Government Publishing Office chooses new CIO

The Government Publishing Office announced this week that it has chosen a new CIO.

Sam Musa, previously the chief of IT services for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, recently stepped into the role that’s been empty since former CIO Tracee Boxley left the agency. At GPO, Musa will be in charge of managing the operation and acquisition of IT systems across the agency.

Agency leadership cites Musa’s cybersecurity expertise as among his key qualifications for the job. In addition to serving in security roles earlier in his career, Musa currently teaches cybersecurity courses at the University of Maryland University College.

“Sam brings a wealth of experience working in Federal Government IT and cybersecurity to GPO,” acting GPO Deputy Director Herbert H. Jackson, Jr. said in a statement. “I look forward to his ideas of strengthening the agency’s IT operations, which will enhance our service to Congress, Federal agencies and the public.”

In the internet age, IT systems are vital to GPO’s mission of “keeping America informed.” A recent report from the Library of Congress’ Federal Research Division explored the challenges that GPO has in collecting digital information from across the government and how it might overcome these. Unsurprisingly, many of the reports concepts for better document collection involve technology.

AI could mean massive reskilling initiatives for the federal workforce

Leaders from across the federal government have been banging the drum lately about the promises that artificial intelligence and automation hold for assisting an overwhelmed federal workforce.

But to ensure that AI can be the “coworker” that tackles all of the time-crushing, labor-intensive work federal employees are accustomed to, it’s going to take a massive redesign of skills needed in the workforce to utilize the technology.

“Really focusing on a lot of the cognitive elements of how to get adoption up and get people to understand these technologies is going to be very important,” said William Eggers, executive director of Deloitte’s Center for Government Insights. “I was over at [the Office of Management and Budget] the other day and their belief is that we are going to reskill [hundreds of thousands] or more federal employees over the next few years alone.”

Eggers said at the Professional Services Council’s Tech Trends conference Tuesday that the advent of AI, automation and machine learning has the potential to free up more than 1.1 billion hours of labor-intensive tasks that federal employees spend most of their time doing, like documenting information, instead directing it toward high-level operations.

But that will only happen effectively if federal leaders can develop a strategy that will ultimately change the role of many employees and get them to buy into it.

“We actually believe that what you need to do is move from thinking about jobs as activities to jobs as a series of behaviors for solving different problems,” Eggers said. “What kinds of problems are we trying to solve and then, what is the human-to-machine pairing?”

The President’s Management Agenda focuses prominently on both adopting automation technologies and reskilling federal workers for needed IT and cybersecurity positions — but the scope of administration’s plans for addressing the latter hasn’t yet been addressed in specific terms.

But U.S. CIO Suzette Kent said that leveraging the current federal workforce will be essential to  IT modernization efforts, both for its institutional memory and its capacity to take advantage of new tools.

Kent said the administration officials would be meeting Wednesday to discuss federal workforce strategy as it relates to the PMA’s goals, including the skills and tools employees will need moving forward.

“There is a significant commitment to the current federal workforce,” she said. “Because the knowledge of how the business processes work is critical to the transformation. The focus on the ways we can reskill and a broad dynamic is part of that.”

Any reskilling strategy will have to be designed to engage that workforce it’s aiming to train. Department of Justice CIO Joe Klimavicz said he’s looking for continuous learners in his ranks.

“I think we need to do more on an assessment of what technology or even business skills an individual needs and how we most rapidly impart those skills to that individual,” he said. “I think we have a lot of web-based technology training classes and those, to me, are boring. We’ll go through some PowerPoints, maybe take a test at the end and they are really limited in scope.”

He said instead, agencies should focus on strategies like nano-degree programs where employees focus on getting certifications in specific skill sets through “interesting and exciting curriculums.”

“What we need is something that people want to do and continue in keeping their skills current,” he said. “For me, the online stuff, it just doesn’t cut it.”

OMB is projected to complete a reskilling plan by the second quarter of 2019.

Exclusive: Kelly Olson lays out her priorities as new leader of GSA’s TTS

The mission and structure of the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Service have evolved immensely over its two years of existence — from a digital-services-oriented startup to an organization on its way to becoming the government’s champion for tech modernization.

And now that TTS has a solid foundation under the guidance of the Federal Acquisition Service after a mid-2017 reorganization, the time has come for the organization to scale and sustain the momentum and progress made in the past year as a driver of federal IT modernization, Kelly Olson told FedScoop in her first interview as TTS’s acting director.

“I think that we’ve built a very valuable and unique capability here through the years. We’re really at a point where we have established, I feel, a foundation for long-term change,” said Olson, who is the first GSA insider to take the helm of TTS since its startup phase.

Olson is hardly two weeks into her tenure as acting director, but she has a short list of priorities she’s eager to target in the early going of her new role: She wants to support and empower her leadership team, “operate and deliver as one unified and collaborative business unit” across TTS, sustain modernization momentum, recruit top talent, and do a better job of sharing “the work that we’re doing with our partner agencies and our customers.”

“We are all so heads-down working, driving into the ground that we forget to tell the stories of what we’re doing,” Olson explained.

Centers of Excellence

Perhaps the biggest story TTS has to tell is of its success in launching the IT Modernization Centers of Excellence. Under the leadership of Joanne Collins Smee, GSA kicked off a “positive cultural intervention” around IT at the Department of Agriculture, the so-called “lighthouse” agency for the CoEs, Olson said. That program, she said, “has already demonstrated a value and real progress at scale at USDA.”

“I think that that’s really powerful because a lot of the work that we’re doing, we are really changing and transforming things at a scale I’ve never seen before,” Olson said.

She couldn’t talk yet specifically on the metrics that detail that success, but GSA will reveal more soon, she said. “We are planning an announcement very soon in the next month to really showcase and highlight the amazing progress at USDA,” which took bids for the second phase of the program last month. “I know we haven’t talked much about it yet, but we just wanted to be cautious and wait and really see the data and have a really solid story to tell about what we’ve been able to change there and modernize, and how that’s going to impact the service delivery for USDA.”

Around the same time, GSA should announce the next agency at which it will launch CoEs. That will be a critical test for the Centers of Excellence program — USDA will eventually be left to continue its modernization progress on its own and the TTS team will work to replicate that progress at the next agency.

“I think that as we move from agency to agency, it is very important to capture what are we learning, what are the best practices, ensuring that what we’re learning at USDA transfers to agency two and agency three,” Olson said. “And we do have a process in place on how we are capturing those things and actually moving into agency two, we have some things that we will be talking about that we will be incorporating into our strategy at agency two that has just incredible insights that we’ve learned from USDA that we know that will apply really well to agency two.”

Olson’s past with GSA, advice from Collins Smee

Unlike her two predecessors when they took over TTS — Collins Smee and, before her, Rob Cook, both of whom spent only about a year in the role — Olson has a long history with GSA, most recently serving as chief of staff for TTS.

She has about eight years of experience serving the agency in various digital-focused capacities, including directing GSA’s innovation portfolio. She joined GSA in 2010, “and really from the beginning I had to quickly learn how to get a lot done with less in a super fast-changing environment,” Olson said.

“We had very limited resources, very limited budget, a small staff and I had to learn how to get things done pretty quickly and pretty effectively,” she continued. “I learned how to work kind of across government to build sort of these coalitions of the willing and across GSA to put together these cross-functional teams to get things done.”

Olson also placed emphasis on building strategic alliances and relationships across government “to help reach influencers and help bring people to decisions.” Two key skills she said she’s picked up in her time at GSA are diplomacy and consensus building, and she thinks they will be critical during her leadership of TTS, particularly as the organization continues to build itself as a model of “the change that we wish to see in government.”

Though Collins Smee led TTS for less than a calendar year, as she departed, she served as a well of experience and expressed great confidence in Olson’s ability to continue the organization’s progress, Olson said.

“She said, ‘I have no doubt that you will keep the momentum and pace going,’ although it’s hard to keep up with her,” Olson said. “But I am committed to seeing that through. And she said, ‘Just really continue to trust the TTS team. They are talented, intelligent, passionate. They truly care about the mission. We’re all here to make a difference, and they trust you.'”

Where Collins Smee set the framework and capacity to grow, Olson wants to continue that progress with a solid commitment to building a body of evidence that justifies TTS’s value as a mission partner to agencies across government.

“The past year, I’ve seen incredible progress in work that I never even thought was possible,” Olson said. “So I think as an organization we just need to build on the current momentum and position ourselves to scale at a sustainable pace. I think that’s being realistic. And on the other side of that, I feel very strongly that we need to have metrics that demonstrate the value of our work as well as the business volume to justify our growth. So I think it’s just a very measured approach moving forward for the organization.”

Alignment and talent

The mission for TTS, Olson said, “remains the same as it has for the last couple of years, which is really to help agencies build, buy and share technology that allows them to better serve the public. So simply put, today I feel like we are better positioned and diversified in the services and solutions that we can bring to agencies.”

But a critical component of being successful in that mission will be aligning all of the teams within TTS — like 18F, the Office of Products and Programs, and the Presidential Innovation Fellows — around that central goal, she explained.

“They’re part of the TTS family and I think my focus is really making sure that our newer efforts are really integrated with our existing efforts and as we move in, for example, to the next CoE agency, having 18F and having some of the products and programs from OPP and having the PIFs as part of our strategy moving in to the next agency for CoEs, which I think is an incredible kind of coming together of all of our capability and expertise,” Olson said.

In total, TTS has something like 250 members, “with a capacity for more,” Olson said, stressing her commitment to continue to recruit more world-class talent. (This is TTS’s recruitment website for those interested in joining.)

“Government is hard, technology is hard,” she said. “The work we do, there’s nothing easy about it — the staff that we are trying to recruit, the expertise that we want here, the culture that we want here. That in itself is challenging to build and I’m always focused on making sure that the staff have what they need to do great work, that they feel valued and that they feel like they have the opportunity to learn and grow.”

New NIH challenge targets apps for improved Alzheimer’s care

The National Institute on Aging thinks software can improve care for people with Alzheimer’s and dementia.

The agency, part of the National Institutes of Health, has launched a challenge aimed at finding such technologies — applications to improve care coordination and fulfill the unmet needs of patients, caregivers, hospitals and more. A wide range of applications could fit into the challenge: NIH, for example, welcomes solutions targeted not only at “consumers” (defined as persons with dementia or their caregivers), but also at “healthcare providers, healthcare service organizations, and/or health systems, and/or community, local, or state governments.”

The challenge listing on the federal crowdsourcing platform Challenge.gov gives some examples of applications that would “fulfill the purpose of the Challenge,” including software to aid communication between doctors and patients, an application to connect patients to existing community resources and more.

Because of the broad mandate of the challenge, NIH encourages collaboration between doctors, health care systems, tech companies, insurance providers and more. There’s a total prize pot of $400,000 on the line for winning solutions.

While the challenge was announced on Monday, it doesn’t open for submission of a working product demonstration until Oct. 1. The challenge will run through June 2019, after which all submissions will be judged by a panel of federal employees on the basis of value, potential impact, creativity, usability and functionality.

FDA awards $225M IT contract to track drug performance

The Food and Drug Administration awarded contracts worth up to $225 million combined to three companies Monday to help develop an IT system that will track and analyze the performance of drugs, vaccines and other pharmaceuticals on the market.

Acumen, LLC of Burlingame, California; Dovel Technologies, LLC of McLean, Virginia; and IQVIA Government Solutions, Inc., of Fairfax, Virginia each secured $75 million indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts to provide data, tools and infrastructure solutions to the agency for its Biologics Effectiveness and Safety (BEST) Initiative.

The initiative, started by the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in 2017, aims to expand the data and infrastructure capabilities to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of post-market biological products, specifically “vaccines, blood and blood products, tissues and advanced therapeutics.”

The contractors will be tasked with helping build an infrastructure able to “to provide data sources and the capability and capacity to run queries and observational studies on the data sources for CBER-regulated biologic products” as well as a network to analyze large-scale health care data, like administrative, claims and electronic health record data.

The BEST initiative will also look to leverage semi-automated processes to streamline the review of medical charts for better analysis.

The move comes as initial one-year contracts— which set up pilots to test artificial intelligence and machine learning to track adverse event data in addition to using EHR and other data sources for regulatory studies — are set to expire this year.

The new contracts will feature a five-year ordering period.

Gov Actually Episode 27: Inside the Senate confirmation process

The hyperpolitical Senate confirmation hearing of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to join the Supreme Court dominated the news cycle last week.

Fittingly, Gov Actually hosts Dan Tangherlini and Danny Werfel have both successfully navigated through the Senate confirmation process. In the latest episode, Dan and Danny take you behind the scenes to explore the confirmation process, describing their personal experiences — a  “tremendous honor, pleasure and, to some extent, pain” — and giving tips on what nominees should expect.

They also speak with special guest Sarah Baker, who formerly served as a special assistant and associate counsel to President Barack Obama, specializing in White House personnel vetting. Baker now serves as executive director of We the Action. She gives an inside look into the extensive vetting process the White House puts personnel through prior to appointing or nominating them.

Catch all of the Gov Actually episodes on iTunes and SoundCloud.

Let us know what you think in the comments on iTunes.

DARPA announces $2 billion in funding for ‘AI Next’ campaign

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency says it plans to spend more than $2 billion on research into so-called “third wave” artificial intelligence capacities over the next few years.

The initiative — announced Friday at the D60 event — is called “AI Next,” and it’s concerned with moving AI beyond the mode where it needs lots of high-quality training data in myriad situations to develop an algorithm. The goal is to get the technology to a place where machines adapt to changing situations the way human intelligence does.

“With AI Next, we are making multiple research investments aimed at transforming computers from specialized tools to partners in problem-solving,” DARPA Director Steven Walker said in a statement. “Today, machines lack contextual reasoning capabilities, and their training must cover every eventuality, which is not only costly, but ultimately impossible. We want to explore how machines can acquire human-like communication and reasoning capabilities, with the ability to recognize new situations and environments and adapt to them.”

As part of AI Next, DARPA intends to issue “multiple” broad agency announcements over the next year. Priority areas to explore, the agency says, include automating DoD business tasks like security clearance vetting, increasing the security of machine learning tech, and more. The initiative also includes further investment in existing programs.

AI Next will leverage the new Artificial Intelligence Exploration (AIE) program that DARPA launched in July, too — a fast-acting funding program through which researchers have 18 months to establish the viability of an AI theory.

AI is not a new research area for DARPA. The defense agency has around 20 ongoing AI research projects, including those that hope to be able to catch so-called “deepfakes” and initiatives around “explainable AI” — the idea that as artificial intelligence takes over more roles, it will need to be able to explain how the algorithm reached the conclusion that it did.

Despite all that interest and progress, however, the development of AI in a military context has been controversial lately. In June, after internal employee petitions and resignations, Google announced that it will end its partnership with the central Pentagon AI initiative known as Project Maven when its current contract expires in 2019.

Perhaps owing to this fallout, Pentagon’s recently established Joint AI Center (JAIC) has expressed interest in establishing some kind of ethics guide — a set of “AI principles for defense,” as DIU’s head of machine learning Brendan McCord put it.

DOT grateful for extra hands that bug bounty program provided, CIO says

Federal agencies are doing all they can to boost their cybersecurity resources, from reskilling employees to incorporating artificial intelligence into their networks. But those strategies — whether they involve developing new specialties or using technology to make a smaller workforce more efficient — have their limitations.

One way to expand the circle cost-effectively is to bring in the public, specifically through bug bounty programs, as the military has done with Hack the Pentagon. CIOs in civilian agencies have taken notice and started their own programs, said Department of Transportation CIO Vicki Hildebrand Thursday

“We, like other agencies, would like to have more resources focused on this within the agency,” she said at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit. “Without that ability, what we’ve done is reached out to crowdsourcing capabilities like Synack to help us what I’m calling ‘cleanse’ our environment.”

Speaking on a panel about innovation, Hildebrand said that utilizing the company and its base of freelance white-hat hackers to test vulnerabilities in its network and see how fixes could be applied. A recent program showed that technology that seemed “rock solid” actually wasn’t, she said.

The bug bounty industry has grown in popularity since Hack the Pentagon started in 2016, with federal agencies paying civilian hackers tens of thousands of dollars in prizes to uncover vulnerabilities and prescribe potential fixes. The Department of Defense launched its sixth bug bounty program last month with its Hack the Marine Corps exercise, which Thomas Michelli, the DoD’s acting deputy CIO for cybersecurity, said had caught 6,000 vulnerabilities in the service’s public-facing websites.

But Jon Bottarini, a technical program manager at HackerOne, said the focus of these government bug bounty programs is often not to discover new vulnerabilities, but to find ways to patch known holes for agencies who don’t have the resources to do it internally.

“[These issues] could be picked up by a scanner,” he said. “But the ability to take that vulnerability information and transform it into a fix can be really difficult if you have different skillsets or a lack of skillsets, which is really being emphasized by the talent shortage in cybersecurity today.

“One of the main reasons that I think the Department of Defense sided with this model of crowdsourced security is that I think they are trying to leverage the skills and the talents of not just their internal teams, but trying to source the talents of different users around the world who may have some deeper insights into not only the applications, but also the best way to go about fixing them too.”

And while the foundations of ongoing initiatives like IT modernization and new hiring authorities are being laid to provide agencies with long-term strategies for securing their networks, leaders like Hildebrand want to move fast now with methods like crowdsourcing.

“It goes back to being proactive. I don’t want to wait for a bad actor to tell me I’ve got a vulnerability,” she said. “We’ve got to get ahead of this curve.”

OSTP director nominee sails through Senate Commerce

The nomination of Kelvin K. Droegemeier, President Donald Trump’s pick to serve as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, is ready for a Senate floor vote.

The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation committee voted unanimously this week to approve Droegemeier, who is largely reported to have bipartisan support. The job has been open since the start of Trump’s presidency.

Trump nominated Droegemeier, a weather prediction expert from the University of Oklahoma, to fill the long-empty role on July 31. During his Aug. 23 confirmation hearing, he largely sidestepped questions about climate change but expressed his interest in federal support for early stage research and development.

Deputy CTO Michael Kratsios has been leading the office on an interim basis.

Droegemeier, who has now stepped down from his role at the university, served on the National Science Board under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. He also cofounded the National Science Foundation’s Science and Technology Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms in 1989, going on to lead that organization and establish himself as an expert in the weather prediction field.

EIS telecom contract can help DHS modernize IT overall, CIO says

John Zangardi wants to change the way the Department of Homeland Security approaches its technology culture, and he thinks leveraging a $50 billion telecommunications contract might be a good place to start.

The DHS CIO said Thursday that he wants to use the Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions contract as a vehicle to help overhaul the agency’s aging IT infrastructure and has established an EIS program office to oversee the transformation.

“Old IT, older operating systems will kill you. It makes you vulnerable and they’re everywhere,” he said, speaking at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit. “As we move out into the future with [Internet of Things devices], it’s going to be greater in an even greater capacity.”

Because DHS oversees 22 component agencies, Zangardi said the tendency has been for those agencies to procure unique systems and software aligned to their missions, but potentially expanding the cyberattack surface of the enterprise. That’s where EIS comes in.

The General Services Administration awarded the contract to 10 vendors last fall, giving agencies until a 2020 deadline to implement the new vehicle and acquire updated telecommunications technology designed to shrink the attack surface with a small measure of standardization.

Zangardi said EIS opens the door for DHS to modernize its IT systems while providing somewhat of a baseline for the technology it will adopt. But for implementation to be successful, he said that the component agencies have to be in on the technology conversation.

“We are going to leverage the GSA vehicle EIS to award in the second or third quarter of 2019,” he said. “The objective here is to modernize through that vehicle and get to a better network for voice and data. We have to change the infrastructure we’re on, it is old. We have to do it in a way that’s inclusive of the whole department.”

Zangardi added that he is working with the DHS Deputy’s Management Action Group — which is composed of acting deputy secretary Claire Grady and the deputies of the component agencies — on implementation plans and there is funding in the fiscal 2020 agency budget to instigate modernization efforts using EIS.

Aiding those efforts is an EIS PMO that Zangardi has established inside the CIO’s office and is currently staffing to shepherd the DHS enterprise through implementation.

“This organization is going to work across DHS to build out our requirements,” he said. “It’s going to lead the charge to get the ethernet, it’s going to work on the charge to get me better connectivity and speed, it’s going to modernize my network to get me software-defined networking, we’re going to look at virtualizing endpoints, improving network resilience and trying to lower costs.”

The aim is to start building DHS’s modern network from the ground up when the EIS contract comes online in 2020, Zangardi said.

“We are really going to try and make this network state of the art and world class,” he said.