FedRAMP office lacks mission clarity, watchdog says

The General Services Administration office in charge of governmentwide cloud security compliance doesn’t have a clear and concise enough mission and goals — and therefore it can’t adequately measure its effectiveness, according to an audit.

GSA’s inspector general found the Federal Risk Authorization and Management Program’s program management office “has not established an adequate structure comprising its mission, goals, and objectives for assisting the federal government with the adoption of secure cloud services.”

The IG, in a report, has recommended that the PMO revise its mission as “a concise, singular statement.”

As it stands, FedRAMP’s mission is expressed as a series of directives that far exceeds the brief, single sentence model suggested in the Office of Management and Budget’s Circular A-11.

“[T]he FedRAMP PMO’s mission statement is not presented in a way that is focused or easily communicated, creating confusion as to its central purpose and vision of what needs to be accomplished,” the inspector general’s audit says.

It may seem trivial to audit an organization’s mission statement, but the GSA IG believes that “without the proper alignment of the mission, goals, and objectives, the FedRAMP PMO’s ability to assess its effectiveness is inhibited.”

GSA Federal Acquisition Service Commissioner Alan Thomas agreed: “While we believe FedRAMP does have a strong mission, goals, and objectives, we appreciate the OIG’s recommendations for further clarity. We understand the importance of making these mission statements, goals, and objectives clearer for our stakeholders and the importance of strong accountability in measuring program effectiveness.”

The audit also found the office’s objectives aren’t specific or measurable, “hindering the understanding of what is to be accomplished and the effective communication of program results. Objective statements should be specific and measurable to assist in assessing performance.”

Finally, the IG also found the alignment of the mission, goals and objectives is not strong enough.

In addition to revising its mission, the IG recommends FedRAMP should create more specific and measurable goals and better align them with that new mission.

Census Bureau touts ‘successful’ test of internet self-response, other 2020 innovations

Census Day 2020 is officially one year away, and Census Bureau officials say the internet self-response component is looking good.

Agency leaders spoke Monday about the upcoming undertaking, as well as the work that’s gone into it so far, including a 2018 end-to-end test conducted in Providence, Rhode Island. The 2020 census will be the first to allow all households to respond online.

“The big takeaway from the 2018 census test is that all of our systems deployed and integrated effectively,” said Albert E. Fontenot Jr., associate director for decennial census programs, during a press briefing in Washington, D.C., with other officials. “In our test, real people were able to use the technology in real world conditions. Respondents were able to effectively navigate and use our internet self-response application.”

Over 52 percent of households subject to the test responded without the push of an advertising campaign, Fontenot said. Of these, 61 percent responded online. The rest responded via phone or mail.

Census officials are hoping that internet self-response will be popular next year. And it’s not just responses that will be enabled by modern technology — the Census Bureau is also using a suite of new geographic information systems to help find where people reside and motivate them to participate in the count.

The end-to-end test was able to “successfully implement” these innovations, too, Fontenot said. Of course, canvassing Providence is a far cry from counting the entire country.

“We are currently working to make sure that all our systems can scale up and perform effectively to handle the level of work that we expect for the 2020 census,” Fontenot said.

The IT stakes for the census are high — not just because of the importance of getting an accurate count, but also because of the costs the agency has incurred getting the 52 new or legacy systems it will rely on up to date. The bureau has reported that IT costs grew from $3.41 billion to $4.97 billion between 2015 and 2017, and these numbers haven’t gone unnoticed by lawmakers or watchdog agencies.

In February, Senator Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., sent a letter to the bureau asking about its IT systems testing and backup plans. The bureau has since assured Enzi that it is working to address these concerns.

In 2017, the 2020 census was added to GAO’s list of high-risk government programs.

FBI delays $5B Justice IT services recompete

After months of delays, the FBI has now decided to scrap the launch of its $5 billion Justice Department-wide IT services contract recompete until later this calendar year.

To bridge the gap for the DOJ during the delay, the FBI filed a one-year extension justification for the current contract, Information Technology Supplies and Support Service (ITSSS). That contract has a $30 billion ceiling, but FBI has said spending has amounted to only about $2 billion so far.

The agency’s plan was to issue a scaled-back recompete — which it has now named the IT Enterprise Contract Support (ITECS) — to launch with the expiration of ITSSS. However, with “intense industry interest,” changes in the acquisition strategy and the 35-day government shutdown, ITECS was thrown off track, the FBI says in the justification.

“Without impacting the mission of the FBI, it is imperative to have an additional twelve months of the existing ITSSS contract to aid in the mission of the FBI being met by IT services,” the bureau says.

Now, the FBI will use the extra time to make the most of ITECS. It plans to reissue a draft request for quotes later this month, accept questions on that draft until May 13 and host an industry day in June. It anticipates awarding spots on the contract to vendors in the first quarter of fiscal 2020.

Through the extension, the FBI plans to continue support of 105 existing task orders across the Department of Justice and compete and award another 30 during the yearlong extension.

“If these orders were to be competed outside the ITSSS BPA on [the General Services Administration’s] IT Schedule 70, the FBI would experience unacceptable delays based on the timeframes required for security,” FBI’s justification says.

When it does come time to award the recompete, FBI anticipates making 15 to 22 awards per track on the contract, it has said. Ten to 15 of those would go to large businesses, and five to seven would be for small businesses in each track. Those numbers may change depending on what the agency needs.

The recompete also differs in that it is built around a framework used by chief information officers and other tech leaders called Technology Business Management. The BPA will be broken down into six tracks: end-user services, business application services, delivery services, platform services, infrastructure services and emerging services.

NSF wants you to build an app to help reskill federal workers

The National Science Foundation announced five winners Friday for the first phase of its Career Compass challenge — a competition to crowdsource ideas for technology solutions that will help federal workers plan for the changing nature of work.

The winners, which described of tech-enabled solutions to help reskill and upskill the federal workforce, came from a pool of 60 white papers. The challenge envisions technology that uses artificial intelligence and “knows your skills, strengths and preferences; recommends possible future careers; and suggests growth paths.”

The winning ideas, which each received a $5,000 prize, are:

• Needed: A GPS for Learning and Work
• E-TAG: Employee Training and Growth through Electronic Games
• My Career Compass
• ACCESS: An Integrated Service Platform for Preparing Future Workforce
• The Career CHARTING App

These ideas came from teams of academics, private companies and nonprofits. They are not final products by any means but essentially blueprints that others can build upon in phase two of the challenge.

NSF CIO Dorothy Aronson explained that Career Compass started “with our interest in trying to figure out how we could use artificial intelligence to improve our business processes here at NSF,” which then led to “concern about the workforce.”

“If we went ahead and modernized our business processes, what would the impact be on the workforce?” she told FedScoop. “And we amplified that to ask if this kind of problem exists here it probably exists elsewhere, and we were just wondering, as the nature of work changes and becomes more automated, what are people going to do?”

It’s not an uncommon concern to have in the federal government — and it’s one the White House has paid particular interest to in recent years and placed at the heart of the President’s Management Agenda. It aligns with the administration’s cross-agency priority goal of “developing a workforce for the 21st century.” This challenge’s cross-sector collaboration also serves as a model for the work the administration’s GEAR Center will do one finalized, Aronson said.

Now, in the second phase of the challenge, NSF is calling for teams to submit working prototypes based on the five ideas from phase one. Teams do not need to have participated in the first phase to submit prototypes in phase two. One winner will be selected for a prize of $75,000.

Aronson admitted that it’s an ambitious challenge. Ultimately, though, she said, the point is to “stimulate a conversation, let people know that this was the kind of tool we believed would be essential to enabling people to create their own destinies.”

“A large part of this is the concept that individuals should be able to choose their own future paths and that in the future, the type of work people will do will change frequently throughout their lives,” she said. “So through this tool, we’re hoping to bring to the marketplace’s attention that there’s a genuine desire on the part of the federal government starting with NSF and maybe beyond the federal government to use tools like this to enable the future of work.”

At the end of the challenge, NSF explains on the competition page, it hopes “to have created a ‘market’ for technology solutions that will help employees plot a path for changing careers or identify how to move forward in their current career path, while also facilitating continuous reskilling.”

Acquisition is ‘ripe for emerging technology,’ says OFPP’s Newhart

The White House’s Office of Federal Procurement Policy is targeting opportunities to use emerging technologies to improve the federal acquisition process.

Joanie Newhart, associate administrator of acquisition workforce programs within OFPP, said Thursday at FedScoop’s 2019 IT Modernization Summit said that her office and the federal Chief Acquisition Officer Council are “focused on emerging technology and how can we use it in acquisition. We think it’s going to explode this year, so we want to get in front of it and use it wisely.”

While many federal agencies are still trying to grasp how they might use emerging technologies, like automation and artificial intelligence, to drive mission outcomes, many support offices, such as acquisition teams, are finding opportunities to automate burdensome and manual workloads with the novel tech.

“If you think about the acquisition space, it is ripe for emerging technology — robotics, artificial intelligence — because there is so many manual, repetitive, boring parts of the acquisitions process that this emerging technology can really help us with so that people who are highly trained…why use them for this repetitive manual stuff?” Newhart said. “Let’s use their talents where they can make more of an impact.”

She pointed to the Department of Health and Human Services as one agency leading the way in blockchain, AI and automating the contract writing process. “If a contracting officer is doing a contract and you know they’re very overloaded with their workload, and there’s so many rules and regulations,” Newhart said.

There are plenty more examples, she said, and OFPP — which is part of the Office of Management and Budget — is “just trying to find out where people are using it, how they’re using it and then helping other agencies who are not so forward-leaning dip their toe in it, just do something, try it.”

The same goes with helping contracting offices innovate around the acquisition process — really, though, it’s just a matter of identifying acquisition flexibilities and broadcasting them across the government to let contracting officers know they can use them.

“We’re trying to get them to understand there’s a lot of flexibility in the acquisition process,” Newhart said.

This plays into OFPP’s larger Acquisition Modernization Plan. “So our processes are complex and kind of outdated, I’ve got to say, so we’re trying to bring things from industry, good acquisition practices in industry, to government in a very thoughtful, transformative way,” she said. “And part of that whole effort, we’re also going to partner with Congress to try and have some … pilots of different flexibilities we can use as we buy this emerging technology, digital services … and see if we can speed up the acquisition process, how can we buy things better, how can we learn better.”

Ultimately, it signals a bit of a shift in how OFPP works with the federal acquisition community — driving change as a team, working hand in hand, rather than just issuing a directive.

“It used to be if we were trying to drive innovation, we would issue a policy. ‘You will innovate!'” Newhart said. “So now we’re more just trying to be helpful, to get agencies to try new things and also to share those ideas, the best practices, what worked, what didn’t work, across the enterprise so that more people will feel comfortable. It’s not a matter of just saying what the success is. People have to understand how to do it, what steps did people take to have an innovation outcome.”

DISA launches milDrive unclassified cloud storage

The Defense Information Systems Agency has rolled out a cloud storage service that allows warfighters to upload, access and share unclassified information from anywhere, anytime.

Called milDrive, DISA began offering the service across the Department of Defense on March 1 with “security, flexibility, and reliability in mind,” Carissa Landymore, cloud storage program manager, said in a release.

“milDrive allows users to store all their files in the cloud. It really ensures warfighters have continuous, reliable access to files without regard to device or location,” Landymore said.

Users with Common Access Cards can use the service to access Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet) files and share them with access controls. The service is compatible with iOS and Android devices, and can be accessed via a web browser or a desktop app on computers.

Landymore touted milDrive’s “reliability and availability” through DISA’s storage of user data in its two data center, replicating it between the two to ensure availability.

For now, there are two levels or storage — 20 gigabyte or 1 terabyte drives that can be used or shared.

“DISA is continuing to keep pace with industry as far as enabling users to maintain, utilize, and access data through a cloud environment,” Landymore said. “We’re making the end user more productive by giving them more ways to access their files.”

CMS Innovation Center launches AI health challenge

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sees a future in which artificial intelligence can help predict unplanned hospital admissions, and the agency is throwing a potential $1.6 million behind challenge-based research and development of this concept.

CMS launched the Artificial Intelligence Health Outcomes Challenge in partnership with the American Academy of Family Physicians and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation earlier this week.

The challenge, which CMS explicitly ties to President Trump’s recent executive order on AI, “is an opportunity for innovators to demonstrate how artificial intelligence tools – such as deep learning and neural networks – can be used to predict unplanned hospital and skilled nursing facility admissions and adverse events,” CMS Administrator Seema Verma said in a statement. “Adverse events” are defined as unintended situations where care results in further injury or illness — like a hospital-acquired infection. The challenge will “prioritize” explainable AI solutions, per its website and marketing materials.

“The power of artificial intelligence will truly be unleashed when providers understand and trust the data and predictions,” Verma said.

The contest will run in three stages — interested participants have until June 18 to submit an initial application. From there, 20 participants will be invited into Stage 1, where the actual work of testing a proposed solution on medicare data begins. Five Stage 1 winners will go to Stage 2, where further testing will take place. The final grand prize winner will be eligible for a prize of up to $1 million.

Weichert: IT direct-hire authority is almost here

A new policy that would give agency heads direct-hire authority for mission-critical IT positions will be finalized soon.

Margaret Weichert, deputy director of management at the Office of Management and Budget, announced Thursday at FedScoop’s IT Modernization Summit that the final regulation for IT direct-hire authority will be published on the Federal Register in a matter of days.

The proposed regulation, which was released in October, calls for the Office of Personnel Management to delegate “to the head of a covered agency authority necessary to determine whether there is a severe shortage of candidates or a critical hiring need for information technology (IT) positions under certain conditions, sufficient to justify a DHA.” Once published, agency heads could begin exercising that authority.

“This means that IT managers who are looking to hire in critical roles who cannot get people to fill those critical roles are able to get the head of the agency to authorize direct-hire authority for those roles,” Weichert said.

Still serving as the acting director of OPM in addition to her OMB role, Weichert focused her comments Thursday around a slew of efforts both agencies are taking to enhance and modernize the federal workforce.

Pointing to the administration’s Cyber Reskilling Academy, she said “we’re going to be dipping our toes in the water on many more” reskilling cohorts with different focus areas.

She also teased progress made with OMB’s GEAR Center, which the administration unveiled last June as part of its government reorganization plan, incorporating leaders from industry, academia and the government to develop innovative solutions for the most pressing problems facing federal agencies. Weichert said within the center, there will be “test-and-learn opportunities around reskilling, and IT is obviously going to be an important part.”

Weichert closed by talking about better rewarding and retaining great federal workers and how hard that can be in the current civil service system. She said her office is exploring better ways to give recognition and reward for meaningful, mission critical work.

“We need to be able to reward with some type of recognition that is meaningful so the best people know they are valued,” Weichert said. “There will be a lot more coming in terms of changing this very antiquated set of policies we have around people.”

The Small Business Administration is setting up an IT working capital fund

The Small Business Administration is now setting up a working capital fund for IT modernization, CIO Maria Roat said Thursday, making it one of the first agencies to put the new capability into action.

“That finally came through for us — so we’re able to stand up our own working capital fund where we weren’t able to do that before,” Roat said at FedScoop’s IT Modernization Summit. The funds allow agencies to set aside unspent annual appropriations for long-term IT investments — a big change from the traditional “use it or lose it” rush at the end of each fiscal year.

The Modernizing Government Technology Act of 2017 provided the general authorization for agencies to create their funds, but Roat was referring specifically to Section 533 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2019, which became law in February. The legislation specified that SBA can transfer to the fund up to 3 percent of any appropriation made by Congress to its “Salaries and Expenses” or “Business Loans Program” accounts.

Roat didn’t specify how much money SBA initially plans to send to the fund.

The December 2018 Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) scorecard says the Department of Labor has a working capital fund, too. The Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Department of Agriculture say they have plans to set up IT working capital funds in 2019 or 2020.

The MGT Act also set up the Technology Modernization Fund, a central pot of money that agencies can apply for “seed funding” from for specific IT modernization projects. Roat serves on the inter-agency board that oversees the dispersal of these funds, which agencies are required to pay back.

Thus far, the TMF board has awarded $90 million of the $100 million appropriated for the fund in fiscal 2018. The pot got a further $25 million under the February appropriations bill.

White House’s Kent previews federal automation policy in IT modernization talk

Federal CIO Suzette Kent teased an upcoming Office of Management and Budget policy on automated technologies as part of her preview of the administration’s 2019 goals for IT modernization during a keynote Thursday at FedScoop’s IT Modernization Summit.

About a week after celebrating the one-year anniversary of the President’s Management Agenda, which explicitly includes a focus on IT modernization, Kent said year two is going to be all about building on those foundations. “There were some amazing things that were accomplished last year,” she said. “But what’s in store for this year is even more exciting.”

The White House Office of Management and Budget wants agencies to have clear guidance on using popular emerging automation technologies like robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning and artificial intelligence, she said. “We will develop an initial release of a policy for the use of automated technologies by federal civilian agencies,” Kent said.

The forthcoming policy will “seek to align the level of inspection, oversight, data examination and model control with the consequences of the outcomes.” This, Kent suggested, will allow the federal government to build policy “infrastructure” around low-level automation like RPA that can, theoretically, be applied down the road to what she called “some of the more powerful technologies.”

“We’re leveraging the learnings from both private sector … and some of the early movers in the federal government,” Kent said. There’s a “massive opportunity” for the government to learn via hands-on pilots, she added, so OMB will be “very aggressive” in encouraging agencies to “just get started.”

Also coming up this year: a continued “relentless focus” on cybersecurity, a continued move to the cloud for agencies and a continued emphasis on user-centered digital services for citizens.

“2019 is going to be a great year for citizen and mission results delivered through enabling technology advances,” Kent said in closing.