• NARA: Lisa Haralampus, director of federal records management policy and outreach
• NARA: Denise Henderson, digitization director, Office of Research Services
• Customs and Border Protection: Dawn Watts, chief records officer
• Tennessee Vallery Authority: Rebecca Coffey, agency records officer and senior manager of enterprise records
• Canon: Tae Chong, manager of new business development
• Canon: Anthony Massey, strategic business developer

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The post Agencies dispense with paper records (mostly) first appeared on Federal News Network.

Michele Sandiford |

As technology continues to evolve and reshape entire industries and work environments, the federal workforce is no exception — they must adopt innovative technologies in their focus on global talent management in order to enhance productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness of both the individual employees and the overall agencies.

Don Bauer, chief technology officer for global talent management at the Department of State, said that, in today’s times, “every single thing we do has a nexus with technology.”

“That’s part of my job — not only to make sure that we have technology, but to make sure that the actual technology interacts well with the rest of the technology that we have,” Bauer said.

The Department of State, according to Bauer, supports a global workforce of 278 locations across the world — and, “when it comes to technology and having systems talk to each other, it’s always a challenge when you have to integrate platforms.”

“The biggest challenge in the federal government has been, ‘I don’t want my data going outside into other people’s systems,’” Bauer said on Federal Monthly Insight — Trustworthy AI in the Workforce.

Challenges to modernization

For Bauer, keeping as much corporate IP within the department’s own control, as opposed to putting it into a third-party platform, is ideal “because [platforms] go away, they change. And then you eventually have to take that logic and put it somewhere else.”

Much of modernization efforts happen because they have to, Bauer said. He points to the cyclic nature of his organization — recurring seasonal bidding seasons and performance management cycles, to name a few — as another challenge to accomplishing that.

“HR modernization is somewhat unique in the fact that we don’t get to stop doing our jobs while we’re modernizing,” Bauer said. “We have to continue to fly the plane while we’re working on it, because pay doesn’t stop, promotion doesn’t stop. These cycles continue, and the systems have to support it.”

Leveraging the power of trustworthy AI

Some technologies, like the transformative technology of artificial intelligence (AI), showcase a great deal of promise when it comes to implementing new, effective and efficient solutions for the federal workforce.

AI is already making significant strides in the federal sector. Bauer said the Department of State has already started to implement generative AI internally, with what they currently call “state chat,” where users can upload documents and ask questions related to those documents.

“If I can upload 100 policy documents, and then interactively ask a question about it, that’s powerful,” Bauer told the Federal Drive with Tom Temin. “It brings it to the masses, like you say, I don’t have to be a guru in order to get it. And the beauty of what they’re building right now internally is, every single answer comes a little icon with an eye. You click that eye and it shows you where it got that data.”

The quick and easy ability to identify the source of AI’s answer is key to its trustworthiness and use in the federal workforce, according to Bauer.

“Not only do I want the answer, but I want to know where it came from so that I can make sure that it isn’t a hallucination,” he said.

Embracing modernization in global talent management

To support global talent management, federal agencies are implementing comprehensive talent acquisition and retention strategies. Perhaps just as important, the use of technology to modernize these strategies and processes is helping to streamline recruitment and onboarding efforts.

The integration of advanced technologies and strategic global talent management is transforming the federal workforce. Modernization plays a crucial role in this transformation, keeping federal agencies and their workers poised and ready with the best tools to succeed.

Bauer says connectivity and integration are paramount to building the optimal modern user experience.

“I’m still kind of weaving my way through my legacy platforms,” Bauer said. “So, I call it ‘subsumption’. I’m subsuming a lot of these tools into my current platform, which is ServiceNow as my front end. … I’ve already built all this connectivity, I have integration with my personnel system with my electronic personnel records, all those integrations are built on one platform.”

He explains that he then doesn’t have “all the extra integrations to manage.”

“I don’t have all this extra overhead because every single integration point now is a vulnerability, potentially, and it has to be remediated if there’s security,” Bauer said. “So, this is reducing my footprint while consolidating and giving the modern user experience. So, it’s kind of like, it’s a win-win, but it’s a slow process.”

The post How the State Department is leaning into AI, modernization efforts to support federal workers first appeared on Federal News Network.

This is the fifth article in our IT lifecycle management series, Delivering the tech that delivers for government.

The headline on this article, asking about the most important technology in you organization, is not meant as clickbait. It’s a question that Future Tech Enterprise President and CEO Bob Venero likes to ask current and would-be customers.

As IT assets go, Venero ranks the PC at No. 1. But that’s not what people typically tell him. They might say their enterprise resource planning systems, or their capture systems or a host of other tools and capabilities. But rarely do they mention their end user devices, Venero said during an interview for Federal News Network’s series, Delivering the tech that delivers for government.

“I might say, ‘OK, now how do you access all of that information,’ and they access that information through a PC, and every one of their employees has a PC,” he said. “So when we look at the importance of what that PC does, and making sure that you are having the proper lifecycle components tied to that PC, it is one of the most important tools that they have in their organizations.”

Squeezing value out of end user devices and improving lifecycle management is a passion for Venero. He has built his business at Future Tech helping organizations — particularly federal systems integrators — get the most from their IT assets.

“We really started working with federal systems integrators on day one, when we started the company in the basement of my house in 1996,” he recalled. “We were really focused on, ‘How do we help those federal systems integrators accomplish their mission?’ — whether that was supporting the warfighter, whether that was putting satellites into space, whether that was keeping our borders safe, whatever their mission was.”

More than a quarter-century later, Venero shared critical factors that continue to affect lifecycle management and how Future Tech helps FSIs and other organizations address them.

Make productivity a priority to derive savings through cost avoidance

Without doubt, organizations sleep on the cost avoidance savings potential of good PC lifecycle management, Venero said.

In part that’s because PCs often are the first technology that organizations look to when budgets are tight or drop, he said. “Everybody jumps to the PC to reduce cost, whether they make it last another two years beyond its lifecycle than they should, or whether they’re going to not refresh or whether they’re going to reduce the specs.”

But it’s possible to radically avoid costs through the productivity advantages that come from maintaining PCs across the enterprise, Venero said. He recounted one example where a Future Tech team did a productivity assessment at one company of all the machines in use for four or more years.

“They were losing about $300 million a year in lost productivity by having 26,000 devices that were over four years old,” he said. “If a machine is running slow or has problems, you’re impacting that cost. This customer did not have a budget for it, but after we did the productivity analysis, they refreshed those 26,000 devices in one year.”

Centralize configuration management to keep current, tighten up security

The move to hybrid environments in a post-COVID world changed device management with the need to ensure most employees can work effectively when remote. It also made consistent security-minded configuration important, Venero said.

“There are security constraints and concerns, things that you have to look at differently, in order to support the mass of folks that are now working remote,” he said.

Future Tech helps organizations by managing configuration services so that their applications are already implemented and installed on every device at its factory. It ensures that employees, no matter their location, “can be up and running day one, making sure that they’re being productive for their environment, making sure that the right security attributes are tied into that system — and they are being monitored and managed,” Venero said.

This enterprise approach to configuration also has set the stage for being able to deliver consistent customer and employee experiences for end users and to take advantage of automation and artificial intelligence capabilities at scale, he said. But it’s important for FSIs to be able adhere to government’s CX directives and agencies’ AI guardrails, Venero added.

To that end, Future Tech brought together a team of technologists, who came from the FSI space and understand large language models and AI, to develop an AI readiness assessment.

The idea is to help FSI’s by addressing a couple of questions: “Where are you on your journey, and what are the things that we can do to help you go down that path? We’re talking about future investment protection,” he said. “AI-enabled PCs are definitely one of those investments where you want to buy into it early. Because when you need it and you’ve created the proper guardrails around it, you want to be able to activate it and let it go.”

Future Tech partners with Dell Technologies to bring AI journey decision-making to customers, Venero said. “No matter where organizations are on their AI journey, or even if they’re unsure where to start, we are ready to help them stay ahead and act quickly to ensure their technology remains competitive. Delaying decisions on AI investments is not an option.”

Lean into OpEx models with PC as service, Day 1 readiness

Increasingly, Future Tech also has been moving capital expenditures for PCs to operational expenditures.

By providing an OpEx capability for PCs, Future Tech can offer organizations a complete solution — PC as a service at a monthly fee — that supports remote workers while reducing failures, Venero said. It means an organization can pay  “a one-time charge on a new asset that will last the life of that asset in support through our organization.”

Likewise the company has tried to ease startup on new projects and help FSIs with capture activities by creating a new Day 1 Readiness program that’s based on common needs across capture activities.

Looking at its own data from working with integrators, Future Tech found that capture activities directly depended on 80% of the same infrastructure components, Venero said.

Future Tech Day 1 Readiness “allows a company to be able to have their architects and their engineers go into our portal, and based on a use case, see the exact bill of materials that they need, be able to look at the budget associated with it, look at the architecture design and then take it right out of that portal and go to management for approval,” he said.

What’s next? A company can then buy those components on an as-needed basis from Future Tech, which stocks what Venero calls the “80 percenters” in its warehouses and has configuration centers ready to make necessary customizations.

“We’ve taken the time to implement down from months to weeks. We’ve taken the time to quote down from weeks to hours. That helps FSIs win more programs and more deals and stand up quicker. Speed of delivery, speed of quote, speed of support today is extremely important.”

Discover more stories about how federal systems integrators and government contractors manage their enterprise infrastructure environments in our series Delivering the tech that delivers for government, sponsored by Future Tech Enterprise.

To listen to the full discussion with Future Tech’s Bob Venero, click the podcast play button below:

Check out all podcast episodes of the Delivering the tech that delivers for government series.

The post Quick: What’s the most critical technology asset in your organization? first appeared on Federal News Network.

This is the fourth article in our IT lifecycle management series, Delivering the tech that delivers for government. It’s Part 2 of a two-part roundtable with enterprise tech leaders from CACI, Future Tech Enterprise, MITRE and SAIC. Find Part 1 here.

ASAP. It’s an acronym thrown around with impunity by almost anyone who has a technology need. For the leaders of technology enterprise operations at government contractors though, delivering capabilities right now is increasingly the desired norm.

Part of that is driven by the needs of the agencies that federal systems integrators work with. Federal agencies often look to their industry partners to provide technology they might not have themselves, said Cedric Sims, senior vice president of enterprise innovation and integration at MITRE.

“We have an obligation to our sponsors to be able to provide some compute and capacity that they don’t have access to now — at scale,” Sims said during the second half of a two-part roundtable discussion for our Federal News Network series, Delivering the tech that delivers for government.

Sims went on to point out that such needs have led MITRE to make investments in technologies ahead of government agencies making their own in some instances. For example, he said, “we’re building out a fairly significant artificial intelligence sandbox.”

For the roundtable, we talked with Sims and also technology leaders from CACI, Future Tech Enterprise and SAIC about how they increasingly deliver technology capabilities at speed to support users across their organizations and also the government organizations and missions that their companies support.

They shared the tactics and technology approaches they’re deploying now to meet these ASAP demands. The discussion homed in on five critical areas that impact delivering and supporting services for users in real or near-real time: cloud, data, security, AI and preparing for the future of lifecycle management. (You can find the first part of the discussion, “How federal contractors put users first — whether employee or fed — to deliver on government missions,” here.)

When cloud and on-prem cross paths

Managing the needs of users as well as preparing for Day 1 readiness on programs increasingly involves cloud — even cloud-like management in the data center.

“We’ve tried to go to a model that’s a little bit more hyperscaler, to where at least from an original equipment manufacturer standpoint, they can provision hardware, new hardware into that environment — creating that hyperscaler environment within the data center,” said Bernie Tomasky, vice president of enterprise IT at SAIC.

That said, he quickly added that ultimately “it’s all about trying to drive everybody into a hyperscaler cloud.”

It’s now more common for agencies to ask about shutting down data centers rather than standing them up for new programs — and how to maximize their existing capital investment while leaning into the cloud for scale, said Erik Nelson, senior vice president of the enterprise IT operating group at CACI.

On premise versus in the cloud are often competing needs, he said, especially for agencies with missions that take them to remote locations where they must deliver technology capabilities for temporary missions. Think the military services or the Federal Emergency Management Agency, for instance.

“It’s being able to figure out how to configure what is available to be out there in that austere location. And you don’t have a lot of time to deploy it,” Nelson said. “So you have to figure out how to kind of MacGyver some things to make things work. What is important about that is to have all the smart people in a room and be able to say, ‘Hey, here’s how this is going to work here.’ Then, test it out, pilot and deploy pretty quickly.”

The ability to easily navigate between cloud and on-premise environments is critical, said Rick Schindel, leader of federal systems integrator programs at Future Tech Enterprise.

“The OEMs have done a good job in kind of reinventing their as-a-service model,” he said, adding that it led Future Tech to develop Day 1 Readiness capability that blends the OEM elements with any mission-unique technology that may be required as FSIs work with agencies.

Security and data at the forefront of enterprise lifecycle services

Although everyone agreed that agencies no longer resist migrating to the cloud, security still leads government organizations to keep some systems on premise. But the ability to support users interactively, provide services as needed, and proactively manage lifecycle and cybersecurity is pushing agencies to actively embrace cloud’s consumption-based and operational expenditure model, Tomasky said.

“Data security is paramount to what the customer is thinking when they typically are on-prem. But by and large, the obstacles they’re already facing by having on-prem solutions, they want to get past,” he said.

The data security focus ties directly to the government’s numerous cyber requirements, such as establishing zero trust architectures (with a fall 2024 deadline looming for agencies) and ensuring supply chain risk management through vendors providing third-party verification.

What is known about each industry provider’s infrastructure has become critical with the move to software as a service and multiuser platforms, Sims said. Plus, it’s common to integrate multiple vendors’ products and tools for federal projects or to host data and environments on the large cloud services providers’ platforms, he pointed out. Going forward, this makes visibility and transparency essential, Sims said.

It also requires reimagining how agencies and vendors manage data so that users can access exactly what they need when they need it to do their jobs, Nelson said. Yes, agencies and their industry partners are implementing least-privilege and role-based access models, but rethinking privacy and classification practices and extracting data selectively must occur in tandem, he advised. This is particularly challenging as the federal government houses vast stores of personally identifiable, sensitive and classified information.

“Being able to, to plan out, ‘Hey, this is the portion of that data that’s really important. Everything else around it, we can do something different,’ ” Nelson said. “It’s really a cultural change for all these government agencies because it’s easier to classify something than to say, ‘Well, only this is classified.’”

AI and the future of lifecycle management

Artificial intelligence should help provide answers to data needs — both culling data but also managing end user devices and meeting users’ needs, Sims added.

At MITRE, AI and machine learning are “being used for things that we could have never imagined,” he said. Its network engineers apply AI models to log data to identify functions on the network that may not be performing as anticipated.

“We have some very bespoke capabilities around some of our security capability logs that come in,” Sims explained. “It allows our staff, our talent, to really explore: What does it actually mean to approach these problems in a different way? And we’ve seen some really impactful outcomes because of it.”

Schindel agreed that AI has potential to improve sustainment and maintenance operations of existing devices and platforms. “Our government has deployed all of these platforms across their operations. AI will help them sustain them for longer periods of time because you’re going to be able to do a ton more in terms of predictive and preventive maintenance,” he said.

Sims added that MITRE expects the development of new small language models trained specifically to do just that, to run on the edge so that IT and security needs can be “responsive, adaptive and predictive — without [devices] having to kind of dial back to a mothership.”

But for that evolution to take place, Schindel circled back to what Nelson shared about the need to focus on data management. Agencies will need to consider the security aspect of how their organizations use AI models, he said. Agencies will need to protect the resulting data and manage who has access to it and who can take part in discussions around it, Schindel noted. In other words, what are the appropriate guardrails for managing transparency and security simultaneously?

“It is an irony of AI” and definitely generative AI, Tomasky noted with a laugh. “We want all the data brought in, but we’re not going to put any of our data back out.”

He expects though that AI will let technology teams get away from looking at dashboards and screens before making changes. Throughout  the IT lifecycle, “you’re going to see AI and automation play a bigger and bigger role,” Tomasky said. “It already has in the service desk environment. And you’ll see it across the network, and cyber, and everything else as well.”

Part of getting there depends on avoiding data overload, by focusing on the value that any given AI use and dataset delivers to the end user or the organization, and also on demystifying AI as well, Nelson said. That’s how to take advantage of “lots of AI ops capabilities and service desk to really draw down the mundane tasks and make them much easier to do.”

Discover more stories about how federal systems integrators and government contractors manage their enterprise infrastructure environments in our series Delivering the tech that delivers for government, sponsored by Future Tech Enterprise.

To listen to the full Part 2 discussion, click the podcast play button below:

Check out all podcast episodes of the Delivering the tech that delivers for government series.

The post Ready, set, run: Meeting users’ tech expectations and needs now first appeared on Federal News Network.

Derace Lauderdale |

The Office of Naval Research is developing an automated hiring portal to track its onboarding and offboarding processes, hoping to improve customer experience for both.

ONR, the Navy Department’s main science and technology organization, is constantly looking for new talents all over the world while having the largest total of PhDs in any federal agency, from trained scientists to research professionals.

For now, the customer experience for new hires is somewhere between good and very good, but ONR is still spending a lot of time looking into automation and areas where they can improve, said Curtis Pelzer, the organization’s chief information officer. He said ONR is looking at reducing the time it takes to onboard personnel and providing more information to leadership on why employees are leaving.

“In terms of our onboarding process, a lot of that process is manual. And when we identify a potential hiring candidate, a lot of that initial interaction also happens manually.  In terms of all the forms that they need to fill out to become a federal employee or transition from another federal agency, what we’re looking to do is allow them to provide all that information online, through what we’re calling a program or hiring portal. They log in, and they are able to see all the information that they need in terms of completing forms and being able to transmit those forms back to the hiring manager,” Pelzer said on Federal Monthly Insight — Customer Experience. “And, then, after the employee has been onboarded to the command, we’d be able to automate the entire lifecycle of that employee. So all those documents that were generated during the hiring process are made available to that employee.”

Information would also be automatically passed on to others in the organization who need to know about the onboarding process, including hiring managers, supervisors, and HR personnel, depending on their roles.

“The system would provide for the individual roles that are needed to make sure that the employee lifecycle is being met, and the things that the employee would need during their tenure. I speak of this in terms of lifecycle, because I believe that there’s a beginning, which is the onboarding process,” Pelzer said. “And then you look at the sustainment of that employee during their tenure, and you look at the offboarding process. That would entail, how do you recover those assets that have been provisioned for the employee? And then how do you successfully offboard that employee, making sure that they have everything that they need when they’re departing the organization?”

Other information in the portal could provide insights into why an employee decides to leave the agency might enhance the automated process in the future,

Prior to the development of the new automated portal, ONR has experienced issues automating processes due to their existing manual process. Originally, they would overlay new technology over the manual process — but would not receive the  level of efficiency they were expecting.

Artificial intelligence has also been a conversation at ONR, as they’re working on AI-enabled capabilities. Pelzer said the challenge is identifying what data will be allowed, and making sure the data remains secure, not putting anything at risk.

“We have been looking at using bots using robotic process automation to help streamline routine processes that we believe can be done better by a bot, or using an AI. And most certainly bring a level of efficiency to these processes like onboarding and offboarding of personnel and tracking personnel better,” Pelzer said. “When you look at our data and analytics program, we’re building AI-enabled capabilities every single day. These are taking systems that we’ve already built, and then layering that generative AI on top of that, to be able to better serve our workforce, to give them an additional capability that we previously didn’t have, prior to the advancement of AI.”

ONR is also looking at new ways to track metrics on how many personnel are onboarding and offboarding. Currently, they’re manually capturing these metrics. For Pelzer, looking at metrics provides insight when it comes to a call for resolution and meeting customer needs.

“One thing that’s the most gratifying in terms of customer satisfaction is the messages that I receive from the customer that say, ‘Hey, well done, your team has done something that I didn’t think was possible,’ or the response time, or the level of satisfaction the customer received. So, the metrics certainly give you insight into how well your team is performing. We look at the data, but having those notes that come in is really something that I look forward to,” Pelzer said.

The post ONR looks to automation to speed hiring federal hiring process first appeared on Federal News Network.

Application and infrastructure modernizing has started to take an all-of-the-above approach for where to operate — commercial clouds, data centers and edge computers. The cloud first idea has given way to optimizing hybrid infrastructures for mission requirements.

“We’re seeing a big shift away from the cloud all of a sudden,” said Brandon Gulla, the chief technology officer of Rancher Government Solutions. It’s not that cloud computing doesn’t continue to provide tangible bets, but rather that in modernizing applications, agencies are balancing their approaches.

One reason, Gulla said, stems from artificial intelligence and a desire to move data to where AI applications execute.

5G wireless circuits have “provided a great opportunity for the data to bounce back and forth from the edge to the traditional cloud faster. And that’s providing a lot of opportunity for our government customers,” Gulla said.

For example, military operators seeking speedy decision-making often want data and applications housed locally.

“That’s where edge computing really comes into play,” Gulla said. “It allows them to have sensors and the processing localized to their environment, and be able to have those decisions faster without that reliance on the [cloud] platform.” He said such applications should work even in air-gapped or intermittent connectivity situations.

A diversification of computing environments also lowers risk by providing redundancy and fault tolerance.

“This is a way for them to mitigate risk while modernizing their platform,” he said.

This compute-anywhere presupposes that the elastic, service-rich commercial cloud environment can replicate at the edge or in the agency data center, noted Tricia Fitzmaurice, Rancher Government Solutions public sector vice president of sales.

In recent months, she said, “we saw our customers, with the advancements in small form factor hardware, wanting to process their data where mission was actually happening.”

She added, “We looked at that and said, ok, we need our solutions to be able to deploy out at the edge in the same way that they would perform out in the data center.” Fitzmaurice said that agency tech staffs also want “single pane of glass” management of workloads, regardless of where the workloads are executing.  

Technical diversity

Fitzmaurice and Gulla said that, in addition to locational flexibility, agencies need flexibility in the way they design or refactor applications. Gulla said that sticking to standards and open source software can simplify the choice of technology for a given use case. He said some organizations that bet heavily on a proprietary virtual machine hypervisor and one commercial cloud computing provider later find they must deal with technical debt as technology evolves.

“We want to promote organizations to be willing to adopt open standards such as Kubernetes or Linux containers,” Gulla said, “and actually be able to lift and shift these applications and their IT modernization across infrastructures, no matter if it’s public cloud, private cloud or on premises.” Otherwise, he said, “the technical debt involved with reverse engineering and changing from one hyper scaler to another is massive.”

Gulla said that flexibility can extend even to multiple CPU architectures, noting the emergence of low-power mobile device chips moving into servers. He noted the Navy, constrained by available power on ships, is turning to hardware that uses Arm 64-bit hardware.

Open source containerization also can potentially cut the time to deploy new code.

“A line of code today will take six months to get into the warfighters’ hands,” Gulla said. “That’s too long.” He said the government, using containerization technology “has started to focus on inheritable security patterns and security controls, and concepts such as continuous authority to operate.” He called that capability “an express lane” to get modernized applications into production.

Consistent security must underlie any modernization, Gulla and Fitzmaurice said, hence the importance of inheritable or reusable security mechanisms.

“As signers of the [Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] secure-by-design pledge,” Fitzmaurice said, “we wanted to ensure that our entire product set adheres to Executive Order 14028,” referring to the Biden administration 2021 initiative.

Gulla added, “We’re trying to ship the software in a secure state. That’s alleviating responsibility from that operator, from that IT staff.” In military settings, “we’re seeing that our warfighters are being asked to do too much these days. By making [security] the responsibility of our team, not only are we delivering secure software, we’re also alleviating those responsibilities and getting code into the warfighter and operators’ hands faster.”

The post Modernize to location-agnostic applications first appeared on Federal News Network.

Financial planning is not something you set and forget. It requires periodic review and changes to maximize results and those changes often depend on the stage of your career.

So how should you tackle that planning? We will talk to experts at OPM, federal unions and more — who are also at various stages of their own careers — to find out!

Federal Drive Host Tom Temin will lead this lively panel discussion as part of WAEPA’s Annual Member Meeting. Our panel of experts will share tips, tactics and best practices that can help you maximize your own financial results — whether it’s your first year in the federal government or your 20th.

Plus, one CPE credit will be earned after you attend the full webinar.

Here are just a few of the topics slated for discussion:

• How to set financial and other life goals as a fed
• When to make financial changes tied to the stage of your government career
• How to maximize return on your TSP contributions
• Where to find tools to help guide your financial planning

WAEPA CEO M. Shane Canfield will open the event and share a brief overview of the association’s 2024 state of the association. Be sure to register now for this must-attend virtual event!

Accreditation: Training certificate for 1 CPE

Federal News Radio, part of the Federal News Network, is registered with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) as a sponsor of continuing professional education on the National Registry of CPE Sponsors. State boards of accountancy have final authority on the acceptance of individual courses for CPE credit. Complaints regarding registered sponsors may be submitted to the National Registry of CPE Sponsors through its website: www.nasbaregistry.org.

The post Financial Wellness Across Your Federal Career first appeared on Federal News Network.

Derace Lauderdale |

In just the last couple years, shared certificates have become an increasingly popular recruitment practice across government — and the impact is hard to miss.

At the Department of Health and Human Services, using shared certificates in some instances has cut the agency’s time-to-hire in half.

“We are seeing significant impacts in terms of hiring efficiencies, and we seek to further increase that share of hiring that takes place, not just for the HR shared service centers, but across the department,” HHS Chief Human Capital Officer Bob Leavitt said on Federal Monthly Insights —Trustworthy AI in the Workforce.

Over time, HHS has increasingly relied on shared certificates, particularly for the types of positions that are similar across many of the department’s organizations, Leavitt told Federal News Network. He called shared certificates “an extraordinary opportunity.”

“One, it uses our resources more productively, and two — and more importantly — from a candidate’s perspective, the sooner we’re able to follow up and eventually onboard a candidate, the better,” Leavitt said.

With shared certificates, agencies or offices that make a hire can then give their list of un-hired candidates, already determined to be qualified for a position, to another agency or office hiring for the same position. And hiring for the same type of job happens quite often, Leavitt said.

“There really are fewer unicorn positions out there than we all imagined,” he said.

Using shared certificates shortens the hiring process by using candidates who are already vetted and assessed by hiring managers and deemed qualified for a position. If multiple candidates are hired off of one certificate, that can cut time-to-hire even further.

“It affords selecting officials a quicker mechanism to bring people into the workforce and meet their needs more efficiently,” Kimberly Steide, associate deputy assistant secretary for human capital at HHS, said in an interview with Federal News Network.

That then allows HR managers to focus more strategically in terms of how they spend their time, Steide added.

And the process isn’t only helpful for hiring managers — using shared certificates benefits job candidates as well. They can be considered for positions they might not have otherwise known were out there.

“You can apply once and be considered for multiple vacancies as they come up open,” Steide said. “That expands that applicant’s reach in terms of what’s available to them.”

HHS shared certificates by the numbers

The idea of sharing certificates isn’t new, as it stems from the 2015 Competitive Service Act and subsequent guidance published in 2018. But the practice has gained much more traction in just the last few years.

At HHS, the use of shared certificates began years ago in just a handful of components, like the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But it’s more recently become a fully departmentwide effort.

Between 2020 and 2023, HHS hired nearly 12,000 employees off of shared certificates, and increased its shared certificate hires by 33%.

HHS hires made from shared certificates

Note: Hiring numbers exclude FDA data, which was not immediately available.

Currently, HHS’ Office of the Secretary is the greatest user of shared certificates. Nearly half of all hires made from shared certificates in the last four years have gone through that office, including all of its staffing divisions.

This year, 11% of hires made through the Office of the Secretary’s HR shared servicing center have been pulled off of shared certificates.

“It might seem like a small number, but that’s coming from a vastly smaller number, and it is increasing significantly,” Leavitt said.

HHS involves SMEs in recruitment

For HHS, like many agencies, a crucial part of the recruitment process is involving subject-matter experts (SMEs) when writing job announcements and assessing candidates. Federal hiring experts say SMEs — usually officials working directly in the office that’s recruiting — offer a helpful perspective on what hands-on skills a candidate would actually need to be qualified for a position.

Especially with recruitment efforts that use shared certificates, HHS involves SMEs when writing solicitations, as well as when reviewing candidate pools.

There are, however, busier or more challenging times of the year for SMEs to be able to take the time to get involved in recruitment. But Leavitt and Steide said they’ve found the officials to be generally willing to offer their support, as it helps their office land a better job candidate at the end of the process.

“We do have to be attuned to the broader environment, but overall, people appreciate the opportunity to engage,” Leavitt said. “But we have to do our bit as well to make sure that the timing works.”

‘HireNow’: The back-end of sharing certificates

HHS’ recruitment arm is massive, involving thousands of hires annually. Underlying the entire recruitment process, HHS uses a platform called “HireNow.” The site compiles tens of thousands of active resumes for hiring managers to sift through when looking for a good fit for an opening at the department.

Right now, there are about 3,000 active job announcements on HireNow that are open to shared certificates, with another 600 or so upcoming announcements. And so far for 2024, HHS hiring managers have selected nearly 900 candidates from shared certificates on HireNow, along with dozens more pending selections.

Currently, there are more than 103,000 active resumes available on HireNow that are open to shared certificates.

“Of course, that’s a large volume to go through,” Leavitt said. “But we’re able to filter that by job series, by grade, and other factors, to help really narrow in on the available pool of candidates that hiring managers across the organization can refer to, rather than starting afresh.”

Once logged into HireNow, HHS hiring managers can view both current and upcoming job announcements employing shared certificates, as well as job announcements that won’t be using shared certificates.

For instance, right now, HHS is actively searching for supervisory physicians, health science administrators and data scientists — all of which have a shared certificate available for hiring managers to use. And coming soon, HHS is opening job announcements for management analysts and administrative specialists.

A list of several current job announcements, shared with Federal News Network, show many originating at the Health Resources Services Administration (HRSA). But with the use of shared certificates, those announcements could later be opened to other HHS components for hiring managers to review and select other candidates.

Application data on HireNow gets fed in through USA Staffing, a talent acquisition system run by the Office of Personnel Management. The system manages federal job applications that come in, and lets hiring managers track and assess applicants. On top of job applications sent directly to HHS, HireNow also intakes information from OPM’s broader talent pools portal meant for sharing certificates governmentwide.

Combining data from the two platforms “makes it easier for our selecting officials, so that they don’t have two places that they need to go to look for resumes,” Steide said.

When creating job announcements in HireNow, HHS staffing specialists will denote whether submitted applications will be shared more broadly. For announcements using shared certificates, candidates are automatically opted into the process, but have the ability to opt out. Once a shared certificate is issued, it remains active in HireNow for 240 days.

“That means that a candidate can apply and be considered for the next 240 days for anything that might come up across the department, which could be quite expansive,” Steide said.

Even with the success, HHS said it’s still working to consolidate the data and processes for sharing certificates. Although the HireNow platform is available for all HR offices to use, not all of them actually use it when going through the shared certificate process.

Shared certificates across government

Of course, HHS is far from the only agency that uses shared certificates — and for all agencies, the process of sharing certificates generally happens one of two ways.

One option is for OPM to initiate a governmentwide pooled hiring announcement. Agencies can then sign onto the announcement and select from a list of qualified job candidates for a common position.

The other option involves a specific agency initiating its own shared certificate announcement. That announcement can either stay internal to share just among different components within a large department, or otherwise get shared more broadly with agencies across government.

HHS uses shared certificates in multiple ways, and the announcements are not always departmentwide. For example, different divisions can also move shared certificates from job announcements they’ve already done in their specific office, and later post them to HireNow for other components to view and make selections.

To decide where and what positions to use shared certificates for, Steide said HHS often looks at where the most vacancies are. But it’s also not as simple as that.

“We’ve had a lot of success with pooled hiring for military spouses [and] for public health associates, which is a huge occupation that spans across the department,” Steide said. “So it really depends on where we have vacancies, where we have the most need, and … unique situations, where we can have one certificate that we can maximize across the department.”

For internally shared certificates, Steide said HHS will look across the department to figure out which occupational series would be the best fit for a pooled hiring effort.

Once an HHS component or office creates an announcement with a shared certificate, that component then has about 40 days to assess and select candidates, before the candidates become available for selection at HHS more broadly.

Depending on the number of certificates that are available on a job announcement, it can be a time-consuming process, but the value is clear.

Steide said, “the amount of effort and time that you put in on the front end just yields you a better product at the outcome.”

The post ‘An extraordinary opportunity’: How HHS uses shared certificates in hiring first appeared on Federal News Network.

There are more than 700 use cases in the federal inventory for artificial intelligence. Of those use cases, as of Sept. 1, the Energy Department had the most with 177, followed by the Department of Health and Human Services with 156, the Commerce Department with 47 and the Department of Homeland Security with 41.

The thirst for using AI isn’t just about use cases. The amount of money agencies are spending on AI tools and capabilities is growing. From 2020 to 2022, for example, agencies spent $7.7 billion, according to market research firm Deltek. That’s a 36% increase over three years. And this doesn’t include all the funding that goes into systems embedded with AI, such as the DHS insider threat infrastructure or the Department of Veterans Affairs’ health and data analytics platform.

The data for 2023 and 2024 will show even more investments, particularly with the relatively new excitement over generative AI.

Over the last few months, agencies have started to follow the Office of Management and Budget’s direction to offer controlled uses of GenAI tools like the Air Force’s new platform called the Non-classified Internet Protocol Generative Pre-training Transformer (NIPRGPT), which the service hopes can help with tasks such as coding, correspondence and content summarization.

The Energy Department also released a new reference guide for using GenAI. The guide provides an understanding of the key benefits, considerations, risks and best practices associated with GenAI.

JP Marcelino, the AI/ML Alliances manager for Dell Federal, said most initial forays into AI by agencies fall into two types: traditional or discriminative AI, used to detect patterns and for simpler analytics; and generative AI, where agencies are starting to generate new content based off of their data.

Right people, right tech in the AI factory

While agencies are more comfortable with the traditional or discriminative AI use case, slowly they are starting to figure out how they can use GenAI, particularly in a more secure manner.

“When it comes to GenAI, there’s still a lot more carefulness that needs to be done to make sure that nothing’s being exposed from a security standpoint, and making sure all of your data is managed and secured in a way that doesn’t get exposed,” Marcelino said on the discussion Innovation in Government sponsored by Carahsoft. “I still think there’s a challenge around the AI workforce that’s capable of developing these solutions. In order to alleviate and offset some of those deficiencies, part of it is just looking for the right kinds of partners that can help develop these solutions. No one’s ever going to find a single partner or a single software provider that can solve everything there is to develop an AI solution. It really takes a village to develop these solutions. So whether it’s a partner that can help you out early on in the process of figuring out use cases to tackle and focus on, or partners that are more in the line of helping you develop your solutions and put together proof of concepts and move them into production-ready environments for you, I think it’ll take quite a bit of effort from numerous partnerships to be able to solve every challenge along the way.”

To that end, Marcelino said Dell Technologies is leaning into the concept of an AI factory. He said this approach provides a framework to accelerate the implementation of AI capabilities.

“We are really helping customers understand the potential use cases that they want to tackle from an AI standpoint. We are helping them understand what kind of data they have to tackle those potential use cases, whether it’s good or bad data; do you have enough of that data to not only train a solution, but also make sure that you can validate that solution as well?” he said. “Then, there are the three pieces in the middle that help enable the AI capability from a solution standpoint. One is the infrastructure and hardware piece and the ability for us to provide the right kind of AI infrastructure and hardware for the given use case. If you’re looking at a really complex AI solution that requires very large language models to develop a solution, you may be looking at some really high-end compute to be able to support that kind of capability. But at the same time, if you’re a single user, just looking at some kind of AI sandbox, or want to start developing or testing smaller AI models locally, you may not need such high-end compute for that. You may need some kind of faster workstation that can support a single GPU, for example, or some really lower end compute that can handle a handful of users simultaneously.”

Data remains key to the success

The AI factory can help agencies close existing gaps in the workforce, the challenge of moving the tools into production and in addressing data quality and management challenges.

“You can just easily have an AI solution that can be garbage-in and garbage-out, so you want to make sure not only you have good quality data, but also have the ability to have a good data management strategy around it so that you can pull that data from the right places and be able to have good quality data to feed into an AI solution in order to achieve the right kind of accuracy and outcomes you want out of an AI solution,” Marcelino said. “When it comes to moving AI solutions from pilot to production, there’s a pretty low success rate of AI solutions that make it to production. There’s a lot of challenges that are involved with that, whether it’s not getting enough accuracy out of your AI solution, it’s not meeting the right types of outputs or outcomes that you’re looking to achieve from that solution or it can be something as simple as it’s taking too much time to achieve the accuracy that you’re looking to develop.”

One way to help address this challenge, he said, is through a machine learning operations (MLOps) strategy, which helps organizations more easily automate the continuous training and deployment of ML models at scale. It adapts the principles of DevOps to the ML workflow.

“I think there’s ways to help alleviate some of those challenges. Implementing things like an MLOPs strategy, so you have better visibility into the models that you’re developing and looking to deploy,” he said. “Being able to leverage solutions that can do things like help augment the development process, whether they’re things like auto ML tools, for example, to essentially use AI to develop AI solutions. Or leveraging solutions like AI factories, where we’ve taken a lot of the guesswork out of being able to deploy an AI solution into production, where we can essentially provide an end-to-end capability that encompasses partner solutions with our infrastructure and hardware, with the ability to fold in other types of solutions to really package it up in an environment that’s been pre-validated and makes it lower time-to-value to deploy these solutions.”

Listen to the full discussion:

The post How a factory approach can accelerate agency use of AI first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Defense Department faces a continuing challenge recruiting and retaining servicemembers across the U.S. military services.

Since 1980, the total number of active-duty military personnel has fallen by 37%, according to USAFacts data.

“It’s historic. The all-volunteer force has been working great for a very long time, but it’s with a shrinking pool of eligible candidates in the highly competitive talent market out there,” said Pamela Powers, executive managing director for the Defense market at Maximus.

Could DoD change that by reimagining how the department and the services interact with the roughly 2.1 million men and women who make up the country’s military force?

Not only is the answer yes, Powers said, but it’s essential so the military services can attract young recruits and also retain its trained warfighters.

“We live in 2024. In a day and age where we can access things in the private sector — in the commercial world — very easily, very efficiently. And our current generation of warfighters expect that,” she said. That’s what they grew up knowing. They are digitally minded. They see what good human-centered design is on a daily basis.”

If she sounds passionate about the topic, it’s because she is. Powers began her work life in the Air Force, serving more than 25 years. She then followed that up with leadership roles at the Pentagon and Veterans Affairs Department.

DoD “is going to quickly lose that new generation of talented folks if they don’t catch up,” she said told Federal News Network for our Forward-Thinking Government series.

Powers shared three elements that can help DoD and the services deliver better experiences to servicemembers to impact retention.

Retention Aid #1: Make digital transformation servicemember-centric

“It’s really important that they focus on taking care of the servicemembers and their families in the best way possible,” Power said. “And customer experience and employee experience approaches  can certainly help with that.”

For a long time, DoD and the services have focused on systems upgrades solely from the perspective of replacing and revamping the technology, she said. And “the services look at their employees as a whole,” rather than as individuals, added said.

Powers suggested that the department and the military services infuse their digital transformation initiatives with human-centered design techniques and define requirements based both on how servicemembers use the systems (as employees) and are impacted by them (as customers).

That starts with understanding the individual roles and journeys of servicemembers from before they arrive until after they complete their service.

“Really everything along the journey of a servicemember is a potential pain point or a potential area of opportunity to improve,” she said. To compete with the private sector, “the services need to make sure that they are taking care of their service members and their families in the right way across that entire journey.”

The inclusion of user and customer experience requirements in transformation initiatives is becoming more common, but it’s not pervasive, Powers said. She pointed to the Army Human Resources Command as an example of the move toward human-centered design within DoD.

“They’re one of the first HR organizations in the department that sees the value, and they’re shifting their transformation to be about the soldier and how they best serve that soldier and their families,” she said

Retention Aid #2: Integrate mission objectives with experience requirements

Employee experience efforts in digital transformation or business process improvement affects the mission, keeps servicemembers engaged and has the potential to ensure they continue their service, Powers said.

“What DoD really needs to be focused on is, ‘How can I design this system focused on the user, but best meet the mission requirements?’ ”

Employees want to be able to do their job well and have access to the technology and tools that helps them do that, she said. DoD and the services must compete with other agencies and with industry to both attract and retain personnel.

Designing for the person that’s going to use a system therefore is a must-do, Powers said.

“We’ve seen so many transformations over the years that were basically ‘lift-and-shift’ efforts fail because they didn’t understand what the problem was,” she said. “They didn’t understand how the systems were going to be accessed, and they didn’t understand how to help the mission in the end.”

Retention Aid #3: Align leadership, development and implementation teams

It’s also important that these efforts are enterprisewide and not siloed, Powers said. Culture change often becomes a critical factor in success. If leadership buys in and approves a project, but front- and mid-line users and managers are not prepared to make changes in workflow and processes, then the implementation will fail, she said.

“There has to be an alignment between the leadership, those that are implementing and those that are using the systems,” Powers said. “That’s a best practice that we’ve seen on the industry side.”

Success is possible, she said and encouraged DoD to look to Veterans Affairs for inspiration. As a designated high-impact service provider, VA has successfully put veterans at the center of its mission delivery initiatives, Powers said. Alignment within the organization, to focus everything they do on the veteran they serve, has been critical to their success.

“It’s made a huge difference. … In the 2015-2016 timeframe, trust by veterans in VA was in the high 50th percentile. Almost half of veterans didn’t trust the organization that they were getting services from and they were getting critical health care from. That was a big problem,” she said. “VA has made an investment since then and now, trust from veterans is up over 80%.”

Discover more about how to improve, secure and transform your federal operations in the Forward-Thinking Government series.

The post Can digital transformation centered on servicemembers address U.S. military’s retention crisis? first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Office of Management and Budget has designated 38 agencies and program offices as High-Impact Service Providers (HISPs).

Matt Mandrgoc, the head of U.S. Public Sector at Zoom, said optimizing the employee experience is key to improving their level of customer experience.

“When the employees are happy, they’re productive, they’re able to do their job. That can flow right over into the customer experience. We’ve seen with some of the HISPs, the biggest thing they have is that if those employees are working and they’re doing well, that experience flows right over into the customer experience,” Mandrgoc said.

Agencies setting a higher standard for customer experience focus are optimizing the time they spend with their customers — and making sure employees are addressing customer needs effectively.

“You want to have the opportunity to get the most out of the time that you’re spending with someone,” Mandrgoc said. “You have someone’s attention for a short period of time — how did you get that information? How did you disseminate the information, and did the customer receive it in the easiest and most simplistic way that they can?”

Improving the employee experience often comes down to giving the workforce the tools they need to do their jobs most effectively.

“When you look at employee experience, it’s about productivity, it’s about having the right tools in place that allow them to get their job done,” Mandrgoc said.

Refreshing CX tools

Agencies are refreshing the tools and technology behind their customer experience, but Mandrgoc said they should also think about the resources employees need to deliver those public-facing services.

“An agency will say, ‘We need to use this solution for our customers because it provides the best experience. But you have to use this other solution internally for internal use only.’ And it sends a message to employees that for the customer experience, we’re going to use these technologies or these solutions to give the greatest optimized customer experience, but not allowing that to happen on the employee side.

Both federal employees and customers have higher expectations for the types of technologies agencies are using, and are less likely to engage with agencies if they aren’t making IT modernization part of their CX portfolios.

“The biggest challenge that agencies are running into right now are legacy systems and forced technologies that don’t allow that growth to happen, and be able to get it to the next level. And this is where it’s incumbent on industry to really share those best practices,” Mandrgoc said.

Federal employees, he added, are more likely to feel engaged in their work if they have the tools to effectively do their jobs and provide services to the public.

“If you don’t have the tools out there from the employee side, it doesn’t allow them to do the job and be productive. So they’re going to be more likely to look outside,” Mandrgoc said.

Gathering feedback through focus groups

To improve both the customer experience and the employee experience, Mandrgoc said agencies should think beyond survey data, and gather feedback directly from individuals in focus groups.

“While people are serving and doing things, you have to poll a segment of people who are doing the job out there, and the customers and their experience and asking them specifically, what did you like? What did you not like?” Mandrgoc said. “We all look at metrics as a way to do things. But metrics can also be changed. You can set a high bar, or you can set a low bar. It’s understanding what the feedback is from those experiences. What are they? What are they measuring, how are they measuring it.”

Mandrgoc said meaningful improvements in the customer and employee experience require agency leaders to keep making sustained investments in what’s working.

“Impactful changes sometimes can take time. You have to realize that you sometimes can be fighting against internal challenges or battles on what culturally is going on in that space. You could also be fighting around legacy or forced technology that is being pushed on groups to do things in a certain way,” he said.

Creating better experiences in a hybrid world

Agencies scrambled to develop a largely remote work culture at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But agencies are still figuring out how to effectively hold virtual meetings — with some employees in the office, working at home, or hundreds of miles away in another office.

“Too many times you go into meetings, in a virtual or hybrid environment, and people don’t have cameras on. So you can’t see their reactions, you can’t get the human connection with those individuals who know what’s going on,”

Hybrid meetings between employees in the office and others working from home can also create challenges.

Mandrgoc said agencies can do more to provide employees with an engaging experience, regardless of how they join meetings.

“You’re in a conference room, and it looks like you’re way far way at the end of the table. How do you arrange these rooms a little differently, to create a more immersive experience?” he said.

Mandrgoc said an agency client, using Zoom solutions, recently hosted a virtual job fair that put recruiters directly in touch with top candidates.

“Instead of just taking somebody’s name and a number and calling them back, they will take them directly from the virtual hybrid environment that they were in, and into a breakout room, to provide more details about this recruitment,” he said.

By taking on this engaging approach to hiring and outreach, the agency was able to identify more than 30 strong candidates.

Mandrgoc added that a HISP agency is also using Zoom solutions to reach out to customers who live in regions without high-speed internet.

“They were showing farmers all of the different things they’re doing for funding that they need to go forward in their business. A lot of them work and live in low-bandwidth environments, you go across there, it allows them to engage in that space,” he said.

The post Transforming customer experience in government through empowered employees first appeared on Federal News Network.

This is the third article in our IT lifecycle management series, Delivering the tech that delivers for government.

For any federal contractor, managing its team’s needs on government projects requires a continual real-time, proactive approach to lifecycle management.

This means ramp-up has to happen well in advance so the organization can achieve true day 1 readiness, said Tom Terjesen, chief information officer at Peraton.

“What’s changed is that on day one of any new program we stand up, we have to be ready to support the program,” he said. “And what has changed really is the frequency we have to push patches and upgrades and things like that.”

As part of total readiness, cybersecurity processes also take center stage before work on a project for any government customer begins.

Peraton’s support of the Defense Department, Homeland Security Department and Intelligence Community agencies means it works with organizations that are constantly a target of foreign adversaries.

“We have to keep our guards up all the time” from a compliance standpoint, Terjesen said. “But also making sure our employees are trained properly to understand the risks and make sure they’re not introducing any risks to our environment that could impact our ability to support our customers. That’s a huge challenge we face on a daily basis.”

To protect the environment, the company applies a zero trust model and only provides its employees with access to systems and data necessary to do their jobs. “It has helped significantly with our risk and compliance requirements,” he said.

We talked with Terjesen for Federal News Network’s series, Delivering the tech that delivers for government, about how a federal systems integrator can best manage lifecycle before, during and after a project. He offered three strategies.

Day 1 Readiness Strategy 1: Know your baseline

“When I say we have to be ready to support our programs on day one, if a vendor issues a zero day vulnerability, we’re ready to deploy it to the program right away,” Terjesen said.

To do that, before a project officially starts, requires knowing the baseline for all devices being used for a program, both by Peraton but also by government users, he said.

“The process has to start during the transition period,” Terjesen said. “We stand up that ability to support our customer when we’re getting ready for day one — readiness and managing and maintaining assets.”

In today’s hybrid environment, making sure all tools and services are accessible over the internet matters too and must be part of the baseline knowledge gathering process. “People are much more mobile,” he pointed out. “We need to be able to connect with them wherever they are in the world,” no matter the hour.

Day 1 Readiness Strategy 2: Introduce a change management process

For ongoing management and maintenance, Terjesen calls the creation of a change management process essential.

It’s the only way to be sure there’s centralized control over the types of changes happening to an environment. That also allows for a controlled approach to managing technology needs, he said.

“You don’t want it to be a free for all because then you’re going to be in a situation where you’re having outages all the time — and that’s the last thing you want for your customer.”

The process also allows for appropriate planning well in advance of any project need or deadline. It avoids panic when trying to get things done, Terjesen said. In fact, that’s a critical gauge of success, he noted.

“If you’re patching things and upgrading things and keeping them in support, you’ll have a lot less fire drills to fight,” he said.

Day 1 Readiness Strategy 3: Implement an asset management tool

Finally, stand up a tool to manage assets across the project’s lifecycle, Terjesen advised. “When you deploy a device, you need to know where it’s going, who owns it or who’s using it.”

It’s critical that the tool be able to connect with all devices on the network, which should be evaluated during the initial baseline assessment. Part of the management tool’s capabilities must be vulnerability scanning, he said.

“Once you’re pushing software out and you’re patching software, you have to have a tool that can tell you, ‘Is it working?’ You have to be able to run a vulnerability scan against all those assets to make sure what you’re doing is actually making a difference,” Terjesen said.

Scanning also provides information to proactively identity and target any devices with issues or needs. And it plays into decommissioning assets too.

“That’s a step we take seriously,” Terjesen said. “We want to make sure, one, it’s done in a green fashion, and two, we don’t want any data left on the device when we hand it off. We have a whole process where we scrub and cleanse data off those devices.”

Discover more stories about how federal systems integrators and government contractors manage their enterprise infrastructure environments in our series Delivering the tech that delivers for government, sponsored by Future Tech Enterprise.

To listen to the full discussion with Peraton’s Tom Terjesen, click the podcast play button below:

Check out all podcast episodes of the Delivering the tech that delivers for government series.

The post Ready on Day 1 in lifecycle management means ready to manage any challenges before Day 1, advises Peraton’s CIO first appeared on Federal News Network.

Lido Ramadan trusts that by putting people first, his company will continue to grow and be successful.

“We really want to ensure that we’re a place that genuinely cares for our people,” said Ramadan, president and CEO of Aminad Consulting, adding, “We feel like if we do that, and we stay true to our values, the rest will fall into place.”

Ramadan started Aminad in 2019, building on successes he learned from co-founding his first federal consulting business in 2003 and then working for a few others afterward too.

Those experiences “showed me the benefits of having a values-based culture and refined for me the thinking on the types of values that were really meaningful to me,” he said during a discussion for the Society of Defense Financial Management’s The Business of Defense series on Federal News Network.

Aminad is a strategy consultancy that focuses on helping federal organizations, mainly in the Defense Department, transform their operations in three areas: performance improvement, business strategy, and supply chain and acquisition.

Ramadan shared his values for the small business along with how he continues to maintain them and create an environment where his employees stay and focus on the mission of their federal customers.

Looking ahead for his business by looking back to his youth

“When starting Aminad, it was very clear to me that I needed to select values that meant something to me personally,” Ramadan said. In all, he identified six: kindness, determination, humility, generosity, intellectual curiosity and simplicity.

He credits his parents’ influence for many of the values. “A lot of the values — especially kindness, generosity, humility and determination — were taken specifically from the things that they showed me that I felt translated extremely well in a professional setting,” he said.

Ramadan also thought hard about a culture that could reflect the people Aminad hires.

He is in fact the last interview in the hiring process. Culture and the company’s values are all that Ramadan discusses during that final gut-check with potential new employees.

“We tick through the six company values. We have a conversation,” he shared. “I want to ensure that our candidates understand how important they are to us. I want to ensure that those values really mean something to them. And I want to ensure that they realize if it doesn’t mean something to them, it might not be the right place for them as well.”

Growing the business by expanding foothold in DoD

The value-based approach has proved successful in finding and retaining employees as well as keeping federal customers too. Why? Because employees want to be part of the business and so go “above and beyond for their clients because they care about where they are,” Ramadan said, adding that Aminad’s attrition is nearly zero.

“We never want to have too many people. We don’t want to have too few people either,” he said. “But talent acquisition and that front end has not been an issue for us.”

With fewer than 100 employees, Ramadan said the company will continue to pursue growth within DoD.

“We have a little bit of work right now at the Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Health and Human Services,” he said. “But the predominance of our proactive business development is still within the defense space.”

3 ways to help employees thrive in values-based culture

Admittedly, creating a values-based culture takes work. Ramadan described it as “a constant effort.”

But he also detailed three tactics that his company takes to help keep its values front and center and simultaneously keep employees engaged:

• Let people work where it makes sense for them to work. About half of Aminad’s staff works in the Washington, D.C., area. But close to 40 employees work in 10 cities across the country.

“For our onboarding, we fly all our new employees in,” Ramadan said. “Then twice a year, the whole company flies in for company events and company meetings.”

• Be deliberate about maintaining culture in a remote environment. Thinking about how to create camaraderie and ensure that people continue to be part of a culture is something Ramadan and the leadership team think about — a lot.

It’s why Aminad hosts virtual events that aren’t just work meetings. We have monthly culture events, whether it be wine tasting, or cheese tasting, or other food and drink tasting — a lot of tastings,” he said with a laugh. “But we really invest in those events because they’re meaningful when you can’t have everyone together all the time.”

• Take an apprenticeship approach to training. Managers reach out to employees at all levels, Ramadan said.

“It is about ensuring that we’re consistent in our reach-outs, consistently ensuring that we’re asking our employees how they’re feeling about their connections with us.” But beyond that, the aim is to provide training to employees no matter their level through mentors who are outside of talent management, he added.

Is it all just talk? It could be, but Ramadan doubles down about his desire to build a business that he called wonderful for its employees.

“We’re going to continue to grow,” he said. “If at any point that culture starts to crack, our people don’t seem happy, we’re not providing that level of quality, then we’re just going to pause. We’re not trying to hit artificial revenue targets. I’m not trying to grow to sell.”

To listen to the full discussion between Lido Ramadan, president and CEO of Aminad Consulting, and Rich Brady, CEO of SDFM, click the podcast play button below:

Discover more stories about how to thrive as a federal contractor. Find all episodes of The Business of Defense podcast.

The post GovCon entrepreneur explains why making his company a great place to work matters more than fast growth first appeared on Federal News Network.

Join host Tom Temin and his guest, Ray Romano, deputy assistant director for Cyber Threat and Investigations at the State Department as they discuss innovative strategies for expanding and improving the cyber workforce. In addition, Sarah Cleveland, senior strategic advisor at ExtraHop will provide an industry perspective.

Learning Objectives:

• The cyber workforce at the State Department
  
• The State Department AI strategy in cyber operations
• Industry analysis

The post Paying down the cyber skills debt first appeared on Federal News Network.

Over its 75-plus years, continual evolution has been a hallmark of the American Society for Military Comptrollers, so it only makes sense that its name should also evolve to better reflect the needs of its members in the defense financial management community and the support the organization provides them.

To that end, ASMC is now the Society of Defense Financial Management, or SDFM.

The name change grew out of reflecting on the work of the nonprofit that serves financial management professionals across the public and private sectors, said CEO Rich Brady for SDFM’s The Business of Defense podcast on Federal News Network.

While doing a deep dive into the brand and its mission, the society’s team came to realize that the ASMC name no longer resonated with its members and was unlikely to connect with future members the society seeks to attract, Brady said.

“Specifically, it was those terms — ‘military’ and ‘comptroller,’ ” he said, “because the vast majority of the people who work in the defense financial management profession today are not in the military, and they’re not comptrollers.”

In truth, this is the organization’s third name change. ASMC began in 1948 as the Society of Military Accountants and Statisticians. It became ASMC in 1955.

Leaning into technology in financial management

“Over the roughly 70 years after that, as the computers of the profession evolved, ASMC continued to evolve,” Brady said. Today, its members range from accountants, budgeteers and auditors to data analysts, system engineers and data scientists.

“This name change, this rebranding, is really intended to be more inclusive of that broader diversity in the defense financial manager community to include those on the corporate side, the commercial side and the government side,” he said.

Brady, who served 32 years in the Marine Corps before joining SDFM, recalled that when he started out in the early 1990s, the job of a comptroller or financial manager involved capturing, recording and reporting financial information.

“Today, we largely have systems that do all of that for us, and they do a very good job that gives us more time as defense financial managers to do higher-value-added activities for our organizations — the data analysis, the data visualizations, the scenario planning, the forecasting — really forward looking for our organizations and not always looking in the rearview mirror just capturing, recording and reporting,” he said. “So again, a highly technical field today compared to what it was just 30 years ago.”

Tree-pronged mission of SDFM

As SDFM continues to evolve programs and services to meet the federal financial management community’s needs, its mission is threefold:

• Promote the education, training and certification of defense financial managers. “We help the community upskill, so that they are up-to-date with the latest technology, and they can provide that support with modern technology and modern ways.”
• Drive financial transformation in the defense sector. “We create this market for the government and commercial to come together, identify opportunities, create solutions, mitigate risks and ultimately create capabilities for our nation’s events.”
• Uphold ethical and professional standards. “The foundation of any profession is being ethical and compliant with all laws and regulations. Because ultimately, we are stewards of the taxpayers’ dollar.”

It’s also critical to keep the work of its 18,000 members front and center: supporting the missions and capabilities — even the combat demands — of the military services and the Defense Department.

“We like to say, ‘Your proximity to the battlefield does not determine your contribution to the fight,’ ” he said. “Everybody in this field — whether you’re out there on the front lines, or you’re in the Pentagon, or you’re a contractor out in Tyson’s Corner — you have the ability to impact what takes place.”

To listen to the full discussion between Federal News Network Publisher Jeffrey Wolinsky SDFM CEO Rich Brady, click the podcast play button below:

Discover more stories about how to thrive as a federal contractor. Find all episodes of The Business of Defense podcast.

The post ASMC becomes SDFM, continues history of evolving with defense financial management first appeared on Federal News Network.