Veterans Affairs launches wait-time and quality-transparency tool

Veterans seeking medical care will have increased insight into their wait times as well as data on the quality of care at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals, the department announced Wednesday.

The VA launched a web-based access and quality tool as part of its “unprecedented” efforts to boost transparency around its medical care and services, it said in a release. Beyond giving veterans better access to key data, the tool also is aimed at increasing the VA’s accountability.

The Veterans Health Administration’s wait times and quality of care came under fire in 2014 when news outlets reported that dozens of veterans died after alleged delays in receiving care facilities in Phoenix, later leading to a systemwide investigation of practices.

With the web tool, veterans are now able to see average wait times in their local area; feedback other patients left about their experience at local facilities; timeliness of appointments for immediate care; and the quality of care provided at those facilities compared to private-sector hospitals, the VA explained in a release. The department called the tool “the most transparent and easy to understand wait time and quality data website in the health-care industry.”

“Veterans must have access to information that is clear and understandable to make informed decisions about their health care,” VA Secretary David Shulkin said in a statement. “No other health-care system in the country releases this type of information on wait times. This allows Veterans to see how VA is performing.”

According to a VA blog post, “It’s just one way VA is working to restore Veterans’ trust and confidence.”

The department said it will continue to evolve the tool with feedback from veterans, VA employees, veterans service organizations and others.

CenturyLink wins VoIP contract potentially worth $6 million-plus

CenturyLink is set to provide voice-over-internet-protocol services to the General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service, to “help them modernize and transform their legacy voice systems,” a company official said.

Valued at $1.3 million for the first year with four one-year options, the contract could be worth more than $6 million. It was awarded through GSA’s IT Schedule 70, according to the announcement.

“CenturyLink’s VoIP service provides government agencies with an affordable, modern solution that accelerates agencies’ digital transformation, connects them to their stakeholders and maximizes commercial best practices,” said CenturyLink Senior Vice President and General Manager of Federal Solutions Erich Sanchack in a statement.

CenturyLink provides government agencies “managed hosting, cybersecurity, cloud and IT services over its carrier-class network.”

One way to keep government stocked with qualified CIOs: Groom them at OMB first

A group including lawmakers and former government chief information officers said the overall federal CIO — the one stationed in the White House Office of Management and Budget — could be the pivot point for attracting talented people to fill CIO positions at other agencies.

The idea came from a forum, convened in September 2016 by the Government Accountability Office, that was intended to generate ideas that could solve well-known federal IT problems — such as recruiting a talented IT workforce.  A report published Tuesday from the conversation offers some potential approaches for tackling that problem — one of which a GAO official said was really new and different.

A future federal CIO, participants in the forum said, could eventually fill agency CIO roles with people who work first in advisory roles at OMB. The program would “create a pool of highly skilled CIOs by establishing three to five CIO advisory positions working with the Federal CIO at OMB.”

“These advisors would work initially at OMB and then be available when an agency CIO position is vacant,” the report says, adding, “The participants felt that such a strategy would be beneficial because these CIOs would already be known and trusted in OMB.”

Dave Powner, director of IT management issues at GAO, told FedScoop the idea behind the idea is that the candidates “would kind of work there and be vetted by the Executive Office of the President, the White House, and kind of understand more about the macro picture of federal IT, and then be placed in a department or agency.”

“That’s a much different way [from] how it currently works today,” Powner said to FedScoop. “Now clearly there would be some challenges, because that’s not currently how departments go about hiring, but it’s an interesting concept, and it’s a way that actually could attract more qualified people, knowing that hey, I’m going to go work, be associated with the White House for a short period of time, and then placed in a department where there’s a real need.”

How government looks at its IT innovators

The forum participants also discussed the need to better integrate private sector innovation groups into the federal workforce.

“They stated that the U.S. Digital Service and 18F teams are not well integrated with federal IT/CIO organizations, which had created a ‘we versus them’ environment,” the GAO said. “The participants noted the highly qualified staff at U.S. Digital Service and 18F and stated that these centralized pools of private sector talent need to be better integrated with the federal IT workforce.”

Powner said the discussion was not about killing the two groups, or criticizing them, but more about “let’s look at the positives there and how do we build off of that, integrate them in.”

“We had some good folks that came into the government through those two organizations, and there was some good work that was done, and the question becomes you know, how do you better integrate them in?” Powner said.

Participants also discussed better integrating fed IT workers with contractors.

“We really need to look at it as the mix between contractors and federal employees, and what’s the right mix,” Powner said. “So that kind of goes hand-in-hand a little bit with that private sector group coming in and trying to integrate them in a little more strongly.”

IT transformation: Getting the foundation right for better mission outcomes

Information technology is at the core of how commercial enterprises will do business differently over the next 15 years, versus its supporting role in the past 15.

The same is true for enterprise operations at federal agencies. Agencies may be more mission-driven than commercial enterprises that focus on the bottom line; but agencies face the same imperative to transform and modernize their IT operations and infrastructure.

Download the full report.

Though the primary IT decision-maker has generally been the CIO, today’s IT transformation demands the attention and the commitment of the entire C-suite as IT becomes integral to how organizations operate and interact with their customers. To get buy-in from leadership across the board, CIOs and their IT teams have to demonstrate the value of IT modernization and an agile infrastructure—and drive home the idea that without digital transformation, they will be left behind.

Several factors will distinguish the role of enterprise IT and how it will empower digital transformation in government over the next 15 years. Enterprise IT will need to:

• Shift to becoming business-centric vs. IT-centric;
• Provide systems of engagement and insight vs. systems of record;
• Rely more on cloud-native apps than traditional applications;
• Process streams of data and analytics vs. transactional data and reporting; and
• Expand beyond the traditional Internet to include the Internet of Everything.

These shifts reflect more than changes in strategic focus; they represent a fundamental reorientation of enterprise IT toward emerging sources of enterprise value. They also require realigning the role of enterprise IT, from supporting agency operations to serving on the front lines, helping agency leaders meet mission needs faster and more effectively.

There’s no question, however, that budgetary, policy and cultural obstacles continue to hamstring agencies from making the IT investments they’d prefer. Budgetary and regulatory constraints leave agencies with less than 25 percent of their annual IT budgets to dedicate to IT modernization, and that percentage has been declining since 2010, according to a 2016 U.S. Government Accountability Office report.

Many agencies face dual vulnerabilities of sorts; relying on decades-old technology while having to deal with modern threats. Legacy systems were simply not designed to withstand today’s sophisticated cyberattacks.

However, a variety of converging factors are giving agencies unparalleled opportunities to overcome many of the IT challenges they have traditionally faced.

There are multiple ways for agencies to lay the groundwork to move data and applications off their legacy systems onto more modern and efficient IT platforms: The advent of cloud computing and software defined networks; advances in mobile technology and data storage systems; and the widening adoption of open data standards and agile development.

Why IT infrastructure lies at the core of transformation

The importance of IT infrastructure and its role in fostering digital transformation were made clear in a January 2017 report prepared by the Federal CIO Council for the incoming administration.

The CIO Council’s 155-page “State of Federal Information Technology” report offers a detailed look at why improvements in management, procurement and IT development over the last two decades had not gone far enough to modernize their systems, noting:

“Agencies may have modernized the technological components of systems, but rarely did these efforts accompany a larger scale business process re-alignment. This resulted in inefficiencies and an inability for agencies to take full advantage of advancements in technology. By replacing these legacy systems with a modern technological solution and a digital-focused business process, we can harness true transformational change and fully leverage the benefits of these improvements.”

The advent of cloud computing, software-defined systems and other, more agile and cost-effective technologies has fueled all kinds of innovation in the commercial market. However, federal agencies have struggled to take advantage of them, in part because of the complexity and interdependence of their IT systems.

Many agencies “repeatedly cited aging infrastructure as a significant roadblock to innovation,” the CIO Council report concluded, based on interviews with 45 agency CIOs and federal IT leaders.

The size and scope of the issue aren’t insignificant. Annual spending on federal IT Infrastructure currently accounts for 43 percent, or approximately $34.7 billion of the $88.7 billion in total federal IT spending planned for fiscal year 2016, and those costs have been rising steadily, according to government figures.

Download the full report to read seven steps federal CIOs and the CIO Council recommends agencies can take to accelerate IT modernization and agile infrastructure.

Dell EMC continues to help civilian and defense agencies modernize their IT infrastructure and move toward digital transformation. Find out more about other federal Digital Transformation Heroes.

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

Harvard undergraduates launch fellowship to connect students early to federal agencies

Not every tech-savvy student at an elite college is looking for a summer internship in Silicon Valley, and if an opportunity in government is the goal, Neel Mehta says attractive options can be scarce.

That’s why the Harvard junior and two other students from the university teamed up to found the Coding It Forward organization and create the Civic Digital Fellowship — a student-led internship designed to offer an experience in federal agencies comparable to a summer at a private-sector tech company.

The idea has been a hit so far, they say. An application went live Monday evening to work at the U.S. Census Bureau this summer for 10 weeks. Less than 24 hours later, more than 40 applications had already rolled in from 27 different schools across the country.

Mehta, who is studying computer science, was looking himself for a government internship when he realized there was a problem.

“I had just gone through the Silicon Valley recruiting process and it was great, they had a well-oiled machine, they had recruiters everywhere, they had incredible benefits,” Mehta said. “And I wasn’t expecting to get anything like that through civic tech, but just the quality of the internships that were available was nowhere even close.”

He continued: “Most government civic tech internships were just like: install SharePoint on our computers. And I’ve probably seen five, six of those identical job postings.”

In this first round of the fellowship the U.S. Census Bureau will take eight interns. It expects to provide them a stipend of $3,300 as well as housing and travel reimbursements to and from Washington, D.C., according to Coding it Forward. The bureau is looking for data scientists, software engineers, product managers, designers and data journalists. 

There were some good civic tech opportunities at the city level, Mehta said, naming Boston and New York.

“But I wanted something at the federal level, because I think that’s really the cutting edge of government tech, it’s the biggest place to be, the best place to be,” he said. “And there really wasn’t anything.”

Founding the Civic Digital Fellowship

Mehta became passionate about civic tech after spending time at Harvard with Nick Sinai, who had finished a tour of duty as President Barack Obama’s deputy chief technology officer.

But looking for jobs in federal government was frustrating, Mehta said: “I’ve been looking really hard, I’ve been working really hard, I know all of the right people but it just seems like there’s nothing really that good out there.”

Sinai connected the students with Jeff Meisel, chief marketing officer at the Census Bureau, and they learned Meisel had been trying for a couple of years to spin up a program at the bureau, which is part of the Commerce Department. From there, things moved quickly.

“The whole Civic Digital Fellowship has kind of been a pie-in-the-sky dream for us for awhile. And we on started working hard on it, and it really started becoming a reality only about a month, or six weeks ago,” said Harvard freshman Chris Kuang to FedScoop. “So the speed at which we’ve seen Census move has been really amazing.”

Kuang, another founder of Coding it Forward, said they created the organization “to inspire and empower people with technology skills to use them in places that will have a social impact.”

The fellowship is the product of collaboration between that organization, the Harvard Open Data Project, Sinai and agencies such as the Census Bureau, according to its job description.

The big picture

The group plans for the U.S. Census Bureau to be the first of many agencies to join on to the fellowship program.

“Agencies like IRS, VA, CDC and I think State, have been all interested in doing this kind of thing,” Mehta said. “But for this year it seems like the timeline of the budget might not work out for them.” 

There’s potentially no limit to where the program could go, the founders say.

“We want to expand… into ideally a fellowship… where any federal government agency or even any local government agency can, as easy as signing a contract, have access to students who are really interested in the same thing,” said Athena Kan, a sophomore computer science major. 

Kan, another co-founder of Coding it Forward, said students can bring government the most up-to-date know how on certain technologies and programming languages.

Asked about the perception of working in Washington, all three noted the stigma of working in government, versus somewhere like Microsoft or Facebook.

And Mehta noted too that “at schools like Harvard, as you can probably imagine, many top schools around the country, President Trump is not entirely popular.” But he said he thought students would “keep wanting to do it anyway.”

The number of students who signed up for the fellowship’s mailing list or applied, “speaks to how people are passionate about this, and they’re going to want to do good work, no matter who is in the White House,” he said.

On that subject, Kuang said: “People are genuinely interested in working in making this country better, and in making government better. And I think what better place to do that than inside government.”

NASA, AWS to stream 4K HD video from outer space

Prepare to see space like never before: NASA, with the help of Amazon Web Services, will host the first live 4K Ultra HD video stream from outer space, the space agency announced Tuesday.

Hundreds of miles away from earth, NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson will take part in a National Association of Broadcasters Show panel April 26 from the International Space Station, conversing with AWS Elemental CEO and cofounder Sam Blackman in Las Vegas. Video of Whitson will be transmitted at 4K resolution — roughly four-times the resolution of standard 1080p HD devices.

The demonstration is meant to display how NASA scientists will soon be able to share discoveries as they are happening, supported by cloud technology. Of course, to see a 4K stream of the event, viewers need a 4K-ready device.

In this specific showcase, the 4K stream will be encoded with AWS Elemental encoding software on the space station and on the ground at Johnson Space Center in Houston, according to the NAB. AWS acquired Elemental Technologies, a cloud-enabled, software-defined video streaming service in 2015.

“The US space agency is a pioneer in the application of advanced media – including 4K,” a release from the NAB says. “By streaming real-time video that captures images four times the resolution of current HD technology, NASA is enhancing its ability to observe, uncover and adapt new knowledge of orbital and deep space.”

Catch the video at 10:30 a.m. PDT April 26.

OPM rolls out more USAJobs updates

The site designed to help people find government work received another upgrade.

The Office of Personnel Management released Monday a new version of its search function on the USAJobs.gov, seeking to deliver “better and more reliable search results.”

Job seekers can now search for jobs by country, city, state and zip code, and filter results by pay, department, work schedule, security clearance or the amount of travel required. The upgrade also allows for saving searches, and setting up notifications for them.

“In response to our research, we recognized that job seekers were not adequately served by a job board that provided no introduction to Federal hiring or resources to make informed decisions,” said Michelle Earley, USAJOBS program manager, in an emailed statement. “Our work over the last year has centered on transforming USAJOBS into a career portal where applying for a job and tracking the status of your applications is simpler and more intuitive.”

Indeed, OPM delivered in August 2016 perhaps the most sweeping update to the federal employment website since first moving the hiring process online about 20 years ago.

That upgrade sought to give potential applicants more visual and user-friendly paths to explore federal hiring eligibilities. It also set out to dispel myths about federal employment in a revamped help center page — to give applicants a more realistic idea of what it’s like to work in the federal government — and promoted the most critically needed hires in the federal government, which included IT specialists, encouraging visitors to apply for them.

“Leveraging human centered design principles, we conduct usability tests and interviews during our design phase, and after we implement a solution to ensure we are delivering a high value product,” Early said via email Tuesday. “Frequently getting in front of our users has given us the opportunity to hear positive feedback on the changes, along with suggestions for future enhancements.”

Blackboard learning management system now hosted on AWS GovCloud

A learning system used by the Army, Blackboard Learn, is now available on Amazon Web Services GovCloud, Blackboard Inc. announced Monday.

AWS GovCloud met the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program’s high baseline — an approval to handle some of the government’s most sensitive data. Blackboard Learn is a virtual learning solution that “uses extensive collaboration and interactivity to fully engage learners with activities like group projects and discussions, wikis, blogs, and the ability to incorporate a wide range of multimedia content.”

According to the announcement: “Government agencies, the military and state and local governments can now continue to deliver their mission-critical online learning programs within a more secure cloud environment.”

Blackboard Learn has more than 10 years had a “crucial role” in providing soldiers education and training “anytime and anywhere,” said Helen Remily, director and TRADOC capability manager at The Army Distributed Learning Program, in a statement.

“Having the ability to deploy this invaluable capability on the FedRAMP-certified AWS GovCloud (US) gives us the added confidence that our most sensitive data is safe and secure at all times,” Remily said.

While there is an on-premise option, Blackboard has managed and hosted out of its data centers most of its federal and Defense clients, said Alex Kissal, vice president of Blackboard Government Solutions, via email. Now, clients can also choose to access Blackboard Learn on AWS’s infrastructure.

“Having our leading learning management system available on the AWS GovCloud (US) region will further support our customers in building engaging, secure learning environments for training and development,” Kissal said in a statement.

Feds haven’t evaluated if efforts to counter extremism actually work, watchdog says

The federal government has been working to counter violent extremism online and offline, but it has no means of measuring if its overall effort is actually helping, a congressional watchdog says.

And the government task force created in part to evaluate that work hasn’t established how to assess “overall progress,” said the Government Accountability Office in a new report. The government has been working to counter violent extremism (CVE) through a variety of ways, according to the GAO, such as trying to develop relationships with the tech and social media industries.

Auditors checked the status of 44 tasks to address CVE domestically outlined in a 2011 Strategic Implementation Plan. The GAO found the government had implemented nearly half of those activities.

“Although GAO was able to determine the status of the 44 CVE tasks, it was not able to determine if the United States is better off today than it was in 2011 as a result of these tasks,” the auditors note in the report.

“As of December 2016, there had been no comprehensive assessment of the federal government’s CVE efforts’ effectiveness,” the report says, later adding that “according to CVE Task Force officials, they do not believe that assessing the overall effectiveness of the federal CVE effort is their responsibility.”

But the task force is well positioned to do so, the GAO said. The watchdog recommended the Department of Homeland Security secretary and attorney general direct the CVE Task Force to develop a strategy with “measurable outcomes for CVE activities,” and to “establish and implement a process to assess overall progress in CVE, including its effectiveness.”

DHS and the Department of Justice both agreed with the recommendations.

Some activities in the tech space were still very much in progress, according to the report, including “reaching communities in the digital environment.”

“For example, DHS aims to build relationships with the high-tech and social media industry and continues to meet with officials to discuss how to address violent extremism online,” the auditors wrote. “In providing a status update on such activities, DHS recognized this as an area that continues to need attention.”

There is also work being done, still, to make more training available for communities to fight against extremists online, the auditors said.

The report adds that DHS officials “noted making initial progress with YouTube and the Los Angeles Police Department in developing campaigns against violent extremism, but recognized this as an area that continues to need attention.”

One of two tasks that had not yet seen any action was the idea to learn from former violent extremists.

“According to DHS officials, legal issues regarding access to former violent extremists are being explored and DOJ will lead this task moving forward,” the report reads.

NSA cyberdefense chief: ‘I have never been more busy’

This report first appeared on CyberScoop. 

The man responsible for leading the National Security Agency’s defensive mission says his team is fielding more calls than ever from agencies across the government.

Dangerous, highly capable hackers and a desire by agencies to adopt cloud technology have increased the workload for Information Assurance chief Paul Pitelli and his office, which he says is “sort of like the Geek Squad for defense” in government.

Pitelli is a career professional who has served in the NSA for more than 20 years as the secretive spy agency transformed into what it is today — a highly sophisticated technology behemoth with an array of federal responsibilities, including both signals intelligence and protecting sensitive government systems. With the recent retirement of former Information Assurance Directorate head Curtis Dukes, a renown computer scientist and intelligence community icon, Pitelli took on an increased role in an ever important effort to ensure that the Defense Department and broader government aren’t hacked.

“We’ll get a wide range of calls from ‘Hey we’re trying to set up a whole new [information technology] environment’ — and that could be the White House calling,” Pitelli said.

A big focus in recents years for Information Assurance, according to Pitelli, has been helping a variety of different federal agencies establish secure cloud data storage processes.

“I have never been more busy,” Pitelli told CyberScoop in an interview Thursday after he spoke at the McAfee Security Through Innovation Summit. “We are getting calls because they all need help. Everyone wants to take advantage of cloud services, that’s sort of one thing we’re getting called for, but it’s also traditional issues because our nation is being constantly attacked. We’re one of the few agencies that get to see when and how the adversary starts operating.”

Federal lawmakers have increasingly encouraged agencies in recent years to adopt cloud data storage technologies as a way to both save costs and phase out old on-premise servers.

“Because of the economics of cloud services there’s so much incentive [for agencies] to migrate many of their capabilities,” Pitelli said. “A lot of people in government want the NSA’s help.”

Nobody in government wants to be the next to suffer a hack like the 2015 data breach that exposed federal employee information held by the Office of Personnel Management, he said.

“So we’re getting a lot of calls where it’s basically, ‘Hey we want to make this move, but how do we do it well?’” Pitelli said.

Turnover at the White House also adds to the Information Assurance division’s current workload.

“With a change of administration, you know, they typically take a fresh look. And for us that’s an opportunity because it allows us to sometimes make an [IT] environment better,” Pitelli said. “The cyber dimension is adding, on one hand, what you can call issues or events, but I think can be opportunities.”

Historically, Fort Meade’s defensive efforts in cyberspace have been overshadowed by the spy agency’s more offensive-centric, intelligence gathering mission set. This is evident from a labor perspective, given that the NSA’s Signals Intelligence workforce remains much larger than the Information Assurance unit.

An overwhelming majority of budget dollars are allocated to offense rather than defense, former intelligence officials say, and that’s resulted in an agency that is known almost exclusively for digital espionage rather than cyberdefense.

Dukes, former IAD head Debora Plunkett and departing NSA Deputy Director Rick Ledgett recently voiced their concerns that the NSA should be focusing on defense more than it has in the past.

Roughly 90 percent of the U.S. government cybersecurity spending is used to fuel offensive operations, Ledgett told Reuters.

“I absolutely think we should be placing significantly more effort on the defense, particularly in light of where we are with exponential growth in threats and capabilities and intentions,” Plunkett, who oversaw the NSA’s defensive mission from 2010 to 2014, recently told Reuters.

Defense under NSA21

The trio’s comments come amid an expansive reorganization effort by the NSA, instituted by agency Director Michael Rogers, that works to combine what was once called the Information Assurance Directorate and Signals Intelligence Directorate into a single, joint entity.

Although Rogers’ plan, known as NSA21, is intended to streamline operations, it has also spurred new concerns that the spy agency’s defensive mission will receive even less resources in the future.

“When the NSA goes through a change a lot of that discussion goes on because there’s a big difference between offense and defense as far as the budget … and so that was one of the big concerns that some folks vocalized,” said Pitelli, “I see a need, a bigger need for cybersecurity not just at NSA but for everybody.

The dual impact of NSA21’s rollout and Dukes’ recent retirement has caused some confusion in government.

“I know Curt voiced concerns that as we make this move [towards NSA21] there can be this perception that ‘Oh well who do I call?’ And if they don’t know who to call the question is, ‘Well where did it go?’ Curt was really one of the great, visible icons of Information Assurance and he retired and so there is that time right now where we are waiting to find out whose going to be given the mantle next,” Pitelli said.

Pitelli declined to specifically discuss the NSA’s budget but said he would like to see Congress broadly allocate greater resources for cybersecurity writ large, across the entire government.

“I will go so far as to say I would hope that the government — not just at NSA, but the government — really tries to allocate additional funds for the cybersecurity information assurance mission,” Pitelli said. “A lot of times people have lumped in their information assurance budgets with their IT budgets and … the challenge I think you’re seeing now is that we haven’t kept up with the budgets of cybersecurity.”