DOD’s data initiatives accelerating with new administration, CDO says

The Department of Defense’s efforts to become a more data-centric organization are accelerating under the new administration, the department’s top data officer told FedScoop.

Dave Spirk, who became DOD chief data officer last June, said he’s planning to release documents that will help define the ways the military should use data and implement a strategy around it.

Spirk said he has support from the most senior leaders in the DOD, which is helping to push the department toward having data available for decision-makers in the Pentagon and troops in the field.

“With the direct support of Deputy Secretary of Defense Dr. Kathleen Hicks and her senior support team, not only are we on the path, but the expectation is we will accelerate,” Spirk said Thursday during day two of the IT Modernization Summit presented by FedScoop.

Spirk said new “data decrees” — documents that will help define the ways the department will use its data — are awaiting approval from Hicks. The decrees are a part of implementing the department’s broad strategy to improve data access and “data readiness” across the military, Spirk said.

One of Spirk’s major focuses is eliminating the idea the DOD will have a “common data standard” where there is a one-size-fits-all approach to what type of data the department uses. Instead, he is working to make a federated data ecosystem where data officials can use an “open-data-standard data architecture” that uses technology and practices to enable interoperability between the plethora of data use-cases specific to different mission areas.

Spirk said one of the initial steps he and his team are pushing is to create a “federated data catalog.” Making that a reality will rely on education, training and technology to ensure everyone from military departments to combatant commands have the flexible tools to use data in unique ways but remain interoperable with the rest of the force.

“Trying to just have one to rule them all would be a fool’s errand,” he said. Organizations should have the expectation that they all will catalog their data, he added.

On Friday at the Aspen Security Forum, Hicks endorsed much of what Spirk had to say on the importance of data and the need to put resources behind implementing the data strategy.

“It is critical to warfighters seeking advantage on the battlefield and it is critical to decision-makers,” she said.

Hicks said the DOD’s efforts to create an enterprise cloud system, like what it is hoping to do with the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract, is “vital” in the ability to use data more effectively.

But how the department will get to that cloud state is still up in the air as the legal battle surrounding JEDI continues. A judge issued a sealed decision Wednesday allowing Amazon’s claims of malfeasance on the $10 billion contract to be heard, further extending the drawn-out court case over Microsoft’s win in 2019.

“We are going to have to assess where we are…and determine what the best path forward is,” she said on the JEDI ruling.

DIU’s Mike Brown pushed ‘unethical’ contracting and hiring, former CFO alleges

The Defense Innovation Unit‘s leadership allegedly created a culture of skirting the ethical limits of Department of Defense contracting, hiring and personnel regulations, its former chief financial officer told FedScoop.

Bob Ingegneri, who was CFO of DIU from May 2019 to June 2020, recently laid out 15 allegations of what he saw as unethical behavior in an official complaint to the DOD inspector general. The IG confirmed receipt of Ingegneri’s complaint, but not its contents or if an investigation has been opened. Ingegneri alleges that during his time with DIU, Director Mike Brown used his position to hire people close to him and increase payments to contractors in his circle.

“The challenge with what DIU did was that I don’t think they did much that was illegal…but I definitely think it was unethical — that’s really my biggest complaint,” Ingegneri told FedScoop in an interview. He specified it was “the hiring, funding, salaries, that were not being executed ethically.”

Ingegneri reported his concerns to Brown directly, as well as Brown’s No. 2, Mike Madsen, and now the DOD IG, he said.

His complaints come at a critical time as President Biden recently nominated Brown to be the next undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, the top acquisition official in the Pentagon.

Despite the complaints, Ingegneri reiterated his support for DIU’s mission and that he fully supports the people working there. He even complimented many of Brown’s qualities as a leader, calling him charismatic, intelligent and hardworking. His concerns, rather, were specific to the culture of pushing the boundaries of regulations and on contracting, hiring and personnel, he said.

Mike Madsen, DIU’s director of strategic engagement, said that DIU takes “any and all complaints very seriously.”

“DIU leverages a variety of U.S. government and DoD competitive and direct hiring authorities to attract the expertise needed to execute its unique mission, in order to provide the speed and agility not always available to DoD in today’s competitive hiring landscape,” Madsen said in a statement.

Madsen’s statement went on to say that “DIU has always made a concerted effort to validate candidate expertise, and over the last few years we have formalized the process, requiring direct hire candidates to interview with at least three DIU leaders.”

DIU has been a darling of advocates for defense innovation. It was set up in 2015 by then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter to use rapid acquisition authorities to purchase emerging technology. It has leveraged billions of dollars to work with mostly non-traditional defense companies in prototyping technologies in fields like artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and others.

The announcement of Brown’s nomination to be the top buyer in the department was initially seen as a win for injecting commercial tech more quickly into the DOD. The spokesperson for the Senate Armed Services chairman did not respond to a request for comment.

Ingegneri gave examples of what he saw as unethical behavior, including allegations of contractors who had connections to DIU leadership being hired by companies working with the unit. Some contractors also requested compensation at higher levels than normal based on inside information given to them by Brown and others around him, he alleged

Another issue was with hiring and personnel. Job descriptions were written narrowly and with specific people in Brown’s circle in mind, Ingegneri alleges.

“When writing requirements for a government civilian position, DIU would write them so specific that only the person they preselected would be able to qualify,” he alleged.

Assignments with service members were created outside of normal practices, he alleges, like an Air Force major who was trying to achieve an advanced degree at a university in California and later continued working at DIU.

“It just continues today that even the young active-duty captains that are being assigned to the unit are being led astray almost instantly,” he said. While Ingegneri left nearly a year ago, he said he remains connected with many associated with the unit.

Both contracting and hiring with government money are strictly regulated to prevent nepotism, or taxpayer dollars being directed to people based on personal connections rather than merit. Ingegneri alleges that Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations were not broken, per se, but bent and their intent not followed.

Since Defense One first reported Ingegneri’s allegations, he said that “four to five” colleagues have reached out to express their support and concur with his assessment of the situation.

“Really what I hope the IG does is come in and look at the organization and bring it back within government processes and procedures,” he said of his motivations for speaking publicly. “There are some good people in there.”

DHS launching a CDO office and CMMC-like risk management program

The Department of Homeland Security is standing up an Office of the Chief Data Officer to better integrate data into its operations and those of other agencies, said new CIO Eric Hysen.

Acting CDO Carlene Ileto is organizing work around eight priority data domains that include immigration, law enforcement and cybersecurity.

The office will identify leaders in each domain to further data governance and information sharing, ensuring DHS‘s IT modernization is led by frontline operators.

“Data must be interoperable and easily shareable by default, and the work we’re doing standing up our CDO office will help us get there,” Hysen said during day two of the IT Modernization Summit presented by FedScoop on Thursday. “This will support efforts ranging from internal projects like workforce vaccination to presenting a common operating view across agencies working to process migrants at our Southwest border, to sharing threat and intelligence information across our law enforcement functions.”

The need for a CDO office was underscored when DHS launched a departmentwide COVID-19 vaccination campaign in partnership with Department of Veterans Affairs health centers. DHS needed to identify, contact and manage responses from workers, which required “extensive time and effort to collecting and reconciling many different datasets from across the department,” Hysen said.

DHS is also strengthening cybersecurity through its Zero Trust Action Group, which is working across components to implement a zero-trust security architecture.

“We were one of many agencies that fell victim to the SolarWinds intrusion campaign,” Hysen said. “For too long, we viewed cybersecurity as an all-or-nothing approach based on a perimeter security model that’s decades out of date.”

Now DHS is embedding security into all parts of the IT organization, network architecture and software development life cycle to better mitigate breaches when they occur.

The Zero Trust Action Group is developing reusable security architectures, policy guides, pattern libraries, and reference implementations with a two-year plan to deploy zero trust departmentwide through 90- and 120-day sprints.

Early efforts include using cloud access security broker and cloud security gateway technologies to give employees direct access to certain secure cloud services from home, which reduces the burden on DHS’s virtual private network and internal network. The action group is also implementing software-defined networking to further segment requests for access to specific resources.

The work of the action group doesn’t mean vendors are off the hook securing their software systems by design, which is why DHS is developing a supply chain risk management program, Hysen said. The department wants to implement vendor due diligence assessments and software assurance processes to understand the provenance of commercial off-the-shelf products before they’re purchased and used.

“We’re looking very closely at [the Department of Defense]’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, or CMMC, and looking to pilot that approach within our vendor base as well,” Hysen said. “And when we do identify issues we are fully implementing our authorities under the SECURE Technology Act to remove companies from the department’s IT supply chains, as well as supporting DHS’s governmentwide responsibilities via the Federal Acquisition Security Council.”

While DHS is asking more from vendors, it will solicit feedback from them along the way so there are no surprises, Hysen added.

DHS also wants to improve the customer service of its public-facing services starting with the most burdensome ones. Department services account for 183 million hours of public burden annually, Hysen said.

“[O]ur immigration system is so complicated that it forces people to master esoteric form numbers and processes, while they’re navigating rush-hour traffic, to access vital services,” Hysen said. “We can do better. Our public-facing services need to be designed around the needs of the people who depend on them, rather than being designed around our org charts.”

The JEDI saga continues: Court denies motion to dismiss AWS protest of political interference

The Court of Federal Claims issued a sealed decision Wednesday denying a motion by the Department of Justice and Microsoft to dismiss Amazon’s protest of the Pentagon’s $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract.

While the decision to dismiss wasn’t made available to the public, Amazon confirmed the court’s denial.

Amazon has two main claims in its larger JEDI protest of Microsoft’s award: That “DOD consistently and repeatedly made prejudicial errors, at every step along the way, that systematically favored Microsoft,” and that this happened because of overt influence from President Trump and other high-level government officials, who wanted to do harm to Amazon.

The government’s motion to dismiss focused on the latter complaint and apparently failed to convince the court to drop it.

“The record of improper influence by former President Trump is disturbing, and we are pleased the Court will review the remarkable impact it had on the JEDI contract award,” said a spokesperson from Amazon Web Services. “AWS continues to be the superior technical choice, the less expensive choice, and would provide the best value to the DoD and the American taxpayer. We continue to look forward to the Court’s review of the many material flaws in the DoD’s evaluation, and we remain absolutely committed to ensuring that the Department has access to the best technology at the best price.”

The JEDI protest has been pretty dormant for most of 2021, at least from the public’s perspective. But this motion shows the lawsuit, which began in late 2019, isn’t over yet.

Or maybe it is nearing its end? There’s a very real possibility the Department of Defense could now decide to give up on this program.

The department sent an “information paper” to Congress in January explaining the potential impacts of the Court of Federal Claims’ then-pending decision on the government’s motion to dismiss Amazon‘s allegations of “improper influence at the highest levels of Government.” In that paper, the DOD said that if the judge didn’t side with the DOD in the dismissal (and we’ve now learned it didn’t), it could “elongate the timeline significantly. The prospect of such a lengthy litigation process might bring the future of the JEDI Cloud procurement into question. Under this scenario, the DoD CIO would reassess the strategy going forward.” The DOD has been working to get the JEDI contract awarded and operational for the better part of four years now.

In January, acting DOD CIO John Sherman told FedScoop: “Regardless of the JEDI Cloud litigation outcome, the Department continues to have an urgent, unmet requirement for enterprise-wide, commercial cloud services for all three classification levels that also works at the tactical edge, on scale. We remain fully committed to meeting this requirement—we hope through JEDI—but this requirement transcends any one procurement, and we will be prepared to ensure it is met one way or another.

Asked about the court’s denial Wednesday, the DOD had “nothing to add to what the DoD CIO said about this topic earlier this year.”

Microsoft, though, downplayed the dismissal in a statement. “This procedural ruling changes little,” said Frank X. Shaw, head of Microsoft Communications. “Not once, but twice, professional procurement staff at the DoD chose Microsoft after a thorough review. Many other large and sophisticated customers make the same choice every week. We’ve continued for more than a year to do the internal work necessary to move forward on JEDI quickly, and we continue to work with DoD, as we have for more than 40 years, on mission-critical initiatives like supporting its rapid shift to remote work and the Army’s IVAS.”

GSA moving to more modular cloud environment

The General Services Administration plans to increase cloud brokerage having “stress-tested” cloud technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Deputy CIO Beth Killoran.

GSA had about 50% of its applications in the cloud when the pandemic hit and only needed to surge existing cloud capabilities to help agencies like the Small Business Administration administer COVID-19 relief funds.

Now that people have seen the cloud’s value, GSA wants to expand into areas where the technology hasn’t been used previously, and that requires a more modular or hybrid environment.

“A lot of agencies have found that not all clouds have the same types of capabilities, and I don’t think that we want to have cloud lock — similar to what we’ve had with other kinds of platform locks before,” Killoran said during the IT Modernization Summit presented by FedScoop on Wednesday. “And so I think we’re going to start seeing some cloud brokerage and some cloud distribution so that we can utilize the best capabilities of cloud environments.”

A move to plug-and-play cloud technologies along with app rationalization — where agencies decide what to keep, replace, retire or consolidate — will help cater to government’s increasingly distributed workforce thanks to telework, Killoran added.

In-house, on-premises services with their burdensome hardware requirements and database and systems administration were necessary when the technology came out, said Alexander Romero, director of strategy in the chief technologist office at VMware End User Computing.

Agencies had to build a stack, platform and talent to manage the two, but now capabilities can be purchased straight from the cloud.

“Now they’re being moved out and made available as a service in, thankfully, the [Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program] environment and on the FedRAMP marketplace,” Romero said.

That, in turn, allows the agency’s tech talent to focus on more mission-oriented work.

IT modernization should accelerate now that agencies have playbooks on moving their apps to the cloud, which should also make them more forthcoming about sharing best practices, Killoran said.

“I think agencies will be more willing to share some of their open source libraries, some of those applications that might already be cloud-ready and cloud-enabled,” she said.

How agencies like Census Bureau are improving network visibility and operations

There is a lot of work behind the scenes to keep the nation’s government IT systems running. When those services fail – as many did last year during the height of the pandemic — it is critical to understand what triggers government websites to crash.

Last year, both state and federal agencies saw their sites overwhelmed by citizen needs for services. The shift in demand for digital services also underscores a greater concern: knowing the health of their IT systems.

That is why leaders are increasingly looking at high-performance AIOps platforms “to collect, unify and analyze data from a vast range of products and applications in real time — and then respond to known and previously unknown anomalies automatically,” according to a recent FedScoop report.

“If there was one upside to the turmoil, it may have been the sudden string of decisions by governors to green-light remedies that IT departments had long been requesting,” says Wylie Vasquez, leadership advisor for observability and AIOps markets at Splunk, in the report.

“AIOPs platforms have become an essential tool for contextualizing large volumes of varied and ever-changing data” says the report, underwritten by Splunk. “What distinguishes AIOps platforms from more traditional analytics tools is their ability to automate routine practices and increase the speed and accuracy of issue recognition. That enables IT staffs to focus more of their attention on higher value needs.”

Splunk’s IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) analytics and IT management solution is a part of a new generation of so-called AIOps platforms that has been recognized by Gartner as a “visionary” application performance monitoring platform.

When systems or applications start to run slow, or issues arise, it usually requires bringing in large teams of people and multiple calls a day to troubleshoot the problem, Vasquez explained. “ITSI allows enterprises to bring all that data together and pre-analyze it, so they can avoid a lot of those ‘War Room’ calls.”

Additionally, the report illustrates how for agencies like the U.S. Census Bureau, ITSI provides a powerful tool for managing large-scale development projects.

When Census officials decided to conduct the 2020 decennial census online it was clear from the start that the bureau would require a whole new approach to their IT, security and data operations — not just to collect and process census data, but to reduce all kinds of technical risks and political concerns.

Vasquez explains the challenge agency leadership looked to address was how to create a single pane of glass view of the bureau’s existing mission-critical applications and platforms, including Oracle OEM and AppDynamics.

With Splunk’s ITSI AIOps platform and its event analytics dashboard, bureau IT administrators could readily identify or narrow the source of an issue across their technology stack, using an automated AI and machine learning approach.

One reason that agencies continue to turn to Splunk’s “Data-to-Everything” platform, according to Vasquez, is it’s unique strengths in being able to ingest and unify nearly any kind of data — structured or unstructured, including logs, metrics, text, wire, API or social-media — from nearly any tool and any system, on-premises or in the cloud. Once assembled and unified, it then becomes far easier to apply AI and ML to get ahead of problems before they happen.

Read more about harnessing data into a single platform to help your agency improve performance and user experience.

This article was produced by FedScoop and sponsored by Splunk.

DOD to allow personal phones to access ‘DOD365’ platform

The Department of Defense is working to allow personnel to access its new collaboration platform DOD365 with personal cellphones, a change to initial plans where only government-provided mobile devices would be allowed to connect.

John Sherman, acting DOD CIO, said several agencies within the department are working to find cyber-secure ways for mobile phones to access DOD365, the DOD’s higher-security version of Microsoft Office 365.

Mobile phones offer hackers many potential access points, hence the initial concerns about having them access the new environment where millions of DOD employees would work, Sherman had previously told FedScoop.

“We are working with the services and [the Defense Information Systems Agency] to test various capabilities to test personal phones and tablets to access the environment in a cyber safe way,” Sherman said Wednesday during the IT Modernization Summit presented by FedScoop. “This initiative is challenging and going to take some time, but we are determined to get it right.” 

The transition to DOD365 is one of the largest modernization pushes inside the DOD. When the pandemic hit, the DOD stood up the Commercial Virtual Remote (CVR) environment, a stop-gap measure that allowed the DOD workforce to stay connected through email, Microsoft’s Teams platform and chat functions. DOD365 is a “parallel” effort the department has been working on for years to create a unified back-office system for employees to access many of the functions they have in-office while working remotely.

“DOD365 is our enduring solution that we must, by necessity, hold to a higher cybersecurity level,” Sherman said.

CVR was only accredited to Impact Level 2, meaning sensitive material could not be transmitted in the environment. DOD365 is expected to handle data up to Impact Level 5 and have a wider range of functions, like OneDrive, Microsoft’s file sharing and storage solution.

Transitioning underway

Some parts of the DOD have already begun transitioning to DOD365, like the Air Force and Marine Corps. Each service will have its own tenancy in the environment, and the Defense Information Systems Agency will provide back-end help for combat support agencies and most of the combatant commands through its cloud tenancy.

“We are well into the process of implementation,” Sherman said. This summer is the target for when all agencies and services to complete the transition.

The U.S. Coast Guard will also transition and be a part of the environment, even though it is technically housed in the Department of Homeland Security.

“I find this to be one of the most impressive transitions I have ever had the chance to help lead and coordinate,” Sherman said.

Former Army acquisition chief tapped to be DOD CTO

President Joe Biden announced plans to nominate Heidi Shyu — former top acquisition official in the Army — to lead the Department of Defense’s research and engineering enterprise.

As undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, Shyu will essentially be DOD’s chief technology officer, a position to which she brings extensive science and technology experience.

Before rising through the ranks of the Army’s Office of Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, she worked in the defense industry as a senior engineer and executive and her work spanned unmanned, space and electronic warfare technologies.

If confirmed by the Senate, Shyu’s main responsibilities will be focused on delivering advanced technology to the DOD through its massive research and engineering enterprise. There is growing support for dramatically increasing DOD’s the research and development budget to reach technological superiority in key areas, including 5G, hypersonic missiles, quantum computing and artificial intelligence.

Shyu is a recipient of the DOD medal for distinguished public service, the Army’s medal for distinguished civilian service and the Air Force’s decoration for exceptional civilian service.

Air Mobility Command works to modernize the flightline

The Air Force command that oversees logistics for global flights is working to digitize data to enable more modern maintenance tracking of its aircraft.

The Air Mobility Command will work with Xage, a cybersecurity company specializing in zero-trust architecture, through a contract awarded by the Air Force Research Lab. The work will focus on digitizing secure data sharing of repair information in “flightline operations,” the work done on aircraft to prepare for takeoff.

The work builds off an initial contract Xage won with the Space Force to secure data and communications coming from satellites using the same kind of zero-trust principles where no users, even known users, are given trust” to move freely around a network.

“The maintenance operations on the flightline traditionally have been pretty manual and pretty paper-based,” Xage CEO Duncan Greatwood told FedScoop in an interview. Xage will work to change that and ensure the new digital means of data sharing through its Xage Fabric product will be secure.

“Mission-critical aircraft require unparalleled cybersecurity to ensure the safety of pilots and mission success. By leveraging zero-trust principles, our Xage Fabric will guarantee the authenticity, confidentiality, and integrity of data across the flightline of the future,” Greatwood said.

Even when not paper-based, current digital practices for collecting flight data consist of downloading flight information on portable drives and then walking them into command centers. Many airmen working on the flightline have resorted to unapproved “shadow IT” where they use their personal cell phones to take videos and photos of maintenance issues.

The use of personal devices creates a security risk if images of sensitive military parts are stored on unsecured devices, Kip Gering, Xage’s senior director for business management, told FedScoop. That is part of the reason the Air Force is modernizing its processes: to give airmen capabilities similar to what they would have in their lives outside of uniform.

“The cockpits have a bunch of useful data…very often someone is going with a portable drive and sticking it into a port,” Greatwood said. “What’s at the heart of this is venture is to digitize the workflows”

Xage was also brought into “harden” other already-modernized methodologies in Air Mobility Command’s digital ecosystem. On top of adding new layers of security to the system, Xage will also bring a new “multi-party” view to the flight data.

“It’s real-time and comprehensive awareness of readiness,” Greatwood said of enabling multi-party data sharing.

More mature 10x program selects 22 new projects

The General Services Administration’s 10x technology investment program will fund 22 Phase 1 projects based on new priorities set last year, the agency announced Tuesday.

Housed within the Technology Transformation Services, 10x selected the projects from a pool of 250 internal submissions to fit three themes: rebuilding public trust, environmental protection and promoting equity.

The announcement comes as 10x nears completion of two Phase 4, public-facing technologies.

“We’re moving from shipping prototypes to shipping live products,” Will Cahoe, project coordinator for 10x, told FedScoop. “And I think this is a testament to how we’ve matured as a program over the last couple of years.”

The 10x program was developed to “crowdsource ideas from federal employees and turn them into real products that improve the public’s experience with the federal government.”

Phase 1 in the 10x process is the “investigation” phase and consists of a two-week sprint in which project teams determine if their ideas are worthwhile by considering legal and regulatory hurdles, consulting experts in the space, and ensuring similar government projects aren’t already ongoing.

A public trust project being evaluated currently would aggregate all agency Freedom of Information Act responses in one place.

Environmental projects address climate change, national parks and conservation issues, with one currently looking to ameliorate sewage spills into public water resources. That project also crosses into the equity space because it would identify underserved communities that are affected.

The equity theme aligns with the Biden administration’s priority of racial equity in the president’s American Rescue Plan and asks who’s left behind by government services. Translation products, as well as those supporting everyone from rural and tribal populations to former inmates, fall in this category.

Phase 2 is a six- to eight-week “discovery” phase, where project teams decide if there’s a solution to the problem identified in Phase 1. Some remain undecided, but 10x has nine definite Phase 2 projects — one of which is a COVID-19-inspired effort to provide contact tracing for GSA buildings in the event of another public health crisis.

In Phase 3 “development” begins with engineers being tasked to build a minimum viable product, potential partner agencies being identified and an end goal of solving one problem for one active customer. 10x has four Phase 3 projects, the latest of which kicked off Monday.

The Combating Bias in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Implementation project is ahead of schedule in that the product is already live. A suite of digital tools helps data and program professionals identify different types of bias — possibly racial or gender-based — within datasets that will ultimately power AI pipelines.

10x is collaborating with the Census Bureau on the project.

“My understanding is that the Census Bureau is going to be on the forefront of using this new technology because they’re really a data agency,” Cahoe said. “They have so much data, and a lot of the census open data is what’s going to be used to power these kinds of AI implementations across government.”

Phase 4 attempts to “scale” solutions to as many users as possible and identify alternative funding to keep products sustainable when the 10x seed money dries up.

Of 10x’s two Phase 4 projects, Site Scanner is just ending.

There are a lot of mandates for .gov websites, and the Site Scanner platform delivers customizable scans keeping agency web managers abreast of accessibility, uptime and downtime, related security certificates used, and required data files listed. The product is live, additional scans continue to be added and TTS will manage the platform within its Digital Analytics Program portfolio.

The other Phase 4 project is DevOps for Privacy Offices, which created a live dashboard empowering such offices to respond to security issues with people’s personally identifiable information (PII). The dashboard, which resides within TTS’s Identity Management portfolio, could eventually help implement the Creating Advanced Streamlined Electronic Services for Constituents (CASES) Act and allow people to see what agency systems hold what PII of theirs.

10x’s phased approach to innovation investment mitigates risk by increasing the funding and time devoted to projects as they advance, which only a third do from phase to phase.

“We do not view closing down projects as failures,” Cahoe said. “We view it as a success because one of the great value propositions of 10x is that we can save money and prevent duplication.”

The funding for 10x comes out of the Federal Citizen Services Fund (FCSF), just like other programs within the TTS Solutions office: the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, USA.gov, U.S. Web Design System, and Data.gov. While the FCSF received $150 million in the American Rescue Plan Act, 10x won’t see a funding increase because it’s funded specifically out of a smaller pot called the Digital Services Fund.

That dollar cap means 10x is at its hiring limit currently, but it did launch a new website Tuesday detailing its work. And the program could always receive more funding during the budget process, as consistent as that funding has been throughout 10x’s life.

“Are we going to be getting a bump next year? I couldn’t tell you,” said Nico Papafil, 10x director. “I hope we do.”