• 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.

In an alert posted to its website, SSA notified the public about the closures. On late Friday afternoon, an SSA spokeswoman told Federal News Network that the agency plans to re-open its field offices for public service on Monday, July 22.

“Staff impacted by the widespread Microsoft and CrowdStrike issues are being brought back online,” the spokeswoman said. “Our phone lines remain operational and many online services at ssa.gov remain available.”

The IT outage is linked to a flawed software update released by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The defect affects computers running Microsoft Windows, effectively shutting them down with what’s referred to as the “blue screen of death.” Crowdstrike says the incident is “not a security incident or cyberattack.” The company also reports that a fix has been deployed.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services also appears to be affected by the outage. A notice on USCIS’s E-Verify website states that “customers calling E-Verify are experiencing long wait times” because “the worldwide Microsoft outage is impacting phone support.” USCIS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A senior Biden administration official told reporters on Friday afternoon that the White House is in “regular contact” with Crowdstrike’s leadership to get updates on the outage and remediation efforts.

“The White House has been convening agencies to assess impacts to the US government’s operations and entities around the country,” the official said. “At this time, our understanding is that flight operations have resumed across the country, although some congestion remains, and 911 centers are able to receive and process calls. We are assessing impact to local hospitals, surface transportation systems, and law enforcement closely and will provide further updates as we learn more. We stand ready to provide assistance as needed.”

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is responsible for overseeing the security of systems across the federal civilian executive branch, said it is working with Crowdstrike, as well as federal, state, local and critical infrastructure partners, “to fully assess and address these issues.”

“Of note, CISA has observed threat actors taking advantage of this incident for phishing and other malicious activity,” the cyber agency wrote in an alert Friday. “CISA urges organizations and individuals to remain vigilant and only follow instructions from legitimate sources. CISA recommends organizations to remind their employees to avoid clicking on phishing emails or suspicious links.”

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), chairwoman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee’s cybersecurity, IT and government innovation subcommittee, said the panel has requested briefings on the outage from Crowdstrike, Microsoft and CISA .

“We’re also trying to determine the breadth of impact, especially across the federal government at this time,” Mace posted to X on Friday afternoon.

While the outage forced airlines to cancel and delay thousands of flights Friday morning, a Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman said TSA has not been directly affected by the IT incident.

“TSA is monitoring the IT system issues throughout the transportation system in partnership with stakeholders and other agencies,” the spokeswoman told FNN. “There has not been any impact to TSA operations.”

In posts on X, the Federal Aviation Administration said it was working with U.S. airlines as they resume operations.

“Currently FAA operations are not impacted by the global IT issue,” the FAA posted. “We continue to monitor the situation closely.”

Meanwhile, a Department of Veterans Affairs spokesman said the VA is “not aware of any impact on health care operations or any adverse impact on veterans who get their care from VA.”

“We will continue to monitor this situation, and we encourage any Veterans who need support – including those who may be impacted by challenges at non-VA health care facilities – to call 1-800-MYVA411 or visit their local VA medical center for assistance,” VA Press Secretary Terrence Hayes said in a statement. “We are standing by and ready to help.”

The U.S. Postal Service on Friday also said it has not experienced any immediate impacts from the IT outage.

“The Postal Service was not directly impacted by the global IT outage,” USPS spokesman David Walton said. “We are aware of impacts to some of our third-party vendors, however, this has not impacted our ability to move mail and packages for the American people.”

Officials highlight IT consolidation risks

Anne Neuberger, deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology, said the Crowdstrike outage showcased the “risks of consolidation.”

“The irony of this morning is that a major international cybersecurity company was impacted,” Neuberger said during an event hosted by the Aspen Institute on Friday. “So, we need to really think about our digital resilience – not just in the systems we run, but in the globally connected security systems, the risks of consolidation, how we deal with that consolidation, and how we ensure that if an incident does occur, it can be contained and we can recover quickly.”

In a letter to acting Defense Department Chief Information Officer Leslie Beavers, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) requested a briefing on any potential impacts to DoD networks by July 26.

“This outage is a warning that consolidation and dependence on one provider can be catastrophic, which is why business and government IT systems should have requisite redundancies in place that promote resiliency, as well as competition and innovation,” Schmitt wrote.

This is an evolving story, and we will continue to update it.

(With additional reporting from Jory Heckman)

The post Crowdstrike outage: SSA shutters offices, other agency impacts 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.

DoD’s recent 90-day review of the NBIS system has led to a new 18-month roadmap for the software development project. But Milancy Harris, acting under secretary of defense for intelligence and security, said her office and the under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment are engaged in a “month-long” process of re-baselining the project.

“We’re looking to make sure that we can use what has been built,” Harris said during a July 10 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing. “We are exploring exactly what needs to happen going forward to ensure we meet the full level of capability that is expected from this system. At this time, we are in the process of refining exactly our understanding of that timeline.”

Harris said the new documentation will include an independent cost estimate.

During the hearing, Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) called the NBIS delays a “disaster.” The next-generation background investigation system still potentially faces years of development, even though it was originally planned to be delivered in 2019.

“If we don’t get NBIS right, the whole security clearance reform process crumbles,” Warner said.

NBIS is a lynchpin in the White House-led “Trusted Workforce 2.0” personnel vetting reform initiative. The goal of the overarching initiative is to overhaul and modernize the federal government’s vetting process, including by bringing most agencies under one background investigation system.

But the Government Accountability Office in recent years has reported on significant challenges with NBIS, including funding shortfalls due to shifting priorities at DCSA, as well as an unreliable schedule and cost estimate.

Background investigation system requirements

During last week’s Senate hearing, lawmakers and witnesses also focused on challenges with how the NBIS program office managed requirements for the background investigation system.

“The requirements were outlined in Trusted Workforce 2.0,” Harris said. “I think what we had was a breakdown in how those requirements were being managed into technical requirements for the development and how we were taking account of the delays in that process. And that is something that we are seeking to remedy immediately with more proactive oversight.”

The Pentagon has recently elevated the acquisition decision authority for NBIS from the DCSA director to the under secretary for acquisition and sustainment, while the program sponsor is now the under secretary for intelligence and security.

Meanwhile, new DCSA Director David Cattler has said getting NBIS back on track is one of his top priorities. DCSA also manages about 95% of the federal government’s background investigation cases.

During the Senate hearing, Cattler acknowledged that while the original NBIS requirements were achievable, DCSA did not have a “firm understanding of the complexity, of the technical features, nor how exactly to approach those and accomplish them.”

“We’ve brought in some new people,” Cattler said. “We know where our gaps are in the skill sets that we need to hire on the government side, we’re working with the contractor as well on actions need to be taken there. And we’re also evaluating the requirements baseline.”

The post Troubled background investigation system still under review at Pentagon first appeared on Federal News Network.

Federal agencies sought to transfer nearly 1 million cubic feet of records to the National Archives and federal records centers ahead of a landmark electronic records deadline.

On July 1, the National Archives and Records Administration stopped accepting transfer requests for analog records, including paper. Going forward, agencies will only be able to transfer electronic records, with some limited exceptions.

The passing of the June 30 deadline marks a key moment in the federal government’s shift to digital processes.

“The deadline has been the focus for so many agency federal records management programs, it’s sometimes hard to believe we’ve made it to the other side,” Lisa Haralampus, director of records management policy and outreach at NARA, said in an interview with Federal News Network.

The impending deadline sparked a surge of transfer requests, as agencies sought to shed paper and analog records.

Over the past year, Haralampus said agencies made more than 1,000 direct offers to the Archives, representing approximately 65,000 cubic feet of records. Direct offers are permanent records considered to be historically valuable. They’re directly “accessioned” into the Archives. “Not many records” clear that threshold, Haralampus said, and the amount of direct offers made ahead of the June 30 deadline is “a higher number than normal.”

Meanwhile, agencies also submitted a collective 40,000 transfer requests for records to be stored at one of NARA’s 18 Federal Records Centers over the past year. Those requests represent a cumulative 930,000 cubic feet of records. Records are stored at the FRCs until final disposition.

“The surge was real,” Haralampus said.

While the deadline for submitting analog transfer requests has passed, the Archives and the records centers will still be taking paper records “for a year or two” as NARA officials work through the backlogs of requests, Haralampus said.

But in the future, most records transfer requests will be measured in bytes rather than cubic feet.

“It is exciting and scary to realize at some point within our careers . . . we will have moved to fully electronic records management,” Haralampus said.

The move away from paper

The shift to electronic record-keeping has been more than a decade in the making. The Obama administration issued requirements for agencies to eliminate paper “to the fullest extent possible” in a 2012 directive.

In 2019, the Trump administration set a deadline of Dec. 31, 2022, for when NARA would stop accepting paper records from agencies.

“The federal government spends hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and thousands of hours annually to create, use, and store Federal records in analog (paper and other non-electronic) formats,” the June 2019 memo from the Office of Management and Budget stated. “Maintaining large volumes of analog records requires dedicated resources, management attention, and security investments that should be applied to more effectively managing electronic records.”

At the time, many agencies were confidently transitioning from paper to digital records. The memo sparked a flurry of additional digitization activities across government.

But COVID-19 tripped up those plans. And even without the pandemic, many agencies said they would have struggled to digitize their legacy records in time due to resource constraints.

After one-third of agencies signaled they wouldn’t meet the 2022 deadline, the Biden administration extended the cutoff date to June 30 of this year.

NARA exceptions to e-records deadline

Even after NARA clears through the backlog of requests, agencies will still be able to transfer analog records in some cases.

Haralampus said NARA has so far approved 24 exceptions to the requirements, with 20 exception requests still under consideration.

In addition to NARA no longer accepting analog record transfer requests, agencies were also required to shut down their own records storage facilities.

But Haralampus said NARA granted an exception for the FBI to continue operating its Central Records Complex in Winchester, Va. “It makes sense,” she said. “The government has invested so much. And those records are of such a sensitive nature.”

In another case, NARA approved the Environmental Protection Agency’s exception request to continue operating its new National Digitization Centers.

In addition to granting specific agency requests, NARA is also finalizing a government-wide exception for official personnel folders and employee medical files. That means agencies will still be able to transfer paper personnel records to NARA’s National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) for the foreseeable future. Haralampus said NARA will soon release more guidance on managing federal personnel records.

And even though some agencies will still be managing paper and analog records, Haralampus said the continuing work to digitize legacy records and adopt electronic processes shows a continuing commitment to the e-records goals.

“If we as the government are as a whole are getting down to talking about exceptions for specific agencies and specific record series, that means the big picture has been taken care of,” she said. “Big things have moved in the right direction with business processes, workflows, how we’re managing all of our records electronically.”

The post NARA sees requests to transfer nearly 1M cubic feet of records ahead of deadline 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.

The impact of the U.S. Digital Service is difficult to measure in real numbers or data sometimes.

Sure, USDS’ work with the Social Security Administration to improve its website and customer satisfaction saved an estimated $285 million over five years in infrastructure costs.

But the true measure of USDS comes in ways that don’t always lend itself to numbers, said Mina Hsiang, the administrator of the USDS.

“Every single day that I work with each of our agencies, we get to see the tremendous shifts as a result of small coherent interdisciplinary teams of feds, USDSers and contractors working together can really make these changes. I think it moves everyone’s frame of expectation for how things should be able to shift right,” Hsiang said on Ask the CIO. “The people who rely on Medicaid for their health care and the extent to which the continuity of our health care can sometimes be subjected to bugs and small changes in technical systems that aren’t what the states intended, but aren’t the kind of thing that most of us get to see because technology lives inside of a black box. It is just really nice to be able to share the human, the efficiency impacts of a lot of the work we get to do. So being able to help states preserve continuity of healthcare coverage for 5 million people who really deserved it is an incredibly meaningful number to be able to put a pin on something that feels like a very wonky, like code change, and working through of like technical requirements in collaboration with policy.”

USDS’ annual report tries to detail its impact through stories, examples and other approaches than pure data.

Hsiang said just because cost savings or avoidance data isn’t obvious, it doesn’t mean the organization impact isn’t real to dozens of agencies and millions of citizens.

One example of USDS’ impact is the Digital IT Acquisition Professional Training Program (DITAP). It has trained more than 900 federal acquisition workers across more than 50 agencies on how to buy and manage technology acquisitions. The Office of Federal Procurement Policy had set a 2022 deadline to get all contracting officers who buy technology trained. It’s unclear if OFPP and agencies met that deadline, but DITAP is well regarded as a success in the community.

USDS collaborated on new hiring program

“It has a major hands-on component where the students come in and work on digital services programs and procurements with us sometimes and with agencies. It’s a really practical education, and it means that there are DITAP graduates that we get to work with across government who can be doing a better job of working with contractors and vendors on building out digital services,” she said. “DITAP is a great program, and we are actually refreshing and continuing to update some of that curriculum right now.”

OFPP USDS launched the DITAP program in 2015 through Challenge.gov. The two agencies and the Office of Personnel Management recently built on the concept of DITAP with another challenge to improve how agencies hire and train technology workers.

“USDS, PPM, and OPM aim to create a specialized and immersive training and development program for federal hiring professionals so that they can better understand the rapidly-changing market for technology talent and learn how to implement and scale modern practices for recruiting, implementing hiring authorities and flexibilities, and candidate management at their agencies,” the agencies stated in the challenge.

USDS, OPM and OFPP are about to move into Phase 3 where the Phase 2 winner, Mediabarn, will receive $100,000 to implement at pilot.

$10M rescission ‘disappointing’

Hsiang said DITAP and other examples of how USDS doesn’t just come into the agency, but ensures there is a long-tail of success.

“We never just come in and like do the work for an agency and then leave, both because that wouldn’t work literally at all as there’s nothing about that that would be tenable. They own and run their systems and are the key decision makers for the long term. We ended up doing always in our programs is coming in building an integrated team with agency and their vendors and really running the program together to improve the digital services,” she said. “Through the course of working together, there’s a tremendous amount of knowledge that’s transferred. We give them a hands on training and how to build digital services, and a lot of them have a lot of experience so some of it is just updates to some pieces of IT. But we definitely focus very much on leaving agencies with the tools that they need to continue doing this work.”

Of course that work will become more difficult the rest of this fiscal year as Congress rescinded $10 million from the $200 million in funding USDS received through the American Rescue Plan Act.

Hsiang said the rescission, of course, was disappointing, but it will not prevent USDS from doing its work.

“It’s something that was broadcasted early so we can do some planning around it. Ultimately, this impacts and impedes our ability to invest, particularly in some of the major programs that we were working to update and improve for all of the agencies,” she said. “This will result in a slight decrease in our program for interagency hiring initiatives and supporting agencies in that way.”

The post USDS measures its impact in longevity, not just raw numbers 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 Army has a plan to no longer “fight the network.”

Through the Unified Network Operations (UNO), initiative, the Army wants to create an agile, software-defined network that is easy to set up and use. This is the opposite of what soldiers currently must deal with then setting up a tactical network that requires on-premise hardware, cables and unique knowledge and skillsets.

The Army is laying the groundwork for this new network set up under UNO in a new draft request for proposals that Lt. Col. Keith Jordan, the product manager for Tactical Cyber and NetOps, in the Army’s Program Executive Office Command Control Communications-Tactical (PEO-C3T) said will bring efficiency, ease of use and, most importantly, meet the needs of commanders more readily.

“There’s a time component of how long it takes to make the network operate. That’s a concern. But also, it’s a manpower issue. It’s specialized training and skills that our signal soldiers are required to have in order to make all these different components of network work, both from a hardware perspective, a cabling, a software interoperability issue perspective and troubleshooting. So there’s a lot of different factors that the soldiers have to go through to make the network work,” Jordan said in an exclusive interview with Federal News Network. “When they are having to do those tasks across multiple items, one-by-one, it does take a lot more time. And depending on a unit, you’re going to always have a degree of soldiers that have the right requisite training and the right requisite experience. So there’s always a little bit of inefficiency built into that model. What we’re looking to do through this is to really improve that inefficiency, and make it much more a much simpler task for those soldiers, especially if we’re not fully manned that at each unit to do that mission.”

PEO-C3T has been leading the UNO effort for the better part of two years and the draft RFP is the second piece of a three-pronged effort to create this new software-defined network.

Jordan said the draft solicitation, for which responses are due by July 17, will help inform its long term plans to bring in commercial technologies and take advantage of cloud services. PEO-C3T expects to issue a final RFP for this multiple award indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract in early 2025 and make awards in early 2026.

In the meantime, Jordan said the Army will soon award “several” other transaction agreements (OTAs) to examine prototypes of what UNO may look like.

“The Army acquisition executive last year decided that UNO would utilize the software acquisition pathway. This is a new pathway under the adaptive acquisition framework that really is focused on how we manage, contract and deliver software capability to the Army. It’s different than what we might typically see under the some of the older pathways. This really is a revolution of thinking in the Army of how we recognize that software is different than hardware and it needs to be procured differently,” he said on Ask the CIO. “Really, what that does is it allows us to deliver capability incrementally versus like a big bang where the product is done all at once. We recognize that this will not be done right off the bat, you’ll get updates to the capability over time and each time we make an update, the capability will get more and more mature, more and more capable. The whole idea is we’re able to rapidly make these updates versus in the past where it may take a really long time to make an update. We want to update very often based on feedback in whatever theater we might be operating in.”

Army testing prototypes through OTA

Through the OTA process, Jordan said vendors will demonstrate SDN capabilities that can bring together several disparate systems and handle a large number of users over a several month period.

He said the vendors will demonstrate the SDN capabilities in the lab and in the field so soldiers can provide real-time feedback and the contractors can add or change the network as required.

Jordan said “usability” and “simplicity” will be key concepts that the Army wants to see in the prototypes.

“We think by doing that we’re going to really get down to a good vendor, and then following that, we’re going to pursue a FAR-based contract that will allow a lot more vendors to get in the mix and be able to deliver various capabilities,” he said. “We don’t know how many vendors we’re going to end up with so that’s why the window [for timing] is a little bit difficult. But we think between late 2024 and 2025, we’ll be able to complete that [OTA award] process. Then as we go into the prototype phase, the idea would be that’s a little bit of a longer phase because there’ll be a downselect. We’re not going to take the same amount of vendors from the lab to the field. We’re going to take those vendors out to the field and that’ll be a little bit longer because what we do want to do is see their agile development process and we want to be able to see as a soldier provides feedback to a particular company, we want to see him make the changes that we’re looking for. It’s not just about the technology, it’s also going to be about the company’s ability to manage the process.”

Jordan said the network of the future will depend on agile and DevSecOps process, where signal soldiers will not have to have special skillsets.

The future network also will enable commanders to make faster and better decisions as data will be easier to get and use.

“We’ve had to fight the network for a long time. This will help us be able to get the network up and running efficiently, tailored to our mission needs and operationalize it,” Jordan said. “For industry, there’s going to be lots of opportunities inside UNO to deliver unique and value added capabilities to the network. We’re really excited because there is so many opportunities for businesses, both small and large, to deliver capability inside the network, around things that we haven’t even thought of yet that we may want. As long as our vendors are able to operate in a modular open system approach, and that we’re able to integrate capability into that architecture in a rapid and easy to do methodology, we’re really going to be successful.”

The post With UNO, Army intends to stop battling its own network 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.

No, he’s not taking a swipe at the Dutch and their almost 800 year old tradition of creating clogs.

Rather, Skinner, whose tenure as DISA director will be ending as soon as the Senate confirms his replacement, Maj. Gen. Paul Stanton, who currently leads the Army’s Cyber Center of Excellence, is talking about wooden shoes as a metaphor for IT services offered through the DoDNet. The DoDNet is the network consolidation initiative under the $11 billion contract award under the Defense Enclave Services and Fourth Estate optimization initiatives.

“We take a best of breed offering, so let’s take identity, for example, or let’s take networking or let’s take applications, and we’re developing an application that is best for the enterprise. A lot of times services, and even some agencies, have, they say, unique requirements that they want to make sure that as part of this. Well, whenever you add a unique requirement to an enterprise solution, it’s suboptimizes that enterprise solution,” Skinner said during a press conference after speaking at the AFCEA TechNet Cyber conference on June 26. “So really, what we’re saying is, you have to change your processes to leverage this environment. Our focus, as a combat support agency, has to be on the combatant commands, who are the warfighters. So our focus is on them and the agencies because that’s what we’ve been tasked and that’s what our mission is. I would love to have the services consume more DISA services and capabilities, that would be great because then as the services and the service components are supporting those combatant commands, they are all leveraging the same capabilities.”

Skinner said the unique requirements that the military services say they need are those wooden shoes, where no two pairs are the same.

DISA taking on software licensing

A prime example of this wooden shoe problem is how the Defense Department set up the unclassified version of Office 365. Across all of DoD, there are 14 different and distinct tenants.

Skinner said DoD is not making that same mistake with the classified or secret version of O365 where everyone will use one instance.

“If you’re a Marine, for example, that is a working at the Marine Corps headquarters and then you go to Cyber Command, and you go to a joint tenant, you have to move your data and move your stuff to this new tenant versus it all being in one tenant already,” he said. “As we lay this framework of cloud identity, networking applications, it’s really for the greater good, and I would offer sometimes the organization’s need to change your process, even it’s just a little bit, to consume it versus saying, we have this unique requirement that and we’re going to use that as a as a reason for not supporting an enterprise capability.”

The other challenge is the cost of licensing the software in the distinct tenants. That issue came about under the DISA Defense Enterprise Office Solutions (DEOS) contract where software licenses could cost as much as 20% higher.

DISA is leading an effort to address this higher cost of software licenses as well as part of this overall DoDNet effort.

“I’m a big proponent of DoD purchasing power that if you’re using, we’ll just say Microsoft, for example, everybody should be paying the same price for the same capabilities, whether it’s Microsoft or ServiceNow [or any other provider]. But from a department standpoint, we have more purchasing power when we’re all aligned” he said. “Same thing to me from a collaboration interoperability standpoint, the more that we’re leveraging the same capabilities, the easier it is to be more proficient and quicker. If I’m a soldier, sailor, airman, Marine or guardian, who is a network operator, for example, and I’m going from a joint position to a service position and back to a joint position, if you’re using common capabilities, then you can be proficient faster as you go into that new position.”

DoDNet ready for expansion

Skinner said the DoD CIO’s board is working on three or four enterprise licenses deals to show the services the potential savings as a way to gain some traction for this effort.

“The other thing that we’re working with the department at the DoD level, is to say, ‘hey, for licenses, why don’t we just take it off the top?’ So instead of a service having to take it [out of their budget,] why don’t we just take it off the top and therefore services don’t have to worry about it?” Skinner said. “Well, as a service, I’m actually paying more than what I did before because they didn’t get as good a deal. But because I’m part of this enterprise license, let’s just take it off the top. So that’s another area that we’re working within the department.”

In the meantime, DISA continues to expand DoDNet and its capabilities.

Miguel Cerritos-Aracen, the DoDNet operations chief for DISA, said during an AFCEA TechNet Cyber panel that they are ready to expand beyond the three current customers, DISA, the Defense Technical Information Center and the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA).

Cerritos-Aracen said about he expects the 30,000 current users of common IT services on the unclassified and secret tenants to increase to more than 300,000 in the next year or so.

“Right now, we’re working with, for example, the Defense Media Activity, the Defense Contract Audit Agency, the Defense Contract Management Agency, Defense Microelectronics Activity and others,” he said. “That’s also why it’s so important that we take advantage of things of new technologies like automation and things of that nature. Our latest partners have actually brought in more solutions that have removed some of the legacy technologies of our environment, and actually allowed us to be on the precipice to be more advanced. In addition to that, some of the other achievements that we did just last year, as an example, is we did retire some legacy environments. For example, in DISA we had a corporate network called DISANet. I actually put to bed because we were able to move on into DoDNet.”

DISA’s Thunderdome included in DoDNet

Additionally, Cerritos-Aracen said by moving to DoDNet, its customers are now using Windows 11 across both unclassified and classified platforms, and are using new applications through O365 that they previously didn’t have access to and allows for more collaboration on the secret side.

Chad Buechel, a vice president for Leidos, which is the lead contractor for DoDNet, said at the end of May or early June, DoDNet reached initial operating capability for some of those new technologies and capabilities, such as virtual desktop-as-a-service and unified end point management, which lets DISA more effectively manage customer end points and protect them from cyber threats.

He said it’s all about making it easier for users to migrate and then use DoDNet.

DISA expects to continue to expand DoDNet to the combatant commands starting in fiscal 2026.

Cerritos-Aracen said DISA also is integrating its zero trust architecture under Thunderdome as part of DoDNet to include a secure access service edge (SASE) and software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) capabilities.

The post DISA’s Skinner not a fan of ‘wooden shoe’ IT services first appeared on Federal News Network.

Of course, modernization requires investment. A custom agency-owned application will take a large in-house development effort and have perhaps ten years of useful life. Alternatively, sourcing low-code/no-code vendor software is faster to implement but less customizable to agency-specific needs. There are also costs to update software to comply with new regulations, and the need to keep up with rapidly changing technology.

Most agency IT leaders will look at these investments in terms of cost savings. While reducing costs is never a bad thing, it is far more important to estimate the mission benefits and business savings that are the primary reasons for IT investments. REI has found in multiple cases that performance improvement and its mission impact are where the biggest returns lie, usually far exceeding the operating savings or the capital expense.

Three steps to rationalizing investment

Focusing on how to maximize those benefits should be part of any IT modernization effort. As IT leaders are planning for future requirements, three often-overlooked steps will help prepare them for measuring and justifying the right level of investment:

1. Understand the current budget environment. Do some homework to see which modernization projects are meeting the bar for acquisition, which are not, and why. Be sure to include acquisitions through special programs like the Technology Modernization Fund, the Information Technology Oversight and Reform (ITOR) initiative, and other available innovation programs.
2. Assess from where mission impact and return on investment (ROI) actually result. This must be an intentional effort; presenting a case for a new investment will be far easier with some supporting evidence rather than having no idea where ROI will be found and no way to measure it.
3. Factor in improvements in quality, productivity and customer service. While this must include updating existing technology, don’t forget to calculate automating processes that are currently manual. All of these inputs equate to mission impact. While they may depart from typical IT measures, quantifying them will go a long way to supporting the case for a given investment.

Expand thinking around ROI measurement

IT leaders who have not previously considered prioritizing new investment this way may be unsure of how to start. Looking at already-completed projects can offer a blueprint. Consider just one example of a real agency program:

A department within Agency A identifies and certifies whether or not individual claimants are legitimate victims of a particular type of crime. Department personnel used spreadsheets to collect and track claimant data, then an analyst would decide if an individual was entitled to benefits or not.

Automating data collection and tracking allowed on-demand access for the entire immediate team, an obvious benefit of introducing technology. However, it also enabled a dozen Agency A components to more easily coordinate with Agency B, an integral part of the justice system.

In quantifiable terms, Agency A was able to serve twice as many victims in the year after implementation vs. the year before, without increasing budget or staffing. While that was likely in part because more people were being victimized, it was also because the agency was far more productive. Additionally, the time to victim certification was reduced by half (from six to three weeks). This already shows high value ROI from the IT system modernization.

Taking it a step further, if all of Agency A’s staff is needed to serve 1000 victims, with their annual salary costing roughly $50 million, there is additional savings in not hiring another $50 million worth of staff to serve twice as many customers. Ultimately, the $50 million in savings produced a $50 million ROI on a $1 million IT investment — a 50-fold return. Even better, some personnel could be repurposed to another program that was short-staffed. There was no need to reduce the workforce. Everyone won.

Beyond Agency A, the IT investment eliminated the need for a duplicate system at Agency B, which was now willing to accept Agency A’s victim certification. The lesson is that the case for investment can also benefit from exploring opportunities to reduce redundancy of partner efforts.

Productivity improvements from IT investment will not only measurably improve critical mission impacts of customer experience and satisfaction; there are also bottom line savings. For example, automation can reduce or eliminate costly manual intervention to help customers who fail to successfully transact for agency services on the first try. This is particularly important given federal mandates to transform customer experience and service delivery.

Transparency elevates ROI

Performance measures are integral to estimating actual savings from IT investment.  While some IT leaders hesitate to reveal full potential savings to their budget officer due to internal sensitivities, practically speaking, transparency usually pays off. Preparing this level of data and insights arms IT leaders to share it with contracting personnel if and when they need to. Not having it eliminates the option.

With IT modernization a never-ending quest, IT leaders will ultimately be well served by understanding the full scope of mission impact that their investments will produce for their agency and for their citizen customers.

Jeff Myers is senior director at REI Systems.

The post Mission impact: The critical factor in IT modernization ROI first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Technology Modernization Fund Board’s $18 million investment in the State Department’s generative artificial intelligence program is just scratching the surface.

The board is expecting a rush of proposals for AI projects, particularly those that are under $6 million dollars or under 18 months in total length.

Harrison Smith, a member of the Technology Modernization Fund board, said since the call went out to agencies earlier this year for AI proposals or ideas, the board has received about 100 “expressions of interest.”

“The one piece that’s a little, a little different there is that the board has allowed for streamlined expressions of interest from agencies. We have to work through the process, reach out and talk to the entities,” Smith said in an interview with Federal News Network. “But honestly, the administration has been very clear. We have an obligation in the TMF and, as part of that, we have to the harness the power of artificial intelligence for good while protecting people from its risks. I believe strongly that the TMF is one of the ways to do that.”

The board’s streamlined expressions of interest approach, as well as the changes to the repayment structure, has caused a 10-fold increase in the number of proposals agencies submitted to the board.

Smith said part of the reason is the $1 billion in funding the TMF received from the American Rescue Plan Act, but another part is because the board and program management office has done more to educate and help agencies.

New  executive director for TMF office

To that end, the General Services Administration named Larry Bafundo as the permanent executive director of the TMF PMO yesterday.

Katy Kale, GSA’s deputy administrator, announced his promotion to staff in an email that highlighted his “thoughtful and strategic leadership that has set up the TMF team for future success.”

Bafundo returned to GSA in January to be deputy executive director and acting executive director of the TMF program management office, replacing Raylene Yung. Kale said in the email obtained by Federal News Network, that Bafundo has provided. The TMF Board has made nine awards worth more than $168 million since January.

The latest awards went to the Federal Election Commission for $8.8 million to modernize its FECFile applications, which is running on software from 1997, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Education for $5.86 million to modernize the websites and other online tools for BIE-funded schools in Tribal communities, and to the Energy Department for $17 million to modernize its human resources IT systems by moving to a software-as-a-service platform.

While none of these three awards focus on AI, the board expects to continue to review and award proposals seeking to implement the emerging technology.

Educating agencies on AI proposals

That is why State’s award in May is expected to be the first of several.

“The TMF call for AI and GenAI proposals, specifically calls out mission enabling approaches. This idea of we want to be able to test in certain areas to understand what might actually work, but if you can get to actual use cases that are helpful, like in the Department of State’s instance, it’s a great thing. It really drives the mission and enabling aspect of technology,” Smith said. “Everyone likes that flashy tool, but one that actually helps the Department of State actually just go through and operate its more than 270 diplomatic posts worldwide where there is a ton of data that comes in is really the question that the proposal answers. How is the Department of State going to be able to empower its global staff to work faster and easier, and with better information?”

One way the board is trying to refine agency proposals, and especially for those in the AI area, is through holding “office hours.”

Smith said agencies submit an “expression of interest,” which is an email about how they want to use the capabilities.

“Then you have an opportunity to talk to the TMF PMO. That’s an area where the board and the PMO have really started to lean in on because those conversations about ‘Hey, could you make it look like this?’ or ‘Hey, what about that?’ and ‘We need this type of repayment.’ Those have reinforced what we are trying to do,” he said. “I personally have spent a good amount of time talking to folks about how are you going to make this work, what are your procurement challenges, is this an existing procurement or are you going to try to do a new one? How are you going to engage with industry to make sure you’ve got the best outcomes? There’s a lot there already but we’ve really continued to lean into that because it’s shown a lot of benefits based on our feedback from the agencies.”

The post AI ‘expressions of interest’ flood into TMF Board first appeared on Federal News Network.

The lawsuit claims VA’s new Oracle-Cerner EHR doesn’t work with assistive devices, such as screen readers that allow visually impaired users to access information on a computer screen.

Laurette Santos, a licensed social worker who’s worked at the VA for over a decade, is leading the lawsuit, which she filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia last month.

Santos works as a Visual Impairment Services Team coordinator for the VA Medical Center in White City, Oregon. It’s one of six VA sites currently using the new EHR. Full deployment of the EHR would bring the system to more than a hundred VA locations.

Santos said in an interview that she provides therapeutic counseling to veterans who are experiencing vision loss or blindness.

“Any disability is difficult, but blindness is particularly isolating. My veterans, mostly who are visually impaired or legally blind, are older,” she said Tuesday. “So they’ve experienced seeing, and now they’re experiencing loss, bit by bit, and it’s very difficult for them to transition,” Santos said. “It is critical that they have a bridge from where they are, to where they want to go.”

Santos understands what many of these veterans are feeling. She’s legally blind from a condition called retinitis pigmentosa, which allows her to perceive light, but she’s been unable to read text since 1988.

Santos said she uses the VA’s EHR to gather data from veterans’ medical records — such as their diagnosis, what items they have received from other VIST coordinators, and their particular challenges.

“It could be anywhere to not having a family, to being alone and blind, to lots of medical complications — physical, mental, emotional, combined with blindness,” she said.

Santos relies on the screen-reader software Job Access With Speech (JAWS), which reads out loud the text that’s on a computer screen. Santos said she’s been using JAWS for more than 20 years.

When the VA hired Santos as a VIST coordinator in 2019, her facility was still using the VA’s legacy Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS), which is also called VistA.

VA’s legacy EHR is compatible with the screen-reader technology Santos uses, and allows her to independently perform the essential functions of her job, with only limited assistance from a sighted assistant.

“In my work, JAWS was very effective,” she said. “I could connect with other providers, which is a huge part of health care for veterans — that support of people who work with them to make sure all of their needs are met, such as pharmacy, social work, and primary care. I need access to all of those, I can no longer do that independently.”

StatNews first reported details of the lawsuit last Friday. VA Press Secretary Terrence Hayes told Federal News Network that the VA is unable to comment on pending litigation.

Federal News Network also reached Cerner’s parent company Oracle for comment.

‘They took my eyes away’

The VA launched the new EHR in White City in June 2022, but Santos said she raised accessibility concerns before the launch that the department didn’t resolve.

“My screen-reading software cannot read anything in the Oracle Cerner platform,” Santos said. “I can’t even sign in,” Santos said. “Essentially, they rendered me disabled again. They took my eyes away. My screen reader was my eyes.”

Before the go-live, Santos said Cerner personnel asked her to provide feedback on the accessibility features back in 2019.

“It was requested of me to see how it interacted, which I did. And I immediately told them it doesn’t work. The codes that were written did not even recognize that there was another software in there,” she said.

According to the lawsuit, VA’s contract with Cerner required the EHR system to be compatible with accessibility-related software and assistive technology devices, including screen readers, screen magnifiers and speech recognition software.

Eve Hill, a partner with the law firm Brown Goldstein & Levy, which is representing Santos in the lawsuit, said the VA failed to ensure that Cerner was compliant with Section 508 before entering into the contract for its procurement and after its rollout.

“The fault here legally lies with the VA. Section 508 requires the VA to only purchase, use and develop accessible technology,” Hill said. “Anything since ages ago, when 508 was passed, they have to only buy things that are accessible. And they went and bought the Cerner system without it being accessible. And they might say, ‘We didn’t know,’ but they’re obligated to know.”

The lawsuit claims the Cerner EHR requires users to operate a computer mouse, which Santos and other blind employees are unable to use. The VA was also made aware that all training simulating the Cerner EHR was not Section 508 compliant.

Between November 2020 and November 2021, the VA’s Section 508 Office conducted several audits and found the Cerner EHR was inaccessible.

The lawsuit claims the Cerner EHR has “disastrous consequences” for Santos and her ability to do her job independently.

“I’ve gone through a million feelings, from really being angry to being really depressed and really hurt,” she said. “I knew that I would get what I needed and be a very successful employee, which I was. And then, in a blink of an eye, it was gone.”

Santos says she can no longer independently complete her clinician job duties, such as receiving and making referrals, or placing orders for devices, software, and other items for veterans.  Instead, she must delegate these tasks to sighted employees.

“Delegating such tasks, particularly to non-licensed staff, potentially jeopardizes Ms. Santos’s clinical license,” the lawsuit states.

According to the lawsuit, the VA allows Santos to keep using the legacy CPRS, but in a read-write-only format with assistance from sighted individuals.

“This response does not allow Ms. Santos to independently perform the essential functions of her job, nor has it allowed her to handle anything close to the workload she previously completed,” the lawsuit states.

Santos said the new EHR is also presenting new challenges to veterans with visual disabilities.

“My veterans, consequently, are suffering, because they can no longer interact with this platform, either, and that’s my largest concern,” Santos said. “Yes, this is really frustrating for me, as an employee. But my goal is to be able to provide the veterans that I work with bridges that can help them transition into a different way of living. One of the things that I was able to do with them was let them know, ‘You can do this. We can do this, and I can help you.’ Well, I don’t feel like that anymore.”

“They’re depending on me to be able to do an excellent job and to support them in their endeavors to climb these militants that are theirs right now. And I can’t do it,” she added.

The VA is currently in a “reset” period and has put all future go-lives on the Oracle-Cerner EHR on hold until it addresses persistent problems at sites already using the system.

“I would really like to see them work on the 508 compliance. However, no new codes have been written for 508. They’re busy trying to put out the fires in the rest of the system,” Santos said.

The post VA employee files EHR lawsuit, claiming lack of accessibility features first appeared on Federal News Network.