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U.S. Coast Guard has its eye on Pentagon’s JEDI cloud

The U.S. Coast Guard is “closely” watching the Defense Department’s move to adopt commercial cloud, the service’s commandant said Wednesday. But that doesn’t mean he’s ready to rush down the same path just yet.

“We’re watching closely JEDI and what the DOD is doing there,” Adm. Karl Schultz said Wednesday at an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Defense Department, after months of delays and criticism from industry, recently issued the final request for proposals for its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract — a single-award, indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity commercial cloud acquisition worth up to $10 billion for a possible 10 years.

Schultz called where DOD is in its journey toward cloud a “big movement.”

“You sort of say, ‘What is that next big technological advancement that really changes things, that allows you to find efficiencies?’” he said. Similarly, he’s issued a challenge to his senior leadership to come back with an answer to such a question.

And while he didn’t mention any immediate moves toward commercial cloud, he did say there is “absolutely” potential to have a conversation about cloud in the next four years of his tenure.

Right now the Coast Guard is taking a holistic look at its technology environment, and working to get the right staff and governance in place to make changes, Schultz explained.

He noted the Coast Guard’s recent transition to Microsoft Windows 10 was a “pretty stringent requirement.” The work to get there “pressurized the system,” he said, but when the Coast Guard looked at its systems during that transition, it realized it had a “patchwork of applications and things.”

“So we’ve got some opportunities,” Schultz concluded. “I’m challenging my team to say, ‘Hey, come back and tell us where you think that next big muscle movement, that big step is that could really make a difference?’”

IRS CIO improperly delegated key IT spending responsibilities, watchdog says

A Treasury Department watchdog found that the IRS is not complying with key elements of FITARA, the 2014 law that put agency CIOs in charge of IT management and purchasing decisions.

According to a July 27 report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TITGA), the IRS CIO has not been involved in some of the agency’s major IT spending decisions. The CIO was instead delegating responsibilities to subordinates, following IRS rules that predate and conflict with FITARA.

In accordance with FITARA, agency CIOs have to be actively involved in the decision-making and review process for major IT contracts and acquisitions.

TITGA noted that the IRS CIO “does not review the acquisition and contract sections in the business cases” for major investments. Instead, an associate CIO presents information about these business proposals to the CIO annually, according to the report. But TITGA found that these annual presentations are scant in key information that the IRS CIO would need to know to meet FITARA requirements.

“However, these high-level acquisition data do not include vendors’ names, the purpose of the contracts, or contract dollar amounts,” TITGA reported, adding that it doesn’t believe this satisfies the CIO’s duties under FITARA.

In addition, the report said the CIO “broadly delegated” responsibilities for approving major IT acquisitions at the IRS. Instead of the CIO being actively involved in these decisions, the deputy CIOs and associate CIOs have been given the authority. Even some executives who report to those officials have some authority to approve IT purchases. TITGA says this flies in the face of FITARA.

“This delegation of authority as it relates to major information technology acquisitions is contrary to the basic principles of the FITARA,” the report says.

According to TITGA, the IRS’s current procedures for who in the agency has authority to make final decisions about IT spending date back to 2011. The IRS told TITGA that it plans to update the delegation order, according to the report.

In its report, TITGA recommended that the IRS comply with the Treasury Department’s FITARA guidance. That means that the responsibility to review IT acquisition and contract sections in IRS business cases goes to the CIO. The watchdog also recommended that the IRS establish a process for the approval of IT acquisitions that is in line with FITARA. The IRS agreed to the recommendations.

Digitally interactive stamps, coming soon to a post office near you?

The U.S. Postal Service is tossing around ideas to better engage Millennials, including some pretty flashy technology.

Augmented reality postcards and digitally interactive stamps aren’t the norm just yet, but they’re two of the concepts discussed in an online discussion board that the Postal Service’s Inspector General used to glean insights as to what Millennials want. The results of the research are published in a recent report, “Millennials and the Mail.”

Millennials, the report notes, utilize technology for convenience and immediacy. Thus, improving the Postal Service experience, for this group, largely centers around increasing convenience and enabling personalization. It also hinges on making sure Millennials know what’s out there. For example, this age group, defined in the report as adults ages 18 to 34, loved the idea of self-service postal kiosks — something USPS already employs.

Research participants also expressed interest in text or email notifications about package delivery, something that is available if you have a USPS.com account. The IG noted, wryly, that the Postal Service could improve its marketing efforts — “it may be prudent, then, to promote awareness of text tracking to Millennials,” the report states.

As for digital upgrades, Millennials surveyed suggested that USPS could improve its tracking capacity, making it more interactive. “The Domino’s pizza tracker was cited as a compelling way of displaying tracking information,” the IG report states. “Many participants also said it would be convenient to visualize the mail truck on a map, showing them where the mail is in their neighborhood or where their package is in its journey.” The report offers little insight into whether this is something the agency would be interested in pursuing.

Then there are the more future-forward concepts.

“Millennials in the discussion board were amazed by the demonstration of AR technology and speculated about ways technology could create a more personalized experience,” the IG writes. These include ideas like augmented or virtual reality postcards, or digitally interactive stamps.

“[I]f there was a way to make postcards or actual cards have an augmented reality like that I would consider using the USPS much more often,” one online forum participant said. “I would look forward to receiving advertisements in the mail from companies that would use that.”

This isn’t the first time the USPS IG has looked to the future at what emerging technologies could mean for the agency and the service it provides. In October 2017 the office released a paper detailing how autonomous trucks, cars and vans could be used within USPS as such vehicles become widely available.

CIOs are doing their jobs, even when there’s no policy to do so

Despite numerous laws, executive orders and administrative cajoling, federal agencies still haven’t fully defined the authorities of CIOs when it comes to managing their IT enterprise.

As a result, the tech executives are being held accountable for the management and modernization of IT systems, often when they don’t have the workforce or the investment authority to manage them.

A new Government Accountability Office report published Thursday discovered an ocean of inconsistency and major gaps in how the 24 Chief Financial Officer Act agencies have defined the responsibilities of their CIOs in key IT management roles. Despite that, GAO says, “officials from most agencies stated that their CIOs are implementing the responsibilities even when not required in policy.”

“The agencies told us that despite a lack of sufficient policy in the six areas, they said that they were, in fact, implementing those responsibilities,” said Carol Harris, the GAO’s director of information technology and an author of the report. “Even in the absence of policy, they [said] they were still doing it.

The report detailed key CIO responsibilities required by law and compared them to how agencies were implementing them in policy, finding that none of the 24 CFO Act agencies were entirely compatible with federal legislation and guidance.

According to GAO’s research, agencies are best at ensuring their policies empower CIOs on IT leadership and accountability, budgets and information security, but they fall woefully short in strategic planning, investment and workforce planning.

In defining the CIO’s role in directing IT workforce policy — a key component of the President’s Management Agenda — the report found 12 agencies lacked such a policy, while another six agencies only minimally addressed it.

CIOs also said that financial resources, recruiting, and retaining personnel and workforce availability remained significant challenges. Six CIOs told the GAO they didn’t have the budget to staff their offices. At one of those, IT spending has increased by 40 percent while the CIO’s staffing budget has remained the same.

“The workforce is a critical area and that’s just one stunning gap that we are identifying,” said Harris.

In IT strategic planning, 13 agencies had policies that either minimally met or failed to address the responsibilities laid out by federal law, while 10 agencies only partially addressed it. Fourteen agencies partially addressed IT investment policies, while another seven only addressed it minimally.

“Again in the areas of IT workforce, IT strategic planning or investment management, those were areas where the CIOs themselves told us that they felt they were not effectively implementing in those areas,” Harris said.

The majority of CIOs said they felt only somewhat effective in managing their roles in those areas, with six CIOs saying they were “slightly” effective in overseeing IT strategic planning and workforce management.

The report noted that while the Office of Management and Budget’s guidance was a major enabler for success for 16 CIOs, it failed to account for all of the executive’s responsibilities — most notably how agencies were to address requirements laid out in FITARA around IT planning, programming and budgeting decisions.

GAO offered three recommendations to OMB:

GAO officials also offered 24 recommendations for the CFO Act agencies they examined.

GAO officials also noted that after seeing a draft report of its findings, the White House issued its May executive order clarifying the role of CIOs. GAO officials said they would continue to monitor the order’s implementation.

DISA expands availability of its mobile management service

More Defense Department mission partners can now buy unclassified mobile device management services through the Defense Information Systems Agency.

The DISA-managed DOD Mobility Unclassified Capability (DMUC) service, which supports more than 100,000 users today, was previously available only to mission partners if they had purchased the DOD’s Enterprise Email service, according to a Wednesday news release. 

“Mission partners can save time, funding, and resources not having to worry about the development, implementation, operations, and sustainment of the infrastructure because DISA’s DMUC service does it all for them,” Al Smith, program manager for DMUC, said in the release.

The service offers mobile device management and an app store, among other things. Mission partners purchase their own devices and commercial carrier service based on their own requirements. The cost for the service is now $4.31 per device, per month, according to the release, down from $7.54.

DISA is reaching out to partners who have expressed interest in the service in the past and has already briefed certain mission partners about connecting to their specific email environments, Smith said.

“We want to understand their specific needs and help them achieve their missions with DMUC,” he said.

DISA is also mulling changes to its classified capability. This summer DISA issued a request for information searching for existing automated provisioning tools to support devices used in the Department of Defense Mobility Classified Capability (DMCC) program.

Mobility is a key area of DISA’s near-future plans, Director Vice Adm. Nancy Norton said in May at AFCEA’s 2018 Defensive Cyber Operations Symposium in Baltimore.

In a luncheon keynote, Norton highlighted several technology programs DISA has in development to meet the evolving needs of military — not just at home in the U.S. but also in contested environments that lack the traditional technological infrastructure found stateside.

She pointed to providing mobility to service members as one of those key areas, “where we can enable our mission partners to work from anywhere regardless of whether there’s a significant infrastructure in the area or allowing them to operate in very, very new environments and new requirements.”

USDA releases RFQs for Phase II of its IT Modernization Centers of Excellence

The Department of Agriculture, led by a team at the General Services Administration, issued solicitations this week for Phase II of its IT Modernization Centers of Excellence initiative.

In this second phase, USDA plans to award contracts across the same five focus areas as Phase I — IT Infrastructure Optimization, Cloud Adoption, Customer Experience, Data Analytics and Contact Center — and an additional contract for support of its program management office.

In December, with the support of the White House’s Office of American Innovation, USDA kicked off GSA’s COE effort serving as a “lighthouse” for IT modernization at other agencies. The intent of the IT Modernization Centers of Excellence is that bringing in help and expertise from the private sector will jumpstart IT modernization within the federal government — first at USDA, and then replicating that success at other agencies in need of modernization support. It’s n idea the White House, and specifically Chris Liddell as director of strategic initiatives, had been tossing around publicly since last summer.

Whereas the first phase “was a comprehensive Department-wide assessment and planning effort,” according to the new solicitations, the second will be the “implementation/execution phase,” bringing to life the work done in Phase I.

Most of the requests for quotes were posted to GSA’s eBuy website, and therefore inaccessible to the general public. An industry source, however, provided several of the solicitations to FedScoop. GSA did not respond to FedScoop’s request for comment on the procurement prior to publication.

The most robust of the bunch, the solicitation combining the infrastructure optimization and cloud adoption focus areas, aims to develop “multiple pools of support to assist USDA in cloud adoption, infrastructure optimization, data center consolidation, application migration, cloud portfolio management, and DevSecOps support.”

“This structure is designed to compartmentalize the complexity of migrations, and reduce uncertainty for both industry and the government; allowing for rapid adoption of routine or automatic, services — leveraging industry innovation and expertise — as well scaling contracts to support iterative delivery by building in research, discovery, and prototyping as outlined in the Digital Services Playbook,” the RFQ says.

Specifically, there will be four pools focused on application rehosting, replatforming, “DevSecOps Resources to support a future Refactoring” and support of a Cloud Platform Services Organization.

“This acquisition will provide USDA with an enterprise-wide vehicle of expertise and capabilities for modernizing and migrating a portfolio of over 1,000 applications, across ~20 data centers, all by end of Fiscal Year 2019,” it says. The plan, it explains, is to consolidate down to just two enterprise data centers by the close of fiscal 2019.

There are also solicitations for data analytics capacity building, contact center support and development of a “CX Digital Support Service,” which all largely build off the work done in the first phase of the project.

The additional solicitation in support of the CoE program management office looks to turn it into a business modernization office. It will have the objective of bringing the CoEs together, the solicitation says, “by coordinating strategic vision and project delivery, to ensure program and stakeholder coordination, strategic alignment, organizational change management, effective decision making and risk mitigation mechanisms, and ultimately successful CoE deliveries.”

Industry has until Aug. 10 to bid on the solicitations.

While the CoEs address a wide swath of IT modernization at USDA, the White House’s Matt Lira argued in June that what they all have in common is creating a better-functioning government.

“We are ultimately in the business of restoring the public’s faith in these institutions themselves,” Lira said.

To catch up on Phase I of the CoEs, read FedScoop’s exclusive inside walkthrough of that first iteration. 

TTS’s Joanne Collins Smee leaving GSA

After spearheading one of the Trump administration’s signature IT modernization efforts, Joanne Collins Smee will leave the General Services Administration at the end of the month.

GSA officials said Thursday that Collins Smee, who has served as director of the agency’s Technology Transformation Service since December, would return to the private sector but didn’t detail her next move.

Collins-Smee, who joined the federal government in September 2017 after several years at IBM, helped stand up the administration’s IT Modernization Centers of Excellence, which is currently operating within the Department of Agriculture and plans to dispatch teams across the federal government to assist in enterprise technology upgrades.

“I am incredibly thankful for Joanne’s tremendous accomplishments during her time at GSA,” GSA Administrator Emily Murphy said in a statement. “In just one year, Joanne has turned the Centers of Excellence into one of the most highly regarded IT modernization initiatives in the federal government and helped deliver results for USDA and America’s farmers, ranchers and producers.”

Collins Smee was tapped to lead TTS, the GSA’s principal technology acquisition arm, following the departure of founding director Rob Cook in December 2017.

In addition to leading the Centers of Excellence initiative, Collins Smee’s tenure also featured an increased focus on cloud adoption and industry engagement, including GSA’s first governmentwide cloud reverse industry training event in June.

“This RIT is not the end of our collaboration with industry. Rather, it is just one step along the never-ending journey towards establishing an ongoing, generational culture change of adaptation and optimization as part of our modernization efforts,” she wrote in a July 31 blog post. “We expect that we will continue to partner with industry to build a community, educate the federal workforce, and help make the modernization journey a successful one.”

But it was the Centers of Excellence initiative that administration officials cited as the magnum opus of Collins Smee’s tenure at GSA.

“Joanne Collins Smee has helped create the foundation for long-lasting change in the Federal government,” Jared Kushner, assistant to the president and senior adviser, said in a statement. “The Centers of Excellence will deliver benefits to the American people for many years ahead. The Administration continues to prioritize this important work and looks forward to building on the foundation that Joanne helped construct.”

“Joanne has done an outstanding job building the Centers of Excellence,” Chris Liddell, assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff for policy coordination, said in a statement. “She took a concept and made it an operational reality.”

In GSA’s announcement of her pending departure, Collins Smee thanked Murphy, Federal Acquisition Service Commissioner Alan Thomas and her TTS team for their support.

“It has been an honor to serve in government, and I am so pleased at the enormous progress that GSA has made in modernizing government IT in such a short time,” she said.

Senator threatens TMF’s 2019 funding without showing results

The Senate passed appropriations legislation Wednesday that includes $154 billion in discretionary funding across multiple agencies. But not a penny of it would go to the Technology Modernization Fund — at least not yet, if one senator has it his way.

The Interior, Environment, Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act, which passed the Senate 92-6, doesn’t include fiscal 2019 funding for the TMF after Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., cited a lack of information from agencies on why more funding is needed.

“We’ve not seen results from that program yet and we don’t have any data on it,” said Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., chairman of the Financial Services and General Government  Subcommittee. “And I wasn’t going to allocate $210 million to something that we don’t know that it’s working.”

The central fund was created as part of the Modernizing Government Technology Act to provide agencies with a way to apply for seed money to finance large IT modernization projects.

Headed by a seven-member board that includes Federal CIO Suzette Kent, the TMF fund was established with $100 million initial funding passed in March as part of a fiscal 2018 omnibus package. In June, the fund awarded $45 million to the departments of Agriculture, Energy and Housing and Urban Development.

The President’s February budget plan requested $210 million for the fund, but the House version of the appropriations bill trimmed that amount to $150 million when it passed last month.

Lankford said denying appropriations for the fund was part a broader effort to require agency leaders to defend their budget requests in committee hearings.

“We’ll continue to hold hearings and continue to have conversations with agency heads, senior leaders and budget directors about the use of their funds,” he said. “In some cases, we have made cuts already, and there will be others that have the be made in the future.”

The possible omission of fiscal 2019 appropriations places the TMF fund into a bit of a sticky wicket. It leaves only $55 million in fiscal 2018 to help jumpstart modernization efforts across the federal government, a stark figure when compared to the nearly $100 billion agencies spend on IT annually, much of which goes to maintaining legacy systems.

Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan. — a co-sponsor of the MGT Act — touted the TMF as critical to helping safeguard the government’s information networks from cyberattack. But he also called on the Office of Management and Budget and the General Services Administration, which helps administer TMF funds to agencies, to provide Congress with more details about the proposals they award.

“Congress and the federal agencies must work hand in hand to provide the necessary resources to the Technology Modernization Fund, which, used responsibly, is a vital tool for the federal government’s task of keeping our nation’s critical IT infrastructure efficient and secure,” he said.

Moran also said that the agencies are continuing to work with the subcommittee on providing a more transparent view of the investments and their results.

There’s still hope for TMF funding. The bill now moves to conference with House officials, who support funding of the initiative, with the potential that some sort of compromise could be reached, adding money through an amendment to the conference bill.

Accenture will build a new data center for the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is getting a new data center.

The federal services arm of contracting giant Accenture announced Wednesday that it has won a three-year, $27.3 million contract to build a new data center for the world’s largest library. The new data center will be both a combination of a physical data center “geographically removed from the District of Columbia” and other hosting environments like public and private cloud, Accenture told FedScoop.

The move to a new data center will allow the library an opportunity to assess which of the 250 applications currently in its data center can be moved to the cloud, and in what capacity. Accenture will conduct this so-called “application rationalization” process.

“We are transitioning the Library’s data center operations from an aging primary facility on Capitol Hill to a hybrid hosting model, which leverages dedicated space at a state-of-the-art Tier III data center outside of the Washington metropolitan area, along with other Library managed data centers and cloud services,” Bud Barton, the library’s CIO, said in a statement to FedScoop. “This new hosting model will ensure that the Library has a modern, flexible, efficient and stable foundation for its technology needs.”

According to a press release, the new data center will be vendor-agnostic, with Accenture leading the procurement and installation of all necessary hardware and software.

“We recognize this effort is pivotal in achieving the Library’s strategic goal of deploying ‘state-of-the-industry’ technology to expand and speed digital access to its vast collection of books and media,” Elaine Beeman, who leads Accenture Federal Services’ programs supporting federal civilian agencies, said in a statement. “We have assembled the best of Accenture’s technology, data center and cloud professionals to rapidly make this vision a reality.”

The library has struggled with IT management in the past, largely because of a lack of leadership and strategic direction. But library leaders have testified that they are intent on doing better, and are making strides in the right direction.

DHS’s NCCIC operations moved temporarily after storms in Virginia

Several key Department of Homeland Security cybersecurity services were disrupted last week after the Northern Virginia building they’re housed in lost power during bad storms.

As first reported by CyberScoop, DHS’s National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC), the 24/7 hub for monitoring cyberthreats across the government and critical infrastructure, has shifted operations to a backup location in Florida. The Arlington, Va., headquarters of NCCIC lost power last week after heavy rains.

The outage July 26 also took down two other programs under NCCIC’s National Cybersecurity Assessments and Technical Services (NCATS) program — Cyber Hygiene vulnerability scans and the Phishing Campaign Assessment — offline, and they remain down.

The Cyber Hygiene program remotely detects known vulnerabilities on internet-facing services. The Phishing Campaign Assessment program is part of a remote penetration testing service. Both programs are used by hundreds of customers across the country. Thirty-four states have received vulnerability scans through the Cyber Hygiene program, according to a DHS presentation given at the National Association of State Election Directors summer conference.

DHS Assistant Secretary for Cybersecurity and Communications Jeanette Manfra told CyberScoop that the disruption to Cyber Hygiene is temporary, and that election systems will be the first to resume service once the program comes back online. Officials expect scans to resume Aug. 6.

Read more about the disruption on CyberScoop.