DOD wants $240M refresh of its high-performance computing capabilities

The Department of Defense is looking to refresh its high-performance computing capabilities in a new $240 million contract.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a solicitation Friday “to provide the High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) with world-class high performance computing capabilities for the” DOD at four of its Supercomputing Resource Centers.

The solicitation calls for production-grade high-performance computing systems that include “an appropriate combination of processor, memory, disk Input/Output (I/O), interconnect and Operating System capabilities in order to conduct complex, tightly-coupled, largescale, scientific calculations” that can be provided through a basic ordering agreement.

The agreement, which serves as a set of terms and conditions, is projected to run for three years with a potential ordering capacity of $240 million at four Supercomputing Resource Centers across the military, located at the Navy’s John C. Stennis Space Center, Miss.; the Army Corps of Engineers’ Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Miss.; Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio’s Air Force Research Laboratory facility; and an Army Research Laboratory site at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md.

The agreement will be awarded by the U.S. Army Engineering and Support Center, or CEHNC, in Huntsville, Ala., which provides specialized engineering solutions on a global scale, including developing technology transfers, integrated facilities and systems and standardized-based tasks outside of the corps headquarters’ purview.

As part of the agreement, the CEHNC will also provide an on-ramp capability to potentially add new contractors through annual reviews of requirements in the BOA and has no limit to the firm-fixed-price orders it can make.

Stakeholders have until Aug. 20 to respond.

Booz Allen lands $885M Pentagon AI contract

Government contracting giant Booz Allen Hamilton has landed a five-year deal worth $885 million to help the Department of Defense and the intelligence community “rapidly employ artificial intelligence, neural and deep neural networks.”

The contract calls upon Booz Allen to aid the Pentagon in dealing with, and using, the “unprecedented amounts” of reconnaissance data that exists in our modern world. The technology that makes this happen is known as Enterprise Machine Learning Analytics and Persistent Services, or eMAPS.

“The high volume, variety and velocity of intelligence acquired across the U.S. government cannot be harnessed by people alone,” Booz Allen’s Executive Vice President Judi Dotson said in a statement. “Our team of expert data scientists and engineers will apply cutting-edge solutions to deliver integrated eMAPS support to unlock the value of artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics, which will give warfighters positioned around the world the tools they need to drive U.S. national security forward.”

The contract was awarded by the General Services Administration’s Federal Systems Integration and Management Center, which provides other agencies acquisitions services for a fee.

The details on what will be done are still a little hazy. But Josh Sullivan, who is in charge of the analytics business at Booz, cited several examples of use in the medical space. In a conversation with the Wall Street Journal, he said AI can help military doctors detect lung cancer faster, come up with new approaches to brain injury and more. The idea — as with process robotics systems elsewhere in the government — is to help free up human capacity by allowing the AI to handle rote or especially data-heavy tasks.

The DOD is bullish on artificial intelligence. At the end of June, the agency officially established the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), a new office that will coordinate the Pentagon’s development and use of this “profoundly significant” technology.

While JAIC is still very much in development, leaders anticipate that it will accelerate the department’s work in AI, be a key connection point for collaboration with industry and academia, and work to attract top AI talent to the agency.

One DOD AI project has faced some talent controversy recently — the Air Force’s Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team (also known as Project Maven) is developing an algorithm to help airmen sift through hours and hours of drone surveillance video. Project Maven was in the headlines in June when subcontractor Google announced that, at the behest of a group of disgruntled employees, it will not seek to renew the contract once it expires in 2019.

Federal IT transformation takes on new dimensions with rise of multi-cloud

The convergence of agile development, containerization, microservices and DevOps is transforming the notion of migrating to the cloud — it’s no longer a destination, but instead it’s a larger, multi-cloud operating model, says a leading chief technologist in a new FedScoop report.

Although moving to the cloud may have started as an exercise in lowering costs, the most forward-leaning federal enterprises now take a strategic approach to cloud computing and its business and digital transformation benefits, the report concludes. Those include speed, agility and responsiveness to agency mission requirements.

With this comes a fundamental shift in how agencies must think about the cloud, says Cameron Chehreh, chief technology officer at Dell EMC Federal, which is leading a push to help agencies visualize a roadmap to their next-generation enterprise.

The cloud is transforming into an operating model, not just a destination, Chehreh says.

“All missions and mission requirements in the government are different. In order to address leveraging cloud as an operating model, not a destination, you have to have a multi-cloud strategy,” he says.

Managing a multi-cloud environment may be a new and daunting endeavor for many large and midsize government agencies, but agencies can take advantage of the transition work already underway in the private industry, he says. Chehreh cites two recent studies in the report, by IDC and RightScale, which found that more than 80 percent of enterprises have committed to multi-cloud architectures.

Chehreh acknowledges agencies face complex IT environments, built on top of legacy systems and years of adaptation, making it much more complicated to deploy and manage cloud-ready apps on an enterprise scale. But he urges agencies to take a step back and look at how key applications can and must operate in a multi-cloud IT environment.

Adopting the ‘Agile Manifesto’

The report outlines four critical questions agency leaders should be asking as they look to redeploy their applications in a multi-cloud operating environment.

“It’s all about interoperability. There are going to be workloads that agencies will find are not technically or financially viable to run in a public cloud infrastructure. So, they’re going to want to run those workloads in a private, on-premise cloud, which begins to create the first aspect of a multi-cloud cloud environment,” he says.

Planning for successful multi-cloud operations is not only possible but is absolutely necessary for today’s modern a government IT enterprise and for agencies to meet their mission requirements, Chehreh suggests.

To accomplish that, he suggests agencies look to the principles captured in the so-called Agile Manifesto. Written in 2001 by 17 independent software developers, the Agile Manifesto laid the groundwork for a reimagining of software development that focused on producing working software incrementally and avoiding cumbersome documentation, lengthy contract negotiations and requirements processes.

Behind the transition to a multi-cloud strategy, Chehreh also points to the confluence of four forces building momentum in IT:  agile development, containerization, microservices and DevOps. Each offers powerful tools and approaches for transforming how agencies deliver IT services, he says.

The report also highlights how federal agencies, such as FEMA, are harnessing those forces to help agencies envision their next-generation enterprise.

But the process of leveraging a multi-cloud model begins with assessing each agency’s application portfolio and making critical decisions about how those applications will evolve going forward, he says.

Download the full report, “Federal IT transformation and the benefits of multi-cloud,” or learn more about other federal Digital Transformation Heroes.

This article was produced by FedScoop for, and sponsored by, Dell EMC.

GSA wants to marry shared services and innovation in SBIR pilot

If successful, the General Services Administration’s new innovation pilot will kill two very desired birds with one stone: bringing innovative upstarts into business with the government and promoting shared services to channel them enterprisewide.

Agency officials said Monday they hope to utilize the new Small Business Innovation Research Phase III pilot to give agencies the edge on new technologies by selling them through GSA’s established acquisition arms.

“GSA has been putting a lot of focus lately on pushing forward with some key innovation acquisition practices and strategies, while at the same time, building in a set of guardrails to make sure that we are innovative, but with potential controls,” said Jeff Koses, GSA senior procurement executive.

The agency debuted the pilot last week, which focuses the commercialization phase of the Small Business Administration’s SBIR program that provides research and development grants to small businesses pursuing new tech. The SBIR program awards three tiers of R&D funding — provided by the Department of Defense and 12 other member agencies and channeled through SBA to small innovative companies — running from the basic research phase through bringing viable solutions to market in Phase III.

The new pilot will use the Great Lakes Region of GSA’s Office of Assisted Acquisition Services (AAS) and its Federal Systems Integration and Management, or FEDSIM, program to assist those companies in pursuing funding from the private sector, or from the member agencies, to promote commercialization.

Because AAS and FEDSIM specialize in custom acquisition support services, SBIR member agencies asked GSA to design a pilot using its dedicated procurement resources to focus on the commercialization process.

But the move also provides GSA the opportunity to serve as a shared service provider for the member agencies, using AAS and FEDSIM to design the acquisition structures for any commercialized solutions and potentially scale them governmentwide if the pilot is successful.

“Many of those agencies lack a dedicated contracting shop that can support Phase III SBIR contracts,” said Mark Lee, the Federal Acquisition Service’s assistant commissioner of policy and compliance. “Having AAS in that position to be able to report these contracts on behalf of those agencies sets up a dedicated support area. They act as a shared service offering across government. Currently, there isn’t a shared service offering that provides assisted acquisition for consumer contracts, so this would be setting up that capability.”

SBIR agencies looking to use the pilot would still pay the standard AAS or FEDSIM fees, which are broken down by a sliding percentage of the total project value.

The pilot will serve to inform GSA on the best practices for both facilitating commercialization and how broadly to scale it. But most importantly, Lee said it provides the government with a window to procure cutting-edge technology at some of its earliest iterations.

“We see a unique opportunity working with the SBIR contractors through the production phase, and as they are moving through commercialization, to establish a relationship with the company and eventually make that available in a broader sense across the federal marketplace,” he said. “It’s really getting in early as the technology is being developed and be able to broaden the access across the federal marketplace. It fits nicely into GSA’s role of working with partner companies.”

The pilot is scheduled to run through fiscal 2019.

Army in search of new cyber capabilities to defend its networks

The office in charge of acquiring enterprise tech for the Army is looking to add new capabilities to defend the service’s networks.

The Army’s Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems (PEO-EIS) issued a request for information Friday in search of potential cybersecurity, risk management and cybersecurity system engineering services — particularly in support of its defensive cyber-operations in the cloud.

“The scope of this effort includes Cybersecurity, Risk Management, and Cybersecurity
System Engineering activities to support [defensive cyber operations] assessments and authorization of [defensive cyber-operations Suite of Complimentary Systems], critical emerging technologies, and mission capabilities, across multiple secure computing environments, to include authorized CSP hosting environments,” the solicitation reads.

Under that broad need, the Army is looking to support its Cyber Protection Brigade and Cyber Protection Teams with cybersecurity program management, information security system engineering, continuous monitoring of its risk management framework, configuration management, and cloud hosting and security engineering.

The RFI doesn’t comment on possible contract length or value. Most work would be performed at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

Responses are due by Aug. 3.

Trump nominates James Gfrerer to head VA IT

President Donald Trump nominated James Paul Gfrerer late Friday to be the next head of IT for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Gfrerer, who spent two decades in the Marine Corps and more recently served as an executive director in Ernst & Young, LLP’s cybersecurity practice, will serve as VA’s CIO and assistant secretary for information and technology, pending Senate confirmation.

He was also a “Department of Defense Detailee to the Department of State leading interagency portfolios in counterterrorism and cybersecurity,” according to his presidential nomination.

Gfrerer’s confirmation would put an end to the VA Office of Information and Technology’s year-and-a-half run without an official CIO. LaVerne Council was the department’s last Senate-confirmed CIO; she left with the change in presidential administrations in January 2017 and was replaced in an acting capacity by Rob Thomas. Then Thomas retired from government in September 2017, passing the torch to Scott Blackburn, who served in an acting capacity until resigning this past April. Since then, controversial Trump campaign staffer Camilo Sandoval has filled the role.

At a recent House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, lawmakers criticized the lack of consistent leadership at the VA, particularly in roles that handle the department’s electronic health record modernization contract, like the CIO.

On the Senate side, Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., chairman of the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said Friday he is “pleased President Trump has announced his intent to nominate James Gfrerer to be assistant secretary of Veterans Affairs for Information and Technology.”

“This Senate-confirmed role oversees a number of critical projects at the VA, including the massive electronic health records merger, a new system to support the expanded VA caregivers benefits, and other IT priorities,” Isakson said in a statement. “Having permanent leadership in place to oversee these projects and the VA’s various information and technology systems will be critical as Congress works with the VA to address concerns and make improvements to bring VA into the 21st century.”

Watchdog: OPM’s health insurance claims system needs security refresh

The data warehouse that holds health insurance claims records for the Office of Personnel Management is operating with outdated security plans and is not meeting various monitoring requirements, an inspector’s general report found.

OPM’s Health Claims Data Warehouse serves as the IT repository for the claims records and administrative data associated with the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, which provides health benefits for 8.3 million federal employees, retirees and beneficiaries.

An IG audit of the HCDW’s IT security controls found that while many elements are in compliance with Office of Management and Budget policy, others fall far short.

Auditors found that required continuous monitoring reports were not issued, and that neither the system’s contingency plan to mitigate service disruption nor the plan of action and milestones for addressing 22 outstanding system weaknesses had been updated since 2015.

OPM has also failed to remove the credentials of several nonessential personnel who retained privileged access to HCDW servers, despite that access being deemed unnecessary.

The agency has also not put in place technical controls to prevent users from accessing HCDW servers remotely or conducted penetration testing of the system.

One of the system’s servers was also excluded from OPM’s vulnerability scanning procedures, potentially leaving the HCDW open to security breaches, the report said.

Auditors also found that the HCDW was still listed as “in development” in its 2015 System Security Plan, a phase typically designated for systems not widely used. But the HCDW has been in routine use, or production, since October 2016, requiring a reevaluation of its authority to operate.

As a result, auditors found that 52 of the 343 security controls were deemed “not applicable” in the system’s security assessment plan and report, raising concerns that they were not correctly applied.

“The assessors did not clarify why these controls were considered ‘Not Applicable’ to the HCDW assessment,” the IG said. “This demonstrates the strong possibility that additional controls may have been identified incorrectly and more weaknesses exist than the assessment identified.”

The IG made 12 recommendations, two of which were redacted for security reasons, about how to improve the HCDW’s security controls.

OPM officials concurred with nine recommendations. They partially concurred with a recommendation to limit remote access, saying that the security documentation regarding remote access needed to be updated to reflect new controls. OPM’s responses to two other recommendations were redacted.

Once a beacon for e-government, U.S. fails to make top 10 in latest U.N. global report

Fifteen years ago, the United States was the undisputed leader in the evolving world of e-government, where online transactions with government were seen as a powerful engine for improving public services.

A new United Nations report shows just how much other nations around the globe have risen up and surpassed the United States in delivering on that vision.

Denmark, Australia, Republic of Korea, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northland Ireland, Sweden, Finland, Singapore, New Zealand, France and Japan all rank higher than the U.S. in their overall use of information and communications technologies to deliver public services, according to the latest global assessment of 193 U.N. member states.

The bienniel survey, which dates back to 2001, lays out a revealing snapshot of how the world’s leading and developing economies are harnessing mobile and cloud technology for public service.

“The 2018 survey highlights a persistent positive global trend towards higher levels of e-government development,” said Vincenzo Aquaro, chief of digital government for the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, which released the report July 19. The number of countries with “high” to “very high” e-government development indexes surged from 94 in 2016 to 111 in the latest survey, according to Aquaro.

But the 300-page report also delves for the first time into some of emerging challenges governments now face with advancements in technology.

Among them is the specter of technology’s darker side on societies — and the need for policy makers to grapple with concerns over cybersecurity, the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs, and a growing digital divide between those who can access information electronically and those who can’t.

“There is a strong concern about the risk of losing jobs because of the capacity of machines to provide new services and functions,” Aquaro said in an interview with FedScoop. “The ethical issues need to be discussed, and somehow defined before it’s too late,” he said. The rapid rate of technology change, and the impact large, commercial technology firms are having on societies, are outpacing the ability of policy makers to keep up, he said. “This is absolutely new,” relative to the U.N.’s prior surveys.

The gradual decline of the U.S.’s global ranking as a beacon for e-government development in part reflects what the U.N. measures and its agenda to address the needs of many nations. The U.N. survey captures and then indexes three dimensions that drive digital government in 193 nations: the scope and quality of online government services; the extent of wireless, internet and telecommunications access; and measures of adult literacy and human capital.

The U.S. ranked 2nd globally in online services, 20th in telecommunications infrastructure and 15th in the U.N.’s human capital rankings, according to FedScoop’s analysis.

Notably, the U.S.’s ranking for online services jumped from 12th in 2016, to just shy of the top spot in 2018, suggesting government agencies have made it significantly easier to apply and pay for a widening range of services online.

That helped the U.S.’s overall rankings — moving it up one position to 11th place this year, compared to the last report. But as recently as 2012, the U.S. ranked 5th globally.

“The report is a powerful tool, but it needs to be contextualized at the country level in order to make a strong analysis of the reasons behind the behaviors,” Aquaro said. The U.S.’s vast size and complexity presents entirely different challenges for deploying e-government services than for smaller countries.

That said, European countries continue leading e-government development globally, Aquaro said, even as many other nations, including the U.S., Australia, and Republic of Korea as well as developing countries, continue to make steady advances.

One reason behind Europe’s accelerating progress traces back to government initiatives begun more than a decade ago in the United Kingdom, and subsequently in Brussels, said Julia Glidden, general manager, IBM Global Government Industry.

“EU countries have been taking advantages from the collaborative and cross-national approach facilitated by the European Commission in implementing, at a national level, the [E.U.’s] single digital market strategy, its goals and targets,” said Glidden. Many of those nations also did more to fund e-government development, she said.

Glidden pointed to the work of U.S. Digital Service and 18-F, federal teams which help agencies jump start online service development, as examples of where the U.S. continues to innovate. But those efforts are hard to scale without the kind of coordinated polices and funding that have sustained continued progress in Europe.

Among other facets of the report is a full chapter devoted to the role of technology in the hands of government as a tool for better anticipating and responding to natural disasters and the need for governments to establish “e-resilience” disciplines.

“The U.N.’s focus on the use of technology, like geospatial, cloud, mobile, AI to help governments anticipate, plan and respond to emergency management — with an eye toward predictive response — is really path-breaking and something governments really need to pay attention to,” Glidden said.

Despite the many challenges, the U.N. survey also makes clear how far many countries have come in developing e-government solutions. When the U.N. conducted its first e-government survey in 2003, just 45 countries were able to provide public services online through a one-stop platform, and only 33 countries could facilitate online transactions.

This year, according to Aquaro, all 193 member states have national portals and backend systems to automate core administrative tasks and 140 provide at least one transactional service online.

In addition to the full report, which includes more than 50 case studies on how various nations tackled their e-government challenges, the U.N. has made all of its survey data, along with interactive maps and related country data, available online here.

Pentagon adds $1B to EHR price tag to ensure interoperability with VA

The Department of Defense’s Defense Health Agency is adding another $1.1 billion to its ongoing $4.3 billion electronic health record modernization contract to ensure a “single standard solution baseline” with the system that the Department of Veterans Affairs is acquiring.

Both systems are based on Cerner software, but apparently this fact alone is not quite enough to guarantee that the two will play nicely.

In a justification document published this week, the agency explains that adding to this contract with service provider Leidos will allow the long-awaited interoperability of EHRs between DOD and VA to run smoothly. The extension of the contract will also allow the DOD to include the U.S. Coast Guard in its MHS GENESIS system.

“In addition to the existing MHS GENESIS capabilities, the VA contract will implement extended capabilities that were not available at the time of the original [DoD Healthcare Management System Modernization] contract,” the justification document reads. “DoD needs to acquire the same core capabilities that the VA is acquiring to ensure consistency (the standard solution baseline) among the agencies.”

Examples of these “extended capabilities” are redacted in the public justification document.

“Contracting with anyone else (other than Leidos) to work with Cerner would create significant redundancies, inefficiencies and other issues,” the document reads.

The VA finalized its own EHR modernization contract in May, signing a deal with Cerner that’s worth $10 billion over 10 years. Robert Wilkie —Trump’s latest VA secretary, who signed the Cerner deal in May as acting secretary after the ousting of David Shulkin — has assured onlookers that the VA is working with DOD to learn best-practices (and avoid pitfalls) from the rollout of MHS GENESIS.

“VA and DOD are collaborating closely to ensure lessons learned at DoD sites will be implemented in future deployments at DoD as well as VA,” Wilkie said in May. “We appreciate the DoD’s willingness to share its experiences implementing its electronic health record.”

MHS GENESIS, however, hasn’t been leading by the best example, according to reports from the first pilot sites in the Pacific Northwest. In May, the department’s Operational Test and Evaluation office issued a scathing report that detailed how the Cerner-based MHS GENESIS’s initial implementation at three military medical facilities in Washington state “does not demonstrate enough workable functionality to manage and document patient care” and has “poor system usability, insufficient training, and inadequate help desk support.”

GSA moves ahead with SBIR Phase III pilot program

The General Services Administration will soon launch a pilot program to test how it can expand research and commercialization aid for potential innovative technologies.

GSA will pilot awarding and managing Small Business Innovation Research Phase III contracts, hoping to broaden the program.

The Small Business Administration runs the SBIR program and offers three tiers of R&D funding for new technologies, the third tier of which focuses on helping bring viable solutions to market.

Federal agencies like the Department of Defense and others provide contract awards through the SBIR program to support potential technological solutions through phases of research & development. In Phase III, the program tests the commerciality of solutions and solicits funding from the private sector and the agency that offered the initial SBIR contract.

GSA believes by managing the Phase III awards, it can broaden the reach of those commercialized solutions through its wide range on contract vehicles.

The pilot will be managed by GSA’s Office of Assisted Acquisition Services and operated in its Great Lakes Region in collaboration with teams from the Federal Systems Integration and Management, or FEDSIM, program.

“Awarding SBIR Phase III contracts allows GSA to bring these cutting-edge solutions directly to our partner agencies,” said GSA Administrator Emily Murphy in a statement. “This is a great example of how GSA is improving the way federal agencies access and use technology to address complex problems.”

SBA Administrator Linda McMahon said in a statement that the collaboration would help both the public and private sectors by providing the government with insights to new innovative solutions and supporting competition in the market.

“The SBA looks forward to working with GSA to encourage the entrepreneurship and innovation associated with the SBIR program and continuing SBA’s efforts to impact the growth of our nation’s small businesses,” she said.

Murphy first teased the pilot program in March, saying that by leveraging GSA’s acquisition vehicles and experience, the SBIR Phase III awardees could have greater market access.

“Because by the time the product is in Phase 3 of the [SBIR] program, it’s hit a commercialization point,” she said. “So, it’s something that GSA has had experience with and gives us a pipeline to bring innovative technologies into our contract vehicles, as well as assisting agencies in getting their products and services quickly.”

The pilot is expected to run through September 2019.