Vote today for the 2025 FedScoop 50 awards.

Cast your vote!

Mattis establishes DOD task force to protect critical tech, information

Secretary of Defense James Mattis has established a task force whose sole purpose is to better secure the Department of Defense’s important technology and information.

Mattis issued a memo dated Oct. 24 creating the Protecting Critical Technology Task Force (PCTTF) to report to the deputy secretary of Defense and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“Working with our partners in the defense industry and research enterprise, we must ensure the integrity and security of our classified information, controlled unclassified information, and key data,” Mattis wrote in the memo. “The impacts of the loss of intellectual property and data cannot be overstated — we must move out to protect our resources and our forces.”

Mattis cites the more than $600 billion American industry loses each year in “theft and expropriation,” and “far worse, the loss of classified and controlled unclassified information is putting the Department’s investments at risk and eroding the lethality and survivability of our forces.”

He calls for “concrete action” to happen quickly. The task force will start working with two sprints of 30 and 90 days “to address a number of basic issues.” He writes that “While the sprints are underway, the PCTTF will also address broader systemic issues, and to this end, leverage the previous work done by the Maintaining DoD Technology Advantage Cross Functional Team, which is now dissolved.”

The deputy secretary of Defense, currently Patrick Shanahan, will also “assign resources to the task force and the DoD enterprise will share all necessary data, regardless of classification.”

According to the memo, task force members will include:

The FBI and Office of the Director of National Intelligence also announced a new framework Thursday for federal agencies to identify insider threat and avoid leaks of sensitive or classified information.

The gospel of shared services resonates across the PMA, say Kent and Murphy

The President’s Management Agenda was always designed to be an interlocking set of goals, with data, workforce and IT modernization projects dependent on one another to help agencies be more effective and efficient.

Federal CIO Suzette Kent and General Services Administrator Emily Murphy said Thursday that there’s another understated element undergirding the PMA’s cross-agency objectives: the Trump administration’s desire to broaden shared services.

The pair, speaking at the Association of Government Accountants Shared Services Summit, pointed to efforts to establish technology and policy standards across the federal enterprise as an example of this. They’re a pivotal piece of the Office of Management and Budget’s plan to both drive efficiency and modernize technology, they said — and shared services are a natural extension.

“OMB, when they worked on the President’s Management Agenda, they really came up with a well-linked set of initiatives,” Murphy said. “[Instituting] Technology Business Modernization, which will help us do a better job of buying IT, which leads to doing a better job of acquisition. If we can do a better job of acquisition — and acquisition itself being a shared service — if we do that, then it frees up resources to support the other [cross-agency priority (CAP)] goals.”

Both Kent and Murphy have been tapped to drive shared services reform as part of the PMA’s CAP goal 5, but the U.S. CIO said that because so many agency IT systems are in need of upgrades, by establishing a shared baseline of standards, the CAP goal helps make that modernization more efficient.

“When we look at the full scale of what we need to modernize, it is a huge agenda,” Kent said. “So I see the shared services agenda absolutely linked with the IT modernization because it’s a way we can pick a common set of solutions and move a large group quickly to a more modern, more secure better service platform and, going back to the PMA, a better mission stewardship.”

But the mission of shared service is not new, and the challenge for this administration, as well as previous ones, has been illuminating the commonalities between agencies that shared quality services can address, rather than their mission-specific differences.

Murphy pointed to the challenges in crafting GSA’s shared NewPay system, which saw a $2.5 billion contract award in September. NewPay establishes governmentwide payroll standards that agencies can leverage with new technology solutions to make better-informed decisions. She said there was an initial heavy lift to develop those standards from their disparate predecessors, but the potential gain makes it worth it.

“It took two years to agree on what the standards were on how we pay people,” she said. “My favorite example is that we pay some people 12 times a year, some people 24 times a year, some people 26 times a year and some people 27 times a year. The Centers of Excellence at the Department of Agriculture have created new dashboards to provide better insight into the workforce and part of that is fed by the payroll data. If we are able to replicate those dashboards across the government, that’s going to give us the ability to have a shared set of data across agencies. Then it just becomes a force multiplier.”

While both noted that the PMA’s goals have been designed to be flexible enough to address and adapt to individual agency needs, Murphy said that GSA’s own self-assessment of its payroll needs revealed the juice of common standards far outweighed the squeeze bridging them over individual needs.

“We found that we seemed to have 100 areas where we had unique needs. So that led to a lot of conversations where we found out that we don’t have unique needs,” she said. “It took some hard reckoning on our part to be honest about that and be willing to admit that, in many cases, the benefit from being special was going to be far less than the benefit we’d get from being part of the collective.”

SOCOM wants to outfit warfighters with futuristic visual tech

U.S. Special Operations Command is looking to integrate more emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality into its mission sets and is engaging with industry to find which solutions it will ultimately deploy.

Partnering with Department of Defense’s Rapid Reaction Technology (RRTO) Innovation Outreach Program, SOCOM will launch the second portion of a three-phase acquisition plan to update its visual augmentation systems next month with an industry day to spotlight potential solutions.

“Optical Dominance Industry Day provides selected innovative companies with an opportunity to make short technical presentations to government representatives about their technologies and products,” says a special notice released Wednesday. “There is potential that companies may be selected for pilot projects or experimentation if their technology appears to match the USSOCOM needs posted in the special notice.”

Scheduled for Nov. 14, Optical Dominance Industry Day is intended to showcase technologies that USSOCOM could deploy across the following need areas identified in the first phase of the acquisition plan:

Defense officials are looking for a range of capabilities, from gaming technologies for training and neuromorphic computing to wearable sensors and haptic technology. A subset of industry responses provided for each of the need areas will be entered into the third phase of the modernization plan, which consists of a technology review conducted by defense officials.

The event will be hosted at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory’s Collaborative Analysis Center in Laurel, Md. Stakeholders can find more information on USSOCOM special notice posting on FedBizOpps.

How agencies bring success to IT modernization with simple service enhancements

Government IT leaders can serve as “trailblazers” for their agencies by leveraging simplified, cloud-based service enhancements as stepping stones to a longer-term modernization journey, a new report suggests.

Citing federal agency success stories, the report highlights how commercially available technologies, such as software-as-a-service (SaaS), can bring service improvements that help agencies modernize applications quickly.

FedScoop report on cloud platforms to improve citizen services

Download the full report.

The report, “Taking a lower-risk, higher-return route to digital transformation,” produced by FedScoop and sponsored by Salesforce, also points to the significant reduction in total cost of operations agencies can realize by looking at digital transformation as a journey.

Agency leaders say they want to “improve service levels, efficiencies and ease-of-use for their customers,” says Paul Tatum, senior vice president for solution engineering at Salesforce’s Public Sector Business Unit. But by shifting to readily-available cloud-based services, they will also discover the “unexpected benefit of improved efficiency, ease-of-use, productivity for their employees on the back-end.”

Tatum adds that the multi-step process should “start by focusing on a service enhancement that’s significant enough to contribute to an agency’s mission, but bite-sized enough to attract buy-in from agency senior leadership.”

The report describes the success of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in using a SaaS solution to consolidate and move mission-focused services to the cloud. After consolidating or retiring some of its apps, the agency was able to use a cloud-based solution to improve how farmers get helpful information.

The report references a study which shows how SaaS solutions typically cut enterprise IT expenditures by as much as 50 percent over five years. But because government agency spend is approved only one year at a time, the report stresses the need for IT trailblazers to secure buy-in from their agency’s leaders for long-term goals.

This perennial challenge to secure buy-in from executives isn’t easy to overcome. Even though IT trailblazers understand the benefits of moving to the cloud, decision-makers may decide to maintain the systems they already have due to, among other concerns, budgeting issues or lack of skilled staff.

That buy-in should come more easily today, the report suggests, in part because of White House initiatives to prioritize IT modernization. The administration has come out in support of agencies moving to cloud-based software services that put the burden of maintaining hardware and software on the SaaS provider and bypassing the recurring costs of infrastructure upgrades, integrations and patching.

The report notes the success Amtrak had consolidating applications with a SaaS provider, which opened the door for innovation and led to the rapid development of an application which more effectively tracks train servicing from start to finish.

Part of Amtrak’s success resulted from working with a well-established cloud provider with a well-established track record of migrating large-scale enterprise systems to the cloud.

A provider’s experience and expertise are especially valuable when in-house knowledge and capabilities are limited, concludes Tatum.

“Since partnering with Salesforce,” the report states, “Amtrak has seen employee productivity double.”

Read more about how agencies can get the most from their digital transformation journey by partnering with experienced SaaS providers.

Learn more about Salesforce and trailblazers in government.

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

DHS seeks biometric screening systems for 2019 ‘technology rally’

The Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate announced Wednesday that it has released a public call for submissions for a “biometric technology rally” to be held in the spring of 2019.

The rally will be modeled after one held in March, when 12 different face and iris recognition systems were tested in a simulated “standard security checkpoint process.” For purveyors of biometric screening technology it provided an opportunity to test their products in a realistic scenario and gather that valuable data. For government agencies like the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, it was a way to see what’s out there.

Participants from both industry and government raved about the inaugural rally. “Getting test data from an independent source is really, really difficult and really, really expensive,” Mary Haskett, the founder of one of the tested vendors, said. “It’s easy to test software if you’re Apple, but getting a large number of test subjects to come in and go through your system is actually very difficult. So this is wonderful for us.”

Now, DHS wants more.

“The 2018 rally established very aggressive objective and threshold metrics for speed, performance and user satisfaction,” Arun Vemury, director of DHS S&T’s Biometrics and Identity Technology Center, said in a statement. “While some rally participants met a few criteria, no single commercial offering was able to meet all objectives.”

Vemury and others are hoping that participants have incorporated some of what they learned in the first go around and that this showing will be better. This second rally will be open to fingerprint biometric systems as well as those focused on faces and irises.

“We believe this will further accelerate improvements in biometric system performance that benefits DHS and our mission partners,” Vemury said.

DHS will use the results of the exercise “to inform planning activities” and will share results with industry and researchers to support the further development of the technology.

The agency will hold an informational webinar about the 2019 rally on Nov. 5. Organizations that want to participate need to submit a white paper and a video showing their system’s capabilities by Nov. 30.

Coming soon: Better collaboration, sharing with U.S. allies, IC CIO Sherman says

The U.S. intelligence community is working to improve collaboration and communication with its Five Eyes allies and beyond.

Intelligence community CIO John Sherman plans “in just a couple weeks” to convene CIOs from Five Eyes allied nations — Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom — “to work through some of these issues” concerning intelligence collaboration and information sharing, he said last week.

“We’ve been able at some level to collaborate with our Five Eyes allied partners for a number of years, and there’s been some notable strides in terms of more seamless email, connectivity,
video teleconferencing, phone,” Sherman said at an event hosted by Fed Insider and George Washington University. “We’re in the 21st century, here — shouldn’t we be able to do more, like chat? Yes, and we’re working on that with them.”

Sherman, who has spent time with the CIA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, said he knows there are plenty of capabilities out there, especially for sharing information across large organizations, and because of that, he doesn’t want to “reinvent the wheel.”

“I don’t want to reinvent the wheel of what the [Allied System for Geospatial Intelligence Senior Management Council] is doing, I don’t want to reinvent the wheel for what the Department of Defense is doing or [the Defense Intelligence Agency], I don’t want to reinvent the wheel with the robust signals intelligence Five Eyes networks that my colleagues up at Ft. Meade have,” He said.

Giving more detail on the upcoming meeting, Sherman said “I’ve invited all these other stakeholders from these other communities of interest so as we look some of the capabilities that have been deployed for discipline-specific reasons like geospatial intelligence — why don’t we just leverage it for broader enterprise needs and not reinvent the wheel on this?”

And sharing with coalition partners shouldn’t be limited to just the Five Eyes, Sherman explained.

“We’ve got other partners too in coalition environments, and of course in Afghanistan, Operation Inherent Resolve [in Iraq and Syria], and also other contingency areas where we could very conceivably bring in greater numbers of allies,” such as on the Korean Peninsula, he said.

“It requires a lot of discussion and also working across their different stakeholder communities to make sure we’re not having an asymmetric sort of solution to work with their IC but not their defense intelligence, or vice versa.”

Transportation RFI seeks better data analysis tools to inform safety policymaking

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Safety Data Initiative — the agency’s strategy for using big data to make American highways safer — is now seeking industry input on what tools are out there for better data analysis and visualization.

The project, which kicked off in January, released a request for information this week calling for “industry sources, business practices, technical capacity, and operational capability related to data integration, data analysis, and data visualization that could be leveraged to further DOT’s capabilities to use safety-related data to better inform policy and decision making for multimodal surface transportation safety.”

Today, DOT admits, integrating new data at the agency is time-consuming and difficult — at least in part because the agency lacks tools for integration, analysis and visualization. The agency hopes to rectify this but wants to know what’s out there first.

Responses to the RFI are due Dec. 7. DOT will host an informational webinar Nov. 15.

The new RFI is just one part of the ongoing Safety Data Initiative. The initiative also includes four pilot projects, including one with the navigation app Waze where DOT crash data is being integrated with crowdsourced hazard data in the app to see if this information can be used to predict likely future accidents.

The agency also has a visualization challenge up on Challenge.gov called Solving for Safety and recently announced the five semi-finalists that will proceed to stage two. During this second phase semi-finalists including Uber, Arity, Ford Motor Company, the University of Central Florida and Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, Inc. will create proofs of concept for their visualization tools. Eventually, two of these competitors will be invited to turn their proofs of concept into fully working tools.

“These advanced applications show the potential for data-driven safety solutions that the Department wants to support,” Under Secretary of Transportation Derek Kan said in a statement. “Combining new sources of data, new methods of data integration, and new means to visualize and communicate the insights from this data can help the Department provide tools to transportation professionals, public safety officials and the public that can save lives.”

Intelligence community will set security clearance data standards in 2019 to whittle backlog

Acknowledging that the intelligence community needs a new game plan to quell a backlog of unprocessed security clearances, Sue Gordon said Tuesday plans are in the works for standardizing how intelligence agencies analyze personnel data.

Gordon, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, said at an Intelligence and National Security Alliance event that the IC is working on a new enhanced security framework that could debut in fiscal 2019 and will provide a risk baseline for agencies to more efficiently process security clearances.

“I believe we will have, in this coming year, agreed-to standards that are promulgated in a policy document,” she said. “What we have to get better at is the accountability for following the standards and the understanding of what it is that they are not.”

While agencies in the IC may have adopted their own individual data standards for processing the clearances of potential employees and contractors, the lack of reciprocity between agencies, coupled with an investigatory process that is overwhelmed by demand, has helped fuel a logjam of requests that Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said is at a “crisis stage.”

Warner recently proposed provisions in the annual Intelligence Authorization Act that include the enhanced security framework, as well as targets for reducing the time it takes to process secret-level clearances in 30 days and top secret-level clearances in 90 days.

He said Tuesday that clearance reform will “much more likely than not” happen this session, and if not, then he’d take the reform provisions from the authorization bill and create separate legislation to ensure that they pass.

“Clearly, we’ve got to get that backlog down,” he said. “It was at 740,000 [requests], we’re down to 660,000, that’s great, but not nearly good enough for the end of this year. We’ve got to get active metrics on an ongoing basis where we measure at least on a quarterly basis and we get agreed-upon goals on how we are going to bring the backlog down.”

But Gordon said there are also gaps across the federal government in how agencies handle the data and the risk needed to provide a clearance and the available tools needed to process it.

“The intelligence community is not the big issue,” she said. “There are a lot of agencies involved here who don’t all have the resources that we do in order to make these things happen. Even within the intelligence community who has resources, to get those resources devoted to this new way of dealing of data is the big move. So you ought to expect the standards, you ought to expect us to be able to measure them and I’ll give you a better view when I can be confident that that will be in place.”

By laying the foundation of the clearance process with a new risk framework, Gordon said the IC can better collaborate with Congress and the private sector to introduce emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning and others to help handle the data processing.

She added that continuous evaluation of security clearances “is on the table,” with 20 agencies, plus another 15 who are in the application process, currently using a standardized set of data streams to constantly monitor existing clearances and allowing officials to reduce the need for periodic investigations.

Gordon said the goal is to reduce the backlog to 300,000 by spring 2019. And with common data standards in place, the IC can take big steps in making the security clearances process move more smoothly.

“We’ve had so many tiers, so many levels, so many definitions of suitability and security,” she said. “And the question is how do you bring those together to the notion of what are you protecting, what is a trusted person and then how do you build standards that have to go back to that? I believe that by the end of this year, we will have that in place.”

Cerner touts early success for DOD e-health record modernization

Pilots of the Department of Defense’s new electronic health record system MHS GENESIS have scored early successes while making key adjustments to address struggles spelled out in a report in May, says a top executive at the company leading the system’s development.

“So far, our focus has centered on implementing solutions at four DoD military treatment facilities, or initial operational capability (IOC) sites,” Travis Dalton, president of Cerner’s government services line, wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “I recently had the opportunity to visit these sites and meet with their leadership teams. I am encouraged by the progress being made and the direction we are now headed. Even in this early stage, thanks to the leadership at each site, we’re seeing improvements in patient safety, patient care and efficiency.”

Dalton goes on describe the improvements MHS GENESIS has driven at the pilots in the Pacific Northwest — things like “a nine-minute improvement in the time from when a patient arrives at the Emergency Department (ED) to when they see an ED provider” and the avoidance of duplicate lab orders or chest X-rays. Also, patients and their care teams are now communicating 40 percent more through online portal messages, he writes.

These proclaimed successes stand in contrast to the findings of a report earlier this year from DOD’s Joint Interoperable Test Command. The Pentagon team conducted an Initial Operational Test & Evaluation at MHS GENESIS’s four pilot sites, finding then that the $4.3 billion project was “neither operationally effective nor operationally suitable.”

Dalton acknowledged the report and said it “confirmed some of the challenges the team was already working to resolve” prior to its release.

“Though some have portrayed the report’s findings as a setback for the program, these reports accomplished exactly what we intended,” he said. “We welcome the feedback from the IOT&E reports as well as direct feedback from end-users and leadership at the IOC sites. We will continue to work with them to optimize and improve the system throughout the lifespan of the program.”

Because things are going well, Dalton said, “we’re well-positioned to soon kick off the next phase of deployment across military medical facilities in California and Idaho.”

Success at the DOD pilots also matters for the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is following in the Pentagon’s footsteps by rolling out a nearly identical modernized EHR developed by Cerner so the two will be interoperable as a service member transitions into retirement as a veteran.

“Cerner and the agency are committed to applying commercial best practices, as well as any lessons learned from our DoD experience, to the VA’s Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM) program,” Dalton wrote. “The VA has unique challenges and it’s critical that end-users and stakeholders are engaged throughout the implementation process.”

The company recently convened more than 400 “stakeholders including Veteran Service Organizations, government officials from the VA, DoD, Office of Management and Budget, and industry partners” in Missouri for the project’s kickoff, he added.

“Servicemembers and Veterans deserve the very best care and services available – whether treatment is received in the community, at a military or VA facility,” Dalton said. “When the DoD and VA implementations are complete, Servicemembers and Veterans will no longer be forced to carry a printed version of their records, experience gaps in care or undergo redundant medical testing. Instead, providers will be able to see a patient’s complete health record – rather than just a snapshot or their current medical condition.”

DIU says the relationship between DOD and Silicon Valley is just fine, thank you

In the news, in story after story, there appears to be a dramatic ideological showdown playing out between Silicon Valley tech companies and the Department of Defense over what kind of technology the military should have and use and how it should have and use this technology.

But out at the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU, formerly DIUx), DOD’s startup-centric outpost in Mountain View, Calif., the drama doesn’t seem to register.

“This is really a non-story,” Capt. Sean Heritage, DIU’s Navy lead and previously the group’s acting managing partner, told FedScoop in an interview this summer. The relationship between DOD and the majority of Silicon Valley startups is just fine, he said — even growing.

His comments came after a particularly dramatic period at Google, where employees protested the company’s work with a DOD artificial intelligence initiative known as Project Maven. The company eventually obliged employee demands and announced that it won’t renew its contract when the current one expires in 2019.

Critics of the military’s use of AI were pleased. “In a big win for ethical AI principles, Google will back away from military AI contracting,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation tweeted. “I am incredibly happy with this decision,” Meredith Whittaker, a Google AI researcher, tweeted.

The incident continues to impact Google’s defense contracting prospects outside of specific AI work — this month Google announced that it wouldn’t bid on a $10 billion defense cloud contract known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) program. The cited reason? Ethical concerns about the department’s use of AI.

And Google is not the only company with employees who’ve expressed concern about serving controversial government agency missions — Amazon employees have protested of the sale of facial recognition software Rekognition to law enforcement agencies, for example; Microsoft and Deloitte employees protested against work done for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

It’s easy to see Google’s rebukes as part of a larger trend, or indicative of sentiment in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs. But according to Heritage, that’d be the wrong read.

Heritage likes to think back to his early experiences in the Valley four years ago, when he was working with the director of the National Security Agency, as a point of comparison. In those days, he says, “there was a huge reluctance to acknowledge any relationship or support for the Department of Defense publicly.”

Back then, Edward Snowden’s disclosures were still fresh in everyone’s mind, he explained. Working with the government wasn’t something to brag about.

Now things are “night and day” different, Heritage said. The agency is getting a “very, very positive” reception in the community — the number of companies “willing to do business with us” increases with each DIU Commercial Solutions Opening, he said.

DIU’s messaging mirrors comments from other DOD personnel. “There will be those who will partner with us,” Lt. Col. Garry Floyd, Project Maven’s deputy chief, essentially shrugged when asked about the Google issue during a conference appearance in May.

And a recent announcement by Microsoft seems to support this perspective. Just last week the company, taking a position in opposition to Google, declared its intention to continue working with the DOD.

“To withdraw from this market is to reduce our opportunity to engage in the public debate about how new technologies can best be used in a responsible way,” company President Brad Smith wrote in a blog post acknowledging the “ethical and policy issues” that spring from the DOD’s increasing use of artificial intelligence.

“We are not going to withdraw from the future,” Smith wrote.