for particularly long, his leadership came during some critical technology changes within GSA and the federal government, like the adoption of cloud.

“When I started at GSA about 4 1/2 years ago, the majority of the discussions at the time in the federal government were ‘Can cloud ever work in the government?’ ‘Is it something that will never work?’ ‘Can it even be possible?'” Hashmi said.

He added, “It hadn’t been done before, and I’m very proud to say that the work we did to make that happen became the foundation for how FedRAMP works today. It set the groundwork for many agencies to say, ‘If GSA can do it, we can do it in a compliant way, a secure way.'”
Thus Hashmi was seen as a critical force for his agency’s innovative prosperity in recent years. But he doesn’t think of his role in that way.

“As much as it’s flattering to hear that people think of me as part of the innovative leadership at GSA, I think I’m just one small piece of the puzzle,” he said, listing name after name of GSA leaders who have and will continue to support GSA IT when he is gone, such as Associate Administrator of the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies and 18F Phaedra Chrousos, and Director of Digital Government Gwynne Kostin.
“There’s no shortage of thoughtful, innovative leaders at GSA,” Hashmi said. “I have no doubts that GSA will continue to rocket and propel federal IT forward. My leaving is going to have zero impact on any of those amazing things GSA will do.”
He’s also bullish on his replacement, David Shive, who served as deputy CIO under Hashmi.

“He’s an exceptional leader. I trust him completely. I’ve been lucky to work with him as part of my team,” he said. “David has been involved in so many of the most critical, most challenging problems within GSA’s IT over the last couple years, everything from migrating to our new cloud-based infrastructure to modernizing some of our legacy systems. David has been at the heart of all of that.”

The work is never done

Hashmi will leave GSA with many of his biggest efforts still in development. But that’s part of working with technology.

“IT’s work is never done,” he said. “There’s never a point ever where you sort of look forward and say, ‘Two years from now, we’ll be done.’ There’s no such thing.”
Hashmi said Shive doesn’t need any direction on how to replace him, but he told FedScoop a big part of his responsibility will be to see some of the agency’s current larger IT projects through.

“We have many things in flight,” Hashmi said, mentioning the Common Acquisition Platform, BuildingLink and the modernization of cloud solutions. “These are all amazing, big, long-term projects that are already showing value. I think David’s focus in the next few years is going to be primarily to land them.”

He added, “I know that the teams are in place to get all of these things done, I know that the leadership is there to make sure that it gets done, and I’ll be rooting for the team every step of the way from the outside.”
But even from the outside, Hashmi’s efforts to improve federal IT will continue.

“My whole life I’ve always been involved in making government IT better in some way, shape or form,” he said. “And I’m not about to stop doing that. I’m always going to be continuing to do that, even in my role at Box. And if at some point in the future, the opportunity presents itself for me to serve again in a government role, I would gladly take that up.”

Drug side effects? There’s an app for that

MedWatcher Social is kind of like a detective for drug side effects.

The app scours social media outlets, like Facebook and Twitter, for people who mention an adverse event caused by a drug they’re taking. Then, it compares the side effects it finds to the Food and Drug Administration’s adverse events data.

But to grab that government information, MedWatcher Social taps into openFDA, the agency’s effort to provide application programming interfaces, or APIs, that get at its data sets on drug adverse events, recalls, device adverse events and labeling. Since FDA put out openFDA less than a year ago, dozens of apps that have sprouted up around the APIs, FDA Chief Health Informatics Officer Taha Kass-Hout told FedScoop. And just this week, FDA announced it had reached 6,000 registered users of openFDA.

To be sure, all that data was available previously. However, it might have been difficult to stitch together – it could be in formats that are outdated or difficult to compare to one another, or there could be multiple versions of some reports.

“It’s a lot of work for someone who just wants to ask the question, ‘Show me the adverse effects of drug X,'” Kass-Hout, the brains behind openFDA, told FedScoop. When they were preparing to launch openFDA, FDA experts had to “clean” the data to make it easier to draw from.

To a tech novice, an API looks like a Web address, but when developers use it in their code, openFDA’s APIs act kind of like a search engine. A developer can send a query to the API, and, just like Google, the API sends back results of that query.

When the agency unveiled openFDA with much fanfare last year at Health Datapalooza in Washington, D.C., it partnered with a few tech groups — including Epidemico, the company that put out MedWatcher Social — to demo what the APIs could do. Clark Freifeld, co-founder of Epidemico, told FedScoop that openFDA helps MedWatcher Social skip a step.

Before openFDA, “we had to parse through [files] and do a lot of extra work in order to gather that data and integrate that into the product,” Freifeld said.

Research AE, a free app that allows users to peruse millions of drug and medical device adverse events, made its debut at the event. With Research AE, users could search the name of a drug, like Humira or Nexium, and the app’s site would display in graphs and charts information about its reported reactions.

“There’s a treasure trove of information…that can be driven by this open data,” said Brian Norris, a nurse-turned-technologist who launched the application under his Indiana-based startup Social Health Insights.

OpenFDA is part of a trend sweeping the government, particularly after the White House issued an executive order directing agencies to make their data available in open, machine-readable formats. And as agencies across the government release more readable data, innovators have been thinking up new ways to use it. Indeed, in Washington, D.C., physicians have tapped National Park Service data to prescribe “outdoor activity” to help treat children with obesity, asthma and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

“You would probably never think of that as a possible source of data unless you already knew something about what’s going on there in that industry,” said Marc DaCosta, chairman and co-founder of Enigma. His startup aggregates public data from governments and the private sector, and allows users to search its troves without being encumbered by barriers between different agencies, organizations or departments.

While he said he doesn’t have much experience with openFDA, he credits the program with trying to interact with the audience it’s trying to reach. OpenFDA has developed active communities on GitHub and Stack Exchange.

“Certainly what marks the initiative of the FDA as unique is thinking about developer communities and utilizing things like GitHub and Stack Exchange and other services tools in the developer communities in order to engage them, and to do this in a way that’s fitting into a pre-existing ecosystem,” he said.

Indeed, looking forward, Kass-Hout said the openFDA team is working with those communities to guide the program’s future. For one, he’s working to further clean up the data sets the APIs draw from as a result of feedback his team has received.

Kass-Hout said he loves hearing about new projects that are tapping into the APIs. One example is Recall Guide, an app that helps people track information about drugs they’re taking. It uses an openFDA API for charting demographic and symptom information about the various drugs.

Overall, JR Oakes, a marketing director for North Carolina-based Consultwebs who conceived of the app, said he thinks the federal and local governments do a good job pushing to open data.

“I think the ability to just pull the data and understand the data is just going to get better and better,” he said. “I think the more data that’s available, the better.”

Apps like Recall Guide encourage Kass-Hout.

“If we can target the middle tier of researchers and software developers to make it easy for them to query and interact with the data in a way that’s consistent and can scale, they can they do can they do something that amazing that’s really beyond our amazing,” he said.

He added, “And they’re starting to do that.”

Mobile leaders to agencies: Think beyond apps and the network

The pervasive role of mobile devices in the world continues to place growing demands on government and agency officials to think more creatively about mobile services, according to nearly two dozen federal and industry IT leaders who spoke at Wednesday’s fifth annual MobileGov Summit.

“We need to get out of our bunker … build things to last, not just to launch … and embrace what makes us government,” said Gwynne Kostin, director of the Digital Services Innovation Center at GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies/18F.

But she urged the audience of government and industry IT officials to capitalize on, and not get distracted by, technology.

The exponential convergence of computing power, storage and the cloud, which is driving the increased capabilities of mobile devices, is helping to create a new environment for innovation, she said at the event, which was presented by FedScoop. And unlike companies competing in the private sectors, government agencies can share ideas freely, she said.

She noted the 2014 iPhone has more than 240,000 times the computing power of the 1977 Voyager 1 spacecraft, and that storage has become 19,000 times cheaper between 1999 and 2012.

She suggested embracing the power of crowds and looking at new business models, the way ride service Uber created the largest taxi business in the world without owning a single car. Kostin also stressed the importance of creating solutions built on open source tools that can continue to evolve with the market.

Sonny Hashmi, in his last week as General Services Administration CIO before
leaving to join Box, also stressed the importance of moving beyond the industrial-era business models of the past and embracing the new creative-era that calls for agility and collaboration.

He warned the audience to avoid the fate of companies like Blockbuster, Yellow Pages and Yellow Cab that succeeded by perfecting processes for business models that technology made obsolete.

He also offered five principles to staying innovative:

• Design your future around the user experience.
• Identify and build for the mobile moments in your users’ journey map.
• Embrace the “Lego” model, buying standardized APIs and technology building blocks rather than building systems from scratch.
• Build your geek army, acquiring the technical talent to stay agile.
• Learn to take effective risks.

GSA’s new associate administrator of the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies/18F and GSA’s chief customer officer, Phaedra Chrousos, put mobile government solutions in a different light.

Too often she said, CIO shops come to her agency assuming that what they need is a mobile app. Instead, agencies should focus on the users and determine what they need.

“We’re really looking to be responsive to our customers’ needs, not just focus on a mobile device or a mobile app, per se,”
said Chrousos, who FedScoop recently named one of D.C.’s Top 50 Women in Technology.

International Trade Administration CIO Joe Paiva, in a discussion led by Intel Director of Federal Marketing Nigel Ballard, put the future for mobile strategy in starker terms. “Forget defending the network,” he said bluntly.

As more data flows over public networks, it will be impossible keep up with network security breaches. The focus instead needs to be “about protecting and encrypting my data.”

Paiva said ITA employees use one Windows-based tablet and one smartphone – and he assumes they are not secure. “We do the best we can to secure devices, but we have to accept … it’s never going to be secure. So I don’t trust them.”

He was also adamant that government shouldn’t buy, own or manage commodity IT, but rather focus on managing its information assets to flow securely over commercial networks.

BlackBerry President of Global Sales John Sims struck a similar note, stressing the importance of “taking a true end-to-end view of mobile … with a zero-trust mentality.”

At the same time, mobile is creating new opportunities unimagined a few years ago.

Wolf Tombe, chief technology officer for Customs and Border Protection within the Department of Homeland Security, sketched out how mobile apps, built into consumer wearables, such as protective vests, could help better protect his agency’s agents.

Imagine, he said, if a law enforcement officer was shot, and his vest could send out a signal telling dispatch where he’s been hit, or if an officer’s wristband could beam vital health data to EMTs en route to treat her.

“These technologies are out there,”
he said.

Another area of discussion was the need for more uniform data standards. Department of Transportation CIO Richard McKinney and Paige Fitzgerald, manager for citizen data at the popular traffic app WAZE, talked about the coming tidal wave of mobile data from cars.

“As we move into connected vehicles, there will just be so much more data available,” said Fitzgerald. “We envision WAZE eventually being a part of a
mobility platform” for government data sharing, she added.

“The data that we’re dealing with right now will just pale in comparison to the amount of data” in the future, McKinney said. That’s one of the reasons DOT was the first Cabinet agency to establish a chief data officer.

David Bray, CIO of the Federal Communications Commission, reminded attendees that they would continue to help chart the future of mobile technology, painting a picture of world still rapidly unfolding.

“We’re bravely mapping terra incognita — unknown world,” said Bray, referencing a D.H. Lawrence poem of the same name.

Between 2014 and 2019, the number of mobile broadband data exchanges per month will increase from 2.5 exabytes to 24.3 exabytes, he said. That’s the same as 6,079 million DVDs’ worth of data, according to the Cisco’s Visual Networking Index Mobile Forecast Highlights
report.

At the same time, as technology develops, threats will grow exponentially and touch all sectors, he said, noting that McAfee Labs
finds more than 200 Internet threats each minute, he said.

Whitney Wyckoff and Corinne Lestch contributed to this story.