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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. 

VA takes first steps to modernize central VA.gov website

The Department of Veterans Affairs is working to become “the first federal agency to deliver a digital experience on par with the private sector” and needs contractor help with a piece of its broad VA Digital Modernization effort.

Specifically, the agency wants to revamp VA.gov as a user-friendly and modern website where veterans can easily find the services they need in a “single customer-focused homepage.” The VA has created a Web Brand Consolidation Working Group to oversee this process, and the group has crafted a two-stage process — build a minimum viable product of the new VA.gov, then stand up a modern content management system (CMS) and migrate to that system. This second part is what the VA wants help with.

According to a recent request for information, the agency intends to use a Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business contractor for the job and is seeking information on the availability of such businesses that will be able to complete the task.

It’s something that agency leadership has been talking about for a while. “I’m hopeful that by this time next year, visiting the VA homepage is going to look a lot more like visiting USAA’s homepage or Bank of America’s, where it’s very customer-focused with clear calls to action that will hopefully expose all the different services that VA offers online,” VA CTO Charles Worthington said in May.

Time is of the essence — according to the statement of objectives, the VA hopes to launch the new VA.gov on Veterans Day 2018. Similarly, the VA launched its user-focused Vets.gov website on Veterans Day 2015. According to the RFI, content from that page will be migrated to this new central website.

Interested companies have until Aug. 3 to respond to this RFI.

The new homepage will be the latest in a string of digital updates at the agency. Other recent accomplishments include redesigning the MyHealth eVet portal, which allows veterans to refill prescriptions and keep track of their appointments, and launching VEText, a text-message-based appointment reminder system that’s helping cut down on missed appointments.

ACT-IAC pens framework to help agencies reform their CX

As the President’s Management Agenda presses federal agencies to refresh their customer experience capabilities, ACT-IAC has crafted a plan on how to deploy human-centered design strategies into those efforts.

The “Customer Experience Playbook” lays out an eight-step strategy for agency leaders looking to recraft their organization’s approach to customer experience (CX), capitalizing not only on the new tools available but also the philosophies that will help drive transformation.

The Trump administration has made CX a key component of its PMA as well as its IT modernization strategy, with White House officials often touting plans to make government services more accessible and user-friendly through technology updates.

But the playbook, authored by ACT-IAC’s CX community of interest group, focuses on the policy and culture challenges that must be navigated as agencies deploy new technologies. Philosophies like human-centered design must be part of the process, the report says.

“Improving the public’s perception of government service is complex and will require that customer experience become a priority and focus within federal agencies,” the report says. “To change this focus will require a better understanding of the discipline of CX, a move toward a more customer-centric culture, workforce and skills, clear governance of the end-to-end customer experience, measures that change employee behavior, greater understanding of customer expectations and systems to integrate customer feedback into systems, to drive improvement.”

The report outlines a framework composed of “plays” agency leaders should undertake to incorporate CX into their organization:

The report details strategies to implement for each play, as well as use-case examples where other agencies have deployed the practices. The goal of the playbook is to provide federal leaders with a flexible framework that can be tailored to multiple organizations, regardless of their size or mission.

“While this playbook is written from an enterprise-wide perspective for external services provided to the public, it can also be applied to improve internal services including acquisition, finance, technology and human resources,” the report states. “These services provided within an agency are also critical components of the CX ecosystem.”

The PMA has tasked the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Office of Management and Budget with its Cross-Agency Priority goal for improving customer experience through digital services.

Trump nominates Droegemeier as long-awaited pick for director of OSTP

Editor’s Note, Aug. 1: This story has been updated to reflect Droegemeier’s official nomination. 

President Donald Trump announced his pick for an official leader of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Kelvin K. Droegemeier, a weather prediction expert from the University of Oklahoma, has been nominated as the new director of the White House science and tech advisory office.

The job wouldn’t be Droegemeier’s first taste of public service. Under President George W. Bush and again under President Barack Obama, Droegemeier served a pair of six-year terms on the National Science Board. 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.

In addition to all this, Droegemeier is, according to his bio, a “national leader” in creating partnerships between government, academia and industry — something the Trump OSTP is quite keen on.

The news of Trump’s choice has been a long time coming. If confirmed, Droegemeier would step in to fill a role that has been formally empty since this administration took office. Michael Kratsios, the office’s deputy CTO, has been the defacto leader for the past 16 months. In that time, the office has focused largely on supporting emerging technologies, like drones and artificial intelligence, often by advocating for less, and less burdensome, regulation.

Last summer, Droegemeier penned an op-ed in support of robust federal research and development funding. “We now risk deeply harming the very thing that has given the United States an enormous national security and economic advantage,” he wrote. “The White House and Congress must continue their long history of bipartisan support for basic and applied research.”

The Senate must confirm Droegemeier’s nomination.

Trump White House releases new R&D priorities list for 2020

The White House released its annual research and development priorities memo Tuesday, indicating to agencies the kind of budgeting it would like to see in fiscal 2020.

“The United States is a nation of thinkers, inventors, and entrepreneurs,” reads the memo, signed by Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney and Office of Science and Technology Policy lead Michael Kratsios. “Empowered by free-market capitalism and driven by bold ideas, Americans created an ecosystem of innovation that is the envy of the world, advancing science and technology and making the Nation prosperous and strong.”

The memo highlights eight central R&D areas: security of the American people; leadership in artificial intelligence, quantum information sciences, and strategic computing; connectivity and autonomy; manufacturing; space exploration and commercialization; energy dominance; medical innovation; and agriculture.

There are some perennial Trump administration tech favorites here — artificial intelligence, of course, for which the White House recently created a special Select Committee, but also drones, 5G wireless and veterans’ health.

There’s broad overlap with the five R&D priorities that the administration highlighted for fiscal 2019 — security, health and energy dominance were all cited in last year’s memo, too.

As is tradition, the memo also goes into R&D priority practices, or the “how” for investing in this research. Here, similarly to last year, the administration urges agencies to collaborate across the government, as well as with industry and academia, and look for opportunities for tech transfer.

“Agency budget proposals should prioritize and highlight lab-to-market initiatives, such as efforts to identify more efficient regulatory and administrative approaches to technology transfer, enhancements to small business innovation programs, entrepreneurial workforce development initiatives, and other programs that improve the transition of federally funded technologies from discovery to practical use,” the memo states.

Streamlining the transfer of federally funded research from the lab to the private sector market is one of the cross-agency priority goals associated with the President’s Management Agenda.

3 tech companies secure a $550M software deal with Navy

A trio of software and technology companies recently inked a $550-million deal with the U.S. Navy to supply cybersecurity solutions.

Herndon, Va.-based software reseller DLT Solutions Inc., McLean, Va.-based EC America — an immixGroup, Inc. subsidiary — and Rockville, Md.-based International Systems Marketing Inc. secured a multiple-award blanket purchase agreement to provide the Department of Defense, U.S. intelligence community and Coast Guard with McAfee cybersecurity products.

The BPA is expected to last five years and will supply defense agencies with McAfee cybersecurity hardware, software and services to cover a range of capabilities. The agreement will include services like “client, data and server protection; data loss prevention; vulnerability management; email gateway security; and network intrusion prevention.”

The BPA was awarded in May through the DPD Enterprise Software Initiative, which provides technology acquisition vehicles across multiple defense and intelligence agencies, as well as some foreign allies.

“DLT is proud to be partnered with both McAfee and the Department of Defense to offer the highest levels of threat visibility and most comprehensive cybersecurity solutions available, which can be acquired simply through this strategic sourcing contract,” DLT President Brian Strosser said in a statement.

The BPA is set to run through May 2023.

Agencies should adopt behavioral analytics tools to fortify their security, expert says

As government agencies continue to modernize their networks, traditional security perimeters are not always enough to stand up to persistent threats from phishing and malware attacks.

Government workers rely more than ever on cloud services, mobile devices and interagency connection points to collaborate on work and access valuable data. However, this results in a wider attack surface that requires a paradigm shift in how IT secures agency networks.

In a new podcast on FedScoop, cybersecurity and infrastructure expert Sean Berg explains that understanding user behavior goes a long way toward defending and monitoring what is happening on the network.

To be able to understand what activity is normal or not normal, an agency must first understand the context of an individual’s activity, says Berg, senior vice president and general manager, global governments and critical infrastructure with Forcepoint — the underwriter of this podcast.

Phishing and malware attacks are not going away, and malicious actors will always seek out ways to socially engineer access to accounts. Berg suggests that behavioral analysis tools will create a more robust security environment because this security posture enters people into the equation.

The goal would be for an agency to draw a baseline of how a user operates on the network and what data they access, then signal an alert if the user’s behavior changes significantly at any time. This concept is similar to how credit card companies look for anomalous behavior on client purchases.

“We need to block things that look really wrong and let go of things that look ok,” says Berg. “But there is this huge chasm in the middle, where if you don’t have the context you can’t understand what’s really going on.”

If agency leaders feel overwhelmed with the volume of threats and alerts, they are not alone. But they can take concrete steps to narrow the risks, beginning with assessing their overall IT environment to identify the most critical operating areas, suggests Berg. Only after this assessment should they “apply the behavioral models to that and connect those to their infrastructures.”

From a cybersecurity standpoint, this will yield better results against a cyberattack than a one-size-fits-all security approach where agencies categorically block certain things from happening.

Most important is that government agencies continue to focus on what is critical to the organization’s environment — people and data. Keeping this in the line of sight will make leaders much better equipped to understand and address cyberattacks.

This podcast was produced by FedScoop and underwritten by Forcepoint.