Goals are clear for ‘second epoch’ of ICITE, intel community CIO says

In 2019, intelligence community CIO John Sherman is committed to expanding and evolving the IC’s IT Environment as it moves deeper into what he calls the “second epoch” of ICITE.

“We’re not in a place right now to pursue routine, peacetime approaches,” Sherman said Thursday at AFCEA’s IC IT Day. “Our adversaries are moving out quickly in many areas such as cyber, artificial intelligence and machine learning, information and asymmetric warfare, and not to mention other capabilities, such as conventional arms and space.”

For the past six years, Sherman said, the IC CIO’s role has been about establishing ICITE — the centralized, cloud-based strategy for intelligence sharing among the 17 intelligence agencies. He called it a “huge cultural shift.” But in the second epoch, which he introduced last year, Sherman will expand upon that foundation in lockstep with Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats’ recent National Intelligence Strategy, particularly the goals of driving intelligence integration and innovation.

“These goals are at the very core of what we’re trying to do in the IC [information environment] in terms of reference architectures, securing our systems and what we’re trying to achieve with ICITE writ large,” he said.

The reference architecture piece is key to ensuring interoperability among intelligence agencies while freeing them up to adopt tools and technologies that are right for them.

“This means that we must to the extent possible ensure flexibility to leverage a range of solutions to include proprietary commercial offerings as well as open source code, tools, and applications to address our mission needs,” Sherman said. “Just as the Department of Defense needs its weapons systems to be able to interoperate between ground, air, sea and space domains, our IC technologies need to be able to work together as well.”

With reference architectures, he said, “we can ensure elements have standards to which their solutions must apply. We’re not seeking a one-size-fits-all set of solutions but we must be able to collaborate at the speed of mission and without overly customized approaches. There must be a balance with a solid focus on being able to keep the IC operating information without seams, duplication of effort or stovepipes, and with approached that scale to the maximum extent possible.” The IC is also pushing interoperability with other partners, like DOD, the Department of Homeland Security and international allies, particularly Five Eyes nations — Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

Along with that, he explained, comes the natural evolution of adapting ICITE, which originally handled Top Secret information only, to integrate less-sensitive data.

“While we started ICITE on the Top Secret side, we’ve expanded recently to the Secret fabric and we are working to integrate and architect the unclassified and Five Eyes levels,” Sherman said. “We had to start somewhere, on Top Secret, but realized we must strengthen all these domains while likewise ensuring more robust edge capabilities.”

How to run an agency Opportunity Project sprint

When it comes to running an Opportunity Project sprint at a federal agency, the best advice Kristen Honey can give is to craft a really precise, difficult question, and then get out of the way and let your collaborators take over.

“They will surprise you,” Honey said.

Honey, an innovator in residence at the Office of the CTO at the Department of Health and Human Services, is fresh off “TOP Health,” a fourteen-week pilot sprint modeled after The Opportunity Project (TOP) at the Census Bureau and run by HHS with help from the Presidential Innovation Fellows program. TOP Health began in October 2018 and wrapped up in January — because of the partial government shutdown, the initiative’s showcase and demo day were postponed until this week.

TOP Health focused on two big and thorny questions: How can emerging technologies like artificial intelligence help match patients to experimental therapies, and how can digital tools and data be used for the prevention of Lyme disease?

While the Census Bureau has run a number of TOP sprints since it took over the program, which began at the White House under President Obama, TOP Health was something different. The experiment: Can another agency organize a TOP sprint around its own data and problem sets? Is the methodology mature enough?

Well, yes. But the three-month-long pilot wasn’t without its challenges. For example, there isn’t yet a formal how-to playbook for TOP. So while HHS had the example of sprints run by Census, it didn’t have any ready-made materials that would have made organizing the initiative a little easier. This is something Honey hopes will come out of the HHS experiment, a set of “TOP in a box” materials that other agencies can draw on moving forward.

But despite organizational challenges, there are big benefits to running a project like this that make wading through the unknown worth it, Honey said.

Above and beyond the products and tools created, which are owned by the industry collaborators, getting feedback on open data, from the people and organizations that use it, is really valuable for agencies.

“The federal government has unlocked a lot of data,” Honey said. “But they range all over the board on discovery, and how accessible they are.” The feedback loop between federal data stewards on the one hand and industry, nonprofit or academic collaborators on the other allows agencies to see the actionable insights that can come from the data.

“And really that’s why we’re unlocking all this data,” Honey said. “It’s not just to add more numbers, to get a higher number on data.gov. You actually want this data unlocked for a purpose.”

All in all, while the future of similar agency-specific TOP sprints remains to be seen, Honey and team are celebrating a successful pilot edition. “The outcome exceeded our expectations,” she said.

RPA is the new ‘it’ technology — so, when will it get the spotlight?

When trying to forecast how automation will reshape the future of work, Mike Wetklow sees one technology as emblematic of the coming age: the ATM.

After the first operational ATM appeared in the United Kingdom in 1967,  the new technology reduced the number of teller positions needed but afforded banks the ability to sell more banking products, Wetklow said Thursday at the Association of Government Accountants’ National Leadership Training conference.

Wetklow, the deputy chief financial officer at the National Science Foundation, said the emergence of solutions like robotic process automation harken back to those times and will both test and reward federal leaders.

“I think we have pretty significant leadership challenge and opportunity in front of us,” he said. “I think the issue today is these technologies are coming at us more agile and quicker. It’s not like we are going to take 10 years to build a system. The robots are here and now.”

Speculation has been abound for much of the past year about how automation will impact the federal workforce. While the executive branch chugs toward modernizing its IT infrastructure, RPA has emerged as a gateway technology to streamline workloads with an eye towards higher quality work for federal employees.

How to measure RPA’s growth depends on which agency you talk to, as some are just starting to dip their toes in the water. NSF stood up three RPA bots last year and is now working with CIO Dorothy Aronson to scale up RPA implementations throughout the agency, Wetklow said.

He added that automation is seen as the opening adoption of the agency’s broader emerging tech goals.

“Now we are starting to move into thinking about more advanced things like [artificial intelligence],” he said.

RPA program manager Ed Burrows has helped the General Services Administration stand up 12 bots over the past year and has designs to double that number by the end of September. He said the agency wants to scale up more and perhaps eventually combine the benefits of RPA with AI. But that goal is still a long way off, he said.

“We’re not there yet,” Burrows said. “We have so much to do to continue to reap the benefits of RPA.”

Right now, Burrows said GSA is targeting the tasks that RPA could take over: rules-based processes that are repetitive and encompass hundreds of hours a month.

But there’s another element to consider as well. “The key characteristic is that you have large groups of people doing them all in the same way,” he said, noting that processes like data entry are excellent candidates for RPA.

What that could lead the federal government to is a model that’s recently been attractive to agency leaders looking to streamline IT modernization: shared services for RPA.

“I think there’s a potential there,” Burrows said. “The idea being that you could help agencies so they all don’t have to figure it out on their own, but I think there’s a step before that that we still need to take and we’re ready to take.”

That step, he said, is information sharing on the challenges and best practices that leaders have faced in implementing RPA to understand the full range of its possibilities.

“I think if we have people in a group, looking at that in detail, it will be beneficial for everyone,” Burrows said. “I think that’s the next step, the community of practice.”

Military is pursuing Silicon Valley tech in a ‘very thoughtful’ way, White House’s Kratsios says

Tech workers may be increasingly speaking out against building advanced technologies for the military, but Trump administration officials say they want to keep the dialogue open with the skeptics.

“I think it’s absolutely critical that we equip our warfighter with the greatest technology known to man,” Michael Kratsios, the deputy CTO at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said during an event Thursday when asked about the employee protests that have featured at Google and, more recently, Microsoft. “And we’re lucky enough in this country to have the companies that are actually developing those technologies.”

But Kratsios admitted that there are some “public discussions” that need to happen.

“We’re working very hard to really continue the dialogue to get people to understand that we are pursuing these technologies in a very thoughtful way,” he said.

The drama began over the summer, when employee protests led Google to announce it won’t renew a contract building artificial intelligence systems for a Department of Defense initiative known as Project Maven. Thousands of employees reportedly signed a letter coming out against the contract. “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” the letter reads. “Building this technology to assist the US Government in military surveillance — and potentially lethal outcomes — is not acceptable.”

More recently, and in a similar vein, a group of Microsoft employees wrote a letter protesting a contract under which Microsoft is developing a version of its HoloLens augmented reality headset for the military. “We are alarmed that Microsoft is working to provide weapons technology to the U.S. Military, helping one country’s government ‘increase lethality’ using tools we built,” the letter reads. “We did not sign up to develop weapons, and we demand a say in how our work is used.”

So far, over 250 employees have signed that letter.

In these missives, the DOD’s mission to defend the U.S. including through lethal means seems fundamentally at odds with the professed values of these tech employees. But Kratsios still hopes the two sides can talk it out and come to an understanding.

The DOD always has, and always will, pursue defense technology in a “thoughtful” manner, he said. “Being able to have these kind of public discussions … is just the beginning.”

Special Operations Command is calling all creative technology futurists

What does the changing world of technology mean for the military’s elite units? The United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) wants your best guesses as to what the tech world will look like in 2029.

“What new or evolved technology will have the greatest impact, either as a challenge or as an opportunity, for [Special Operations Forces] in 2029?” An essay prompt for a Special Operations Command ideation challenge reads. “We want to know how you see the world in 2029 and the critical impacts it might pose for SOF.”

SOCOM wants a three to five pages on the topic. But unlike most school essay contests, this one comes with the promise of a cash prize. Writers can detail the evolution of an existing technology, or talk about how a yet-to-be-created one will rock the world, but the essay should be full of original ideas. “You can use others as references, but the bulk should be your own thoughts,” the challenge description reads.

Essays will be evaluated based on the novelty, impact and feasibility of the technology described. Once the responses have been ranked, the top five to 10 writers will be invited to join an “Innovation Foundry” design thinking event at the Capital Factory in Austin, during which participants will work with SOF Operators to “develop potential technological concepts to face a SOF SR mission, based off a fictional Future Operating Environment.”

Top essay writers are eligible for a prize of $1,000 — event participants will get $1,500 more. Essays are due March 3.

The Army Futures Command recently opened a Center for Defense Innovation at the Capital Factory in Austin — a new space for “collaboration and serendipity” between the Army, the Air Force’s AFWERX, the Defense Innovation Unit, The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and a team of Booz Allen Hamilton contractors.

DOD needs to staff up to hire Cyber Excepted Service personnel, officials say

The Department of Defense finally has the plan and the authority to more quickly hire cyberwarriors — now it just lacks a dedicated staff big enough to recruit and bring thousands of information security specialists onboard across the military, Pentagon leaders said Tuesday.

Top defense IT officials detailed progress around the rollout of the Cyber Excepted Service personnel system, based on an authority Congress granted the Pentagon in 2016 to fast track the hiring of civilian cybersecurity specialists. While the department has moved on to the second phase of its CES plan, resources are lacking to recruit new talent at the scale the military services require, they said.

“The resources in the building are lacking for us, both internally and then at the service level, to make sure we can handle that workload we are addressing,” Brig. Gen. Dennis Crall, deputy principal cyber adviser for DOD, told members of the House Armed Service Committee.

Currently, there’s a staff of about five dedicated to the management of the CES process. But Crall said he’s developing a request to bring on about five or six more so DOD can hire cybersecurity specialists at a greater scale across the department, alluding to “thousands that need to be brought in and the training that’s required.”

“We have identified inside the building, and I have a request that we’re putting together right now that will be making its rounds to Mr. [Dana] Deasy here shortly that asks for some more resourcing inside the building to get after unfolding this a bit faster,” he said. “We could do a bit better inside the building to get after it, and I’m articulating what those specific needs are.”

Lawmakers were worried that despite giving DOD this authority, the department has only used it to hire cyber professionals for the U.S. Cyber Command, the Joint Forces HQ-DOD Information Networks and within the DOD CIO’s Office. That, however, was by design for a slower roll out during the first phase, Crall said.

Phase one was “modest by design … to make sure we knew what we were doing,” he said. “Were we trained properly, could we track those individuals properly?” In the ongoing phase two, which is focused on hiring for the Defense Information Systems Agency and the military services, activity will be “exponentially higher in number.” And that’s why the Pentagon needs more staff, “both internally and then at the service level, to make sure we can handle that workload we are addressing,” Crall said.

The Pentagon needs people “to dedicate the right number and the right mix to get after this at scale, and that scale has to change for us to meet pace,” he said.

Deasy, the department’s CIO, acknowledged that it takes a specialized staff to hire for the CES.

“This isn’t a case of the volume of people we need inside my respective organization or working on Gen. Crall’s cross-functional team,” he said. “This is about competencies that need to exist in them. This is a new way of doing business. And more importantly, the [personnel and readiness] organization in the respective military services need to train up at a faster rate the people that they need to bring on board to actually accelerate the Cyber Excepted Service.”

The hard part isn’t necessarily keeping people excited about mission once they arrive at the Pentagon, Deasy said — “but it’s how do we create a better avenue of awareness” for opportunities.

The Defense Digital Service is trying to tackle the issue as well. It recently issued a request for information looking to create a “Civilian Hiring as a Service Pilot Program.” The idea is that DDS would bring in a support service from industry to assist “with recruiting technical talent from industry and federal/state/local government into the Department of Defense.”

Crall agreed that the DOD and military services struggle to understand the market for talent.

“In many cases, we think we know where we should be recruiting, and we may not be recruiting to the level we should,” he said. “So understanding the type of applicant we’re looking for and the needs of those applicants, we need to bolster our understanding a little bit better.”

During Tuesday’s hearing, Deasy also discussed the department’s highly contentious Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract and how protests of it are hurting DOD’s vision for cloud across the military.

For government to capitalize on its data, officials say it should be user-friendly

Recent legislation and the priorities of the President’s Management Agenda have strengthened the government’s data transparency, but officials said Wednesday that capitalizing on it will require agencies to make it all about the user.

Chris Mihm, managing director for strategic issues for the Government Accountability Office, said that laws like the DATA Act and the recently passed Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act have made the U.S. a “global leader” in terms of data transparency, but added that those gains are lost if the citizenry is unable to utilize it.

“Fundamentally, the single most important thing for data quality is to keep in mind the end-user,” he said at the Association of Government Accountants’ National Leadership Training. “Keep in mind that the citizens have a citizen-centric perspective on how they would use the data and who’s going to be using that data.”

While the government has been pursuing standardized datasets to make federal spending more public through the 2014 DATA Act and to compel agencies to provide data-backed policy decisions through the recently passed Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, Mihm said that the real data quality progress will be made by designing a system that will allow citizens to collate and crunch various datasets together for new innovations.

“The history of any of these websites that have ever been put up is that you can’t predict how people are going to use the data,” he said. “Look at data.gov. It’s just a couple-hundred data sites out there, and it’s just amazing what people are doing,” he said. “They are pulling [the data] down and they are doing their own apps on this in very creative and innovative ways, and we can’t [predict] how they are going to use it.”

The Trump administration has sought to capitalize on the potential innovations that federal data can hold, detailing data quality milestones in its President’s Management Agenda last year. Those milestones include targets to make government more accessible to the public and sharable between agencies.

That, combined with the new evidence-based law, has enabling agencies to better categorize and access their data, said Victoria Collin, chief of Management Controls and Assistance Branch at the Office of Management and Budget.

“I think OMB is really excited about this law, in part because it builds on what has already been laid out in the President’s Management Agenda,” she said. “I think this is going to really help move the ball forward in empowering, nudging, pushing, requiring agencies and all of us to do all of those really hard things that we haven’t been able to get across the finish line.”

But it’s also not without challenges. The deployment of the DATA Act allowed agencies three years to prepare and they still faced difficulties in meeting the law’s requirements.

That’s why, Collin said, for true transparency and innovation to take hold, agencies shouldn’t just make the data available, but also aim for making interoperable and sharable across the federal enterprise to ensure the government, and the public, can make the most informed decisions.

“While all of this data exists, lifting the curtain isn’t really enough by itself,” she said. “We have to look across the silos of that data and find where you have one dataset that means one thing in one context and one place. That may be fine, but when you look at it alongside another dataset, it starts to raise really interesting questions about to what extent we need to standardize this data.”

DHS launches $1.5 million opioid detection challenge

How can the U.S. government stem the flow of illegal opioids coming into, and traveling around, the country via the mail? This, per the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate, is the $1.5 million question.

Together with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) and the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), DHS S&T launched the Opioid Detection Challenge on Wednesday. The goal of the challenge is to combat the ongoing deadly opioid epidemic, a public health crisis that claimed around 50,000 lives in 2017.

The challenge statement seeks “novel, automated, nonintrusive, user-friendly and well-developed” ideas for tools and technologies that can detect opioids in the mail and thus disrupt their flow. The tools can’t penetrate the package in any way, can’t use powders, sprays or liquids, and can’t rely on any information other than what can be seen on the physical package. DHS S&T thinks machine learning and artificial intelligence might be able to play a role.

“This competition is part of the comprehensive government effort to address the opioid crisis that is devastating too many American communities,” DHS Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Under Secretary for Science and Technology William N. Bryan said in a statement announcing the launch of the challenge. “New tools and technologies offer a critical opportunity to more quickly and accurately detect opioids before they enter the United States.”

The challenge will run in two stages: the first, requiring the submission of a plan, and the second, a prototype. Stage one comes with an $800,000 prize pool and will see up to eight finalists. In stage two, organizers expect to award $500,000 to a winner and $250,000 to one runner-up.

Would-be solvers have until April 24 to submit a plan for stage one; the challenge plans to wrap-up entirely by fall 2019.

Air Force’s March pitch day is a bid to ‘move at the speed of relevance’

Bucking the traditional submit-and-review-in-private process, the Air Force is gearing up to award small business grants, on the spot, through a pitch competition early next month.

It’s the Air Force’s latest plan to “move at the speed of relevance” and adopt “modern business practices,” Ryan Helbach, chief intrapreneur at the Air Force Research Laboratory, told FedScoop in an interview. “If we just stand still we’re going to get run over.”

Here’s what relevance looks like: a day-long pitch event during which 59 companies working on 60 solutions in the areas of digital tech, special forces or command, control, communication, intelligence and networks (C3I&N) will deliver pitches to respective Air Force program offices and subject matter experts. If the Air Force likes a pitch, it’ll give the company a one-page contract and make the first payment — selected companies can get up to $158,000 paid out on the spot for a five-month customer discovery sprint.

The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant program, which has been around since the 1980s, allows participating federal agencies to encourage research and development at small businesses by giving money to specific projects. The funding comes as a grant — companies don’t have to give up any equity. SBIR runs in three stages, with increasing amounts of cash on the line at each stage.

But while SBIR sounds like a great deal for startups, the Air Force has had some trouble getting a wide variety of companies to apply. That could be because of cumbersome application requirements — a traditional application for and Air Force SBIR grant includes a 20 page white paper, Helbach said — or because of the lengthy review process. Helbach told FedScoop the white paper evaluation stage traditionally takes around 90 days, and, if the company is successful, the contracting phase can take another 90 days. Getting payment can take even longer.

So with the pitch day, “what we want to highlight is that we can move very quickly,” Helbach said.

The effort is aided by the fact that, from a legal perspective, the SBIR program is “tremendously flexible.” But it did take some cultural shifts to get this initiative off the ground, Helbach admits. Streamlining the contract companies have to sign down to a single page was huge, for example, as was empowering the people who review SBIR applications to make quick judgments.

The pitch day is part of a larger ecosystem of initiatives at the Air Force that aim to make the military institution more startup-friendly. In fact, Helbach says, the idea grew out of the Air Force’s accelerator partnership with TechStars, now in its second year. The creators of that program realized that, for all its value in introducing the selected startups to government, the Air Force still lacked a way to quickly enter contracting relationships with these startups. SBIR pitch day is one attempt to fill this void, and Helbach hinted that there’s more coming.

“This is really just the first step,” Helbach said. “We need to adapt our business practices to the world that’s around us.”

JEDI protests are holding back DOD’s vision for enterprise cloud, CIO Deasy says

As protests of the Department of Defense’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract continue to delay an award, and therefore any work under the acquisition, it could hurt the military’s vision for breaking away from using one-off clouds in favor of a departmentwide approach, CIO Dana Deasy testified Tuesday.

“The biggest thing we’re losing right now is the Department of Defense needs to bring data and integration together,” Deasy said in a House Armed Services subcommittee hearing when asked about the impact of the protests.

“Our enterprise cloud for the first time allows us to establish a common platform where we can bring data together in a common way,” Deasy said. “What will happen is the longer we delay standing up a JEDI capability, the military services are going to need to go solve for mission sets and they’re going to continue to stand up their own individual environments, and I don’t see that as beneficial over the long term to the department.”

Deasy framed those comments in the department’s vision for a “general purpose” enterprisewide cloud in JEDI versus smaller, “fit-for-purpose” clouds for unique capabilities that fall outside of JEDI. This is the language DOD introduced recently in a new cloud strategy.

Once the department has an award made to a cloud contractor and “a direct line of sight as to how soon we’ll be able to stand up a general purpose cloud capability,” the CIO’s office will be able to give the rest of the DOD a 60-day heads-up about “when we’ll actually be able to go live,” Deasy said. After that, the DOD and military services will be able to start “reporting” or lifting-and-shifting existing applications while planning how to stand up new activities in the cloud, he said.

“The fine line we’re walking right now is not to impede the need for mission success where people are standing up in the cloud, but as soon as we can provide clarity to the DOD on when the enterprise cloud will be available, to then redirect those activities onto JEDI,” Deasy said. “The big thing hanging out there right now is until we know what that architecture and that cloud is going to look like, it’s very difficult to start estimation exercises.”

Deasy’s comments come soon after yet another twist in what’s been a drama-filled JEDI acquisition. Last week, the judge presiding over Oracle’s pre-award lawsuit against JEDI granted an unopposed motion from DOD to stay the litigation as the department investigates new information regarding conflicts of interest. A redacted court filing shows that the Pentagon’s probe involves a former DOD employee, Deap Ubhi, who played a role in the development of the JEDI acquisition. Ubhi was an Amazon Web Services employee before joining the Pentagon’s team and then since returned to AWS, claiming to have recused himself from work related to JEDI.

Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., noted that his Intelligence and Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee got that news from press reports rather than hearing it first from DOD.

“It would be an understatement to say that I was frustrated that the subcommittee and our staff had to learn about the development from a presser rather than from department staff,” Langevin told Deasy. “We really do expect and anticipate better communication from the department going forward.”

Langevin was also “frustrated that we haven’t moved it along more quickly,” he said of the contract’s pace of development.