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CDOs want more data sharing in next Federal Data Strategy action plan

Chief data officers want to see more opportunities for data sharing and agency partnerships included in the Federal Data Strategy 2021 Action Plan expected in December.

More than 80 agencies have installed CDOs since the passage of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act was passed in 2019. And the next Federal Data Strategy action plan has the potential to solidify the CDO Council as a major voice informing policymaking at the Office of Management and Budget.

Specific actions could aim to eliminate points of confusion in agency data use agreements and grow the Federal Data Science Training Program that began in September, said Kirsten Dalboe, CDO at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

“Giving agencies the space to continue to mature their practices over the next year will be really important,” Dalboe said during a discussion with other CDOs at ACT-IAC’s Reimagine Nation ELC 2020. “And I think a big area I’m hoping to see growth in for the Year 2 strategy is really around sharing, the coordination, the community aspect.”

Smaller agencies like FERC have limited resources and need to get strategic about sharing services and recruiting and retaining data scientists, she said.

One of the ways the CDO Council should measure success moving forward is in the ability of agencies to effectively use data collected by one agency to meet their own needs, said Jamal El-Hindi, interim CDO at the Treasury Department.

“If you look at the Evidence Act and you look at the basis for it, that’s fundamental in terms of opening the doors up for appropriate sharing of information that can be used for more than one purpose,” El-Hindi said.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is taking collaboration a step further and developing a joint data and analytics strategy with its biggest agency partner, the Department of Defense. The strategy will focus on customer experience metrics as they relate to interoperability, data sharing, joint analytics and joint policy development, said Kshemendra Paul, CDO of the VA.

Other areas are better handled by the CDO Council, such as replacing identifiers like Social Security Numbers with privacy-enhancing indicators that can link data across agencies, Paul said.

“It doesn’t really work well if we use different approaches,” Paul said. “It works better if we share and use a common approach.”

The Federal Data Strategy team released the 2020 Action Plan in December, providing CDOs with a foundation for data governance and management activities in the strategy’s first year. The strategy is intended to last 10 years, with a new action plan every year.

DOD needs new IT to share its spectrum with industry

The Department of Defense wants to share bands of the electromagnetic spectrum with industry — and to do so, it needs a modern IT infrastructure to support automated sharing back and forth.

Defense officials said Thursday ahead of the release of a new spectrum sharing strategy that advanced technology will make the military more efficient and effective in allotting bandwidth to commercial companies who wish to use it to develop 5G wireless technology. The new strategy lays out a plan for how the DOD hopes to share the electromagnetic spectrum, rather than leasing it, while also requesting the use of some frequencies once reserved for the private sector.

New technologies include advanced radiofrequency sharing devices and modernized IT that can automate broad spectrum sharing across the department and between the public and private sectors.

Currently, much of the military’s command and control structure is reliant on the electromagnetic spectrum, particularly radio frequency communications. But as more mobile devices are cleared for military use, demands on the spectrum have increased and changes need to be made to the governance of frequency band use, the officials said.

The existing IT for spectrum sharing is “in the Flintstones era,” one DOD official told reporters. “We need to get some more modernized IT to be able to coordinate across the department faster.”

Part of the strain on spectrum space has been the DOD’s own shift to using more mobile devices. The growth of communications technology within and outside of the DOD has led to a “congested” environment that quickly is becoming untenable, according to the new strategy.

“The rise of mobile systems and digital technology across the globe has placed enormous strain on the available spectrum for DOD’s command, control, and communication needs. This strategy will help set the conditions needed to ensure our warfighters have freedom of action within the electromagnetic spectrum to successfully conduct operations and training in congested, contested and constrained multi-domain environments across the globe,” Dana Deasy, DOD chief information officer, said in a news release about the strategy.

In the past decades of counterinsurgency warfare, the military did not need to worry as much about degraded network communications or electronic warfare that could block its signals. But as it pivots to focus on the specter of great power war, the department is working to ensure communications network viability in the face of attacks on its EMS.

DOD officials acknowledged some in industry might be unwilling to let go of the current divisions of the spectrum. But they said the new model of shared spectrum is a part of an enterprise approach to re-thinking communications networks. The new approach was designed with the futuristic network-of-networks approach to warfare the DOD is developing called Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2).

“The JADC2 concept is extremely dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum,” an official said.

HHS is improving tracking of COVID-19 vaccine trials with an Oracle cloud system

The Department of Health and Human Services improved tracking of clinical trials and registrations for potential COVID-19 vaccines by developing a cloud data platform with Oracle, says former CIO José Arrieta.

The Oracle Health Management System uses digital identifiers to track the outcomes of people who have received COVID-19 treatment or therapies as part of clinical trials to determine their efficacy. Previously, before a cloud management system, this was difficult to track after patients were discharged from the hospital, Arrieta said.

HHS implemented the technology in July but didn’t announce it before Arrieta left the job Aug. 28.

Collecting data from people once they’ve left the health care system is critical to getting a vaccine in the hands of as many people as possible.

“There are 340 million people that need to get vaccinated in this country, and we know not all of them will get vaccinated,” Arrieta said at ACT-IAC’s Reimagine Nation ELC 2020 on Wednesday. “And we still need to have people volunteer for clinical trials, but there was no mechanism to actually reach those people directly.”

The Oracle Health Management System creates digital identifiers for state and federal governments, machine endpoints and people.

Volunteers — of which there were nearly 700,000 when Arrieta departed HHS — can walk into a CVS, buy an over-the-counter COVID-19 test, scan the QR code, and establish an electronic health record on their mobile device to register for clinical trials or a forthcoming vaccine.

Previously clinical trials treating other diseases largely went through states or hospital systems, but the federal government can use the system to manage them now.

“One of the biggest obstacles is really a lack of transparency and integration in our health care technology systems, and that’s across the country and globally,” said Rebecca Laborde, master principal scientist for clinical innovation at Oracle. “And we lack the ability to gather real-time data from patients and providers, especially when any kind of care occurs outside of the traditional health care system.”

Oracle is also working with the National Institutes of Health to support the COVID-19 Prevention Network by creating the covpn.org Volunteer Screening Registry.

People can visit the site to learn more about clinical trials and take a five-minute, pre-screening survey to volunteer for Operation Warp Speed, the government’s program to produce 300 million coronavirus vaccine doses by January 2021.

“We really need to have a large number of Americans volunteer for these trials representing different demographics all across the country,” Laborde said. “So it’s a really easy way for people to volunteer and get involved.”

With new statement of work, DOD recommits to its CMMC accreditation body

The Department of Defense reaffirmed its commitment to work with a volunteer, third-party accreditation body to implement its new cybersecurity standards.

The DOD included a statement of work (SOW) in a no-cost contract issued to the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification Accreditation Body (CMMC-AB), officials said. Negotiations over the contents of the SOW have been going on since the summer. It replaces the initial memorandum of understanding outlining the relationship between the two.

The contents of the SOW had been fiercely debated between the two bodies, most acutely over authority and responsibilities over the CMMC standards. The document is in the “final stages of signature,” according to a DOD spokeswoman. So far, no contract information has been posted to beta.sam.gov.

Katie Arrington, the lead CMMC official in the DOD and chief information security officer for acquisition and sustainment, also re-affirmed support for the AB, calling its efforts “tremendous.” CMMC is the DOD’s new set of tiered cybersecurity standards that will apply to all contractors and be subject to verification by certified assessors. Those assessors will be trained and accredited by the AB.

“We have absolutely never varied from being fully supportive of the AB,” Arrington said.

Arrington vowed to “make transparent” the SOW once it is fully executed.

Arrington also denied that she or her office is looking for another accreditation body to replace or compete with the AB accrediting and certifying assessors. Rumors had been circulating that she had met with another accreditation organization, A2LA. Arrington said she met with officials from the A2LA for “10 minutes.”

“We are not interested in issuing another statement of work,” she said.

A2LA did not comment when contacted by FedScoop.

Sources familiar with the negotiations over the SOW have described much more contentious conversations between Arrington and the AB. At times the officials have threatened to drop the current AB, documents reviewed by FedScoop show.

GSA, Pentagon drone solicitation aims to bring performance-based contracting back

The General Services Administration’s latest solicitation for drone services is a tool intended to return government to performance-based contracting, said Administrator Emily Murphy.

Dubbed ASTRO, the solicitation establishes 10 multiple-award, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts for “manned, unmanned and optionally manned platforms and robotics” that the Department of Defense will use.

ASTRO represents GSA‘s first use of its 2019 National Defense Authorization Act Section 876 authority to award multiple contracts for services on an hourly rate basis, without considering price as a factor at the contract level. The Federal Systems and Integration Management Center and any DOD contracting officer granted a delegation of procurement authority (DPA) may use ASTRO.

“ASTRO is giving us a chance to partner together on unmanned aerial systems, and instead let’s look first at the most qualified companies and figure out who they are,” Murphy said during ACT-IAC’s ELC 2020 on Tuesday. “And then run a competition at the task order level, where we compete the hell out of it. We get the dollars down as low as we can at that point, but we’ve made sure we’re getting the high-quality work.”

Currently, GSA has a bad habit of pricing things it will never buy like carnival workers — three different types appearing across the agency’s schedules — which wastes procurement officials’ time and resources, Murphy said.

Similarly, the Department of the Defense identified 31 contracts for orange juice from two different vendors within one agency, as well as a commodity battery that’s price varied from 13 cents to $25 dollars across contracts, said Pentagon Chief Management Office Lisa Hershman.

In contrast, performance-based contracting helped Special Operations Command introduce next-generation radar systems, giving warfighters a better view of the battlefield, three years ahead of schedule.

“It’s really getting people thinking more along the lines of outcomes and not just a dollar figure, and don’t get me wrong those dollar figures are really important,” Hershman said. “Every dollar that we’ve saved from every reform initiative has gone back directly to the warfighter or investments such as hypersonics.”

With offers due Oct. 30, ASTRO is part of GSA and DOD’s effort, along with category management and the Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System, to put qualifications first, Murphy said.

“We’re taking a requirement that they have, and we’re working with our FEDSIM to try and make sure that we put it in place,” Murphy said. “But it gives us both control over this new approach, so that we’re going to be able to see the results and be able to carefully manage it before we expand it.”

The plan for the future of the Pentagon’s remote work environment

The Department of Defense‘s virtual work environment developed during the pandemic will remain in place until June 2021, when a more permanent solution will replace it to ensure teleworking can remain an option for millions of DOD employees, a top IT official said Wednesday.

The original plan was to transition DOD’s Commercial Virtual Remote (CVR) environment to an “enduring” Microsoft-led solution by December, but that timeline has been extended, John Sherman, principal deputy chief information officer of the DOD, said during the Cybercon 2020 event.

The longer-term telework environment will also be based on Microsoft Office 365 cloud-based back-office suite, allowing uniformed personnel, civilians and contractors working with the DOD to host team meetings, collaborate on documents and use chat functions from anywhere. The new environment will also see added security up to DOD impact level 5, allowing for the processing of highly sensitive unclassified information, as opposed to the temporary environment’s level 2, which only allows users to share public, non-sensitive mission information.

By far the federal government’s largest bureaucracy, the DOD was able to work nimbly to acquire more cloud space and internet bandwidth during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to roll out the Commercial Virtual Remote environment in a matter of weeks. CVR now has more than a million users, Sherman said.

“I think this is a gold standard for the government,” he said of CVR.

DOD CIO Dana Deasy has previously said that the network and other new capabilities brought by the shift to telework will remain in place for the foreseeable future. The DOD is also looking for more options for secure teleworking to let employees continue working on sensitive projects remotely. The long-term virtual environment slated for summer could be part of that answer, although Sherman said DOD would still require employees to come into secure facilities for classified work.

CVR has also proven to be critical for deployed personnel. National Guard units activated during the pandemic used the environment to work with large teams in multiple locations to set up field hospitals to alleviate the burden of treating COVID-19 patients.

“CVR at the unclassified level is exactly what they needed to help set up the field hospitals,” Sherman said.

NGA chief technologist Mark Munsell to retire

Mark Munsell, CTO of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, will retire with 20 years of federal service early next month.

Since February 2019, Munsell has led NGA’s forward-looking technology portfolio and development as the CTO, helping in particular to build out the agency’s geospatial technology ecosystem at its secondary headquarters in St. Louis. He is credited with publishing NGA’s first Technology Strategy.

He will step down from the role Nov. 9.

Munsell has been a big advocate for attracting talented technologists — both inside and outside of government — to work with NGA.

“What does it take to meet future mission with future technology? It requires technologists who understand the mission and how GEOINT is evolving to meet the mission. Driving future mission requires that technologists are leading the GEOINT mission,” Munsell wrote in his technology strategy. “NGA is the world’s leader in geospatial intelligence because of the passion held by our people to deliver timely and relevant information to members of the national security apparatus, policy makers, and international partners.”

During his time at NGA, Munsell served also as deputy director of the agency’s CIO and IT Services Directorate. His tenure began in 1996, when NGA was previously referred to as the Defense Mapping Agency. He spent a few years in the early 2000s as a flight and maritime planning contractor before returning to NGA in 2006.

NGA’s CTO role in an evolving one, created in 2018 to “focus on increasing the agency’s ability to instill next-generation technology, tradecraft and innovative approaches to the geospatial intelligence community, enterprise and mission.” The agency said it will announce Munsell’s replacement in the coming months.

NOAA exploring artificial intelligence pilots with Google Cloud

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration plans to improve weather forecasting by more effectively using satellite and environmental data in a series of pilots with Google Cloud.

Google entered into a three-year other transaction authority (OTA) agreement with the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) to explore machine learning and artificial intelligence applications for not only weather but environmental monitoring, climate research and technical innovation, it announced Tuesday.

Together NESDIS and Google will develop small-scale ML and AI systems and use results from those pilots to build full-scale prototypes for operationalization across NOAA.

“Strengthening NOAA’s data processing through the use of big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other advanced analytical approaches is critical for maintaining and enhancing the performance of our systems in support of public safety and the economy,” said Neil Jacobs, acting NOAA administrator, in the announcement. “I am excited to utilize new authorities granted to NOAA to pursue cutting-edge technologies that will enhance our mission and better protect lives and property.”

Like most agencies, NOAA has experienced an uptick in the volume of its datasets, in this case geared toward the environment. ML and AI systems could help better predict extreme weather events like tornadoes and hurricanes.

The number of pilots is to be determined, but they’ll offer NOAA employees hands-on training to improve ML and AI skills.  NOAA released an AI strategy in February that emphasized applying the emerging technology to its mission priorities.

Google engineers and data scientists have already explored weather prediction including hyperlocal precipitation forecasting, flood forecasting in India and Bangladesh, and related computational methods.

Air Force seeks companies that are shooting for the sky, not necessarily the moon

The Air Force is looking to open another pot of money up to companies that are ready to think big, but not too big.

The department wants to shift some of its “deep tech” acquisition money to what its top procurement official is calling “skyshots” — ideas short of a full moonshot. Funding will come  through the AFWERX development program.

Will Roper, assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, says the Air Force is interested in ideas that could be game-changers but take years to mature. In this case, the goal is not to acquire specific tech, he said during an online “Ask Me Anything” event hosted by the AFWERX, the Air Force’s tech incubator based out of Austin and Washington, D.C.

“What that means is you have a direct relationship with us,” Roper said, speaking directly to interested companies. “You don’t have to master defense contracting and procurement … you simply have to master your technology.”

AFWERX has not settled on any specific areas for the skyshot funding, Roper said. He posted a poll on Twitter seeking input from the public on what topic to potentially choose. Possibilities include new ways to network sensors in battle, future energy sources and anything related to artificial intelligence. Ultimately, the broader goal is to have companies bring the Air Force ideas it is not even thinking about yet, he said.

“A white paper where you explain your technology is enough to start the relationship with us,” he said.

The program will be similar to other emerging technology programs the Air Force runs, like AFVentures and Agility Prime, its flying-car initiative.

Roper also stressed that the Air Force will not try to own the intellectual property of companies that choose to work with it. One of the goals is to “de-risk” the work of building prototypes that fit the Air Force’s needs, he said.

Roper had jokes, too. He implored companies to “swipe right” on working with the Air Force, saying that he hopes the department’s tech acquisition initiatives are “finally creating a good dating app for us.”

How agencies can modernize their data warehouse infrastructure

Federal agencies are faced with several daunting challenges exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, that are causing them to take a second look at their IT investments and data strategies.

Among them, revamping data warehouse projects could be a good way to modernize and save their agency budget dollars to reallocate to more pressings needs.

data

Read the full report.

According to a recent Qlik report, a modern approach to data warehouse projects can address several key challenges, including improved cloud interoperability, replacing brittle legacy systems and end-of-life technology and addressing staffing constraints within the IT department

“This is a good opportunity for your teams to review technologies and choose a more modern, responsive approach,” says the report, “Data Warehousing Accelerated.”

There is often a reluctance to adopt new techniques within organizations that are invested in traditional data warehouses. However, modern solutions can bring automation to the processes and replace manually-coded, time-consuming and error-prone tasks, according to the report.

Today, more than ever, government agencies need to adopt greater agility to respond to mission needs. Data warehouse infrastructure is still critical for some agencies, and it will need to to keep up with changing data requirements so agencies can reduce siloes of information.

The Qlik Compose solution can bring modern capabilities across the data warehouse lifecycle, according to the report. That includes:

Learn more about modernizing your data warehouse infrastructure.

This article was produced by FedScoop for, and sponsored by, Qlik.