VanRoekel launches PortfolioStat 2.0
U.S. Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel and Office of Management and Budget Acting Director Jeff Zients issued a memo on Wednesday creating a second round of PortfolioStat review sessions with some noted improvements.
The first round of PortfolioStat sessions have resulted in approximately $300 million in savings, VanRoekel wrote in a WhiteHouse.gov blog post.
“PortfolioStat will be an ongoing effort, growing each year to incorporate lessons learned and changes in technology,” VanRoekel said. “The upgraded process streamlines agency data collection and improves analytics, consolidates the agency’s strategic IT direction and management improvements into one central plan, and holds agencies accountable for the goals set through last year’s process.”
Under the first round of PortfolioStat sessions, agencies have collected and analyzed baseline data on 13 specific types of commodity IT investments, spanning infrastructure, business systems and enterprise IT. Through this process, agencies identified more than $2.5 billion in spending reductions that could be achieved from federal fiscal year 2013 through fiscal year 2015, VanRoekel said.
“We are committed to continuing PortfolioStat to drive further management improvements, save billions of dollars across the Federal Government, and improve services to Americans through the use of technology,” VanRoekel said.
Noted changes:
- An expanded focus on streamlining operations and giving federal CIOs more authority over decisions.
- Instead of simply closing data centers, the memo said the federal government will look to run the ones in operation at a cheaper price, focusing on energy efficiency
- Consolidates a number reports CIOs had to issue to OMB on a regular basis into just three.
Fiscal Year 2013 PortfolioStat Guidance: Strengthening Federal IT Portfolio Management
DOD releases app for military healthcare providers
The Department of Defense’s National Center for Telehealth and Technology released a mobile application to help military healthcare providers remain productive and emotionally healthy.
The app, Provider Resilience, is aimed at helping military health care providers cope with burnout and compassion fatigue.
“Dedicated clinicians often put their patients first, and their own needs second,” said Dr. Robert Ciulla, psychologist and director of T2’s mobile health program, according to the American Forces Press Service. “The app was designed to fit easily into the busy lives of health care workers and remind them to be mindful of their own emotional health.”
Features include a resilience rating that incorporates a number of stress-related factors such as the amount of rest and relaxation, a burnout assessment and professional quality of life. The app’s toolbox encourages users to reduce stress with restful breaks with educational videos, inspirational cards, patient testimonials and stretching exercises.
Provider Resilience is free and available for iPhone and Android.
Open source in government with DLT Solutions CTO Van Ristau (VIDEO)
Van Ristau, chief technology officer at DLT Solutions, discusses open source and government in this interview with FedScoopTV.
ATF to launch new site on April 1
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms will launch a refreshed version of ATF.gov on April 1 with further enhancements following in the coming months.
According to the agency, new features include:
• User-friendly navigation: This new topic-based approach helps you find what you need easily and quickly. The new look allows you to immediately choose the ATF related topic you are interested in and effortlessly find the information you are looking for.
• Tab-Based Structure: A conveniently organized tab structure will allow easy access to information you need most at ATF.gov without having to constantly go to another page.
• Library: We have placed all of our forms, publications, rulings, and other relevant documents in one easy to navigate location.
Owens rewrites USPTO’s IT future
USPTO CIO John Owens (Photo: FedScoop)With the agency’s information technology modernization roadmap complete, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Chief Information Officer John Owens is turning his attention to software.
In an interview with FedScoop, Owens said the USPTO’s automated systems were built – in some cases – approximately 40 years ago and has been carried through various updates and upgrades, but is not in line with modern technology.
“I joke that we need to keep EMTs around to resuscitate some of the folks that know the code some our systems are written in,” Owens said.
Owens is using open source and agile development to rewrite the more than 200 automated systems the agency uses. Using mainly Red Hat’s CloudForms, Owens said USPTO would focus on bringing a better set of Internet technologies to the agency’s more than 11,000 employees.
“It’s going to be a complete reorientation,” Owens said. “We’re going to build a services-style model in a virtual cloud environment with redundancies, so if part of a system goes down there is no disruption of service, just like private sector companies like AOL, Google, Yahoo or Amazon.”
The USPTO does, in fact, operate as a business, receiving federal taxpayer appropriations set at projected fee revenue from patent and trademark users.
That means a complete rewrite to a number of the agency’s core business-related functions:
- Patents End to End: A set of new and improved patent examination tools that reflect an exciting next-generation technology solution for an automated, fully integrated patent processing system capable of handling the demands of USPTO’s workload and needs of a sophisticated intellectual property community.
- Trademark Next Generation: The agency’s trademark system that Owens said has become unsustainable in the current technical environment based on outdated technologies. The program will provide trademark applicants and trademark owners the ability to manage applications and registrations online, as well as an automated watch service to notify requestors of status changes in applications and registrations.
- Fee Processing on Next Generation: Owens wants to adopt the eCommerce idea of a shopping cart that allows people to shop for the USPTO products and services they need in a familiar online shopping environment.
- MyUSPTO: Will allow users a single sign on and in the future allow people to access their entire portfolio of USPTO products. Users will only need one username and password to access all of these services, something Owens said is very important for his team to implement.
All of these projects will be completed within the next few years, done on a two-week agile development cycle.
“We’re constantly putting out new releases and then burning down the backlog of features, patches and corrections,” said Owens, who came to USPTO after a long career at AOL. “Its very akin to the work I did in the private sector in how we are approaching it.”
Owens said with the USPTO expecting to get a new director soon, his priorities could be altered, but the projects he mentioned will take center stage for the immediate future.
All of that falls in line with his view of the role of IT.
He quotes former Chubb CIO June Drewry when she says that ”there is no such thing as an IT project. There are only businsess projects with an IT component.”
“We’re at a point where I don’t worry about email or storage or the basics of IT – that’s not our core mission,” Owens said. “The focus is finding ways to help us run more smoothly as a business and let IT be a key enabler of that.”
OMB: agencies must use shared services for financial systems
The Office of Management and Budget sent a memorandum on Monday calling for federal agencies to use a shared service solution for financial management systems.
The memo, written by OMB Comptroller Danny Werfel, said that traditional agency-specific, large-scale financial systems have led to poor results in terms of cost, quality, performance and reporting.
“In many cases, these projects – designed to meet agency-specific business processes and system requirements – have resulted in substantial cost overruns, systems that are so large and complex that they cannot be easily updated and lengthy delays in planned deployments or needed improvements,” Werfel wrote. “In addition, the highly fragmented nature of financial management systems across Federal agencies has contributed to inconsistencies in financial data, making it challenging to provide transparency into Federal finances.”
The memo directs all executive agencies to use, with limited exceptions, a shared service solution for future modernizations of core accounting or mixed systems going forward.
By using shared services, Werfel said the federal government will benefit in many ways:
- better enable the Government to strategically source software providers, hosting, and (potentially) transaction processing,
- reduce system implementation risks and timelines, and
- improve data quality and provide greater transparency into Federal finances, including through the production of auditable fmancial statements at the government-wide level.
OMB and the Department of Treasury will analyze the landscape of existing shared services to identify capability caps, evaluate various agencies’ financial and related mixed system needs, identify the need for new systems to be shared and develop a blueprint for a strategy to implement them.
There will be a designated federal shared service provider for each core financial management system that will fully interface with subsidiary systems, such as payroll, travel and procurement, as well as Treasury’s payment, collection and central reporting systems, the memo says.
The FSSP will offer these subsidiary systems either directly or through a subcontract with other SSPs or agency systems. In limited cases, if a common solution is not available, FSSPs may propose to create new interfaces with existing agency solutions, the memo says.
“Agencies with near-term financial systems modernization needs should begin planning to adopt a shared-services approach, consistent with this guidance, that will provide the agency with future financial systems infrastructure, application, or transactional processing services,” Werfel wrote. “OMB and Treasury will begin working with these agencies immediately to develop plans consistent with this guidance.”
Office of Management and Budget: Improving Financial Systems Through Shared Services
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In this episode:
- GitHub’s Ben Balter discusses his new role as the company’s first ‘Bureaucat.’
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Gwynne Kostin on mobility (VIDEO)
Gwynne Kostin, director of the Digital Services Innovation Center in the Office of Citizen Services & Innovative Technologies at the General Services Administration, sat down with FedScoopTV to discuss trends in mobility.
On trends in federal mobility:
The big trend we are seeing right now. Agencies are working on a number of things. One has to do with the governance of mobile. So when we started talking a couple years ago there was a lot of innovation in the mobile space and now agencies are actually bought in to the importance of mobile and are looking at how you brand the applications well and your strategy for the level of service. The other trend has to do with a problem we’ve been seeing over all is that it has to continued diversity of different devices. We’re seeing agencies go with a build once and deploy many option. And a lot of agencies are really focused now on mobile web.
The evolution of mobility:
The big driver for mobile has been the digital strategy … Part of the digital strategy is that each agency had to create two mobile products and two APIs. The APIs, application programming interfaces, are important because many mobile products are being built off those services. What were seeing is that every agency is getting its feet wet in this space, so as they have that experience, they are really looking at the broader spectrum of how they are delivering at services.
Lessons learned:
The big takeaway we’ve had the past few years ago is that we were really focusing on devices … The big lesson we’ve learned that is we really need to start looking upstream in the development. The application or the mobile website is the final product, but we need to look upstream and see how are those web services build? How is the infrastructure set up in terms of our data sets and the availability of that information?
SAP Senior Director Tom Voshell on government mobility (VIDEO)
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