From the moment in 2007 that presidential candidate Barack Obama announced his intention, if elected, to appoint the first U.S. CTO, analysts and commentators began speculating as to the wide range of authorities this role could potentially involve.

Would the CTO oversee technology within the White House? Help the president set policy? Bring “innovation” to executive branch agencies? What is a chief technology officer, anyway?

Thirteen years, two administrations and four U.S. CTOs later, a look through the projects pursued by this office reveals overlapping themes but malleable focal points. If there’s a general statement to be made about the job, it’s that a CTO’s agenda depends on the timing of their arrival, the political landscape and the individual’s fundamental philosophy about the role of technology in society. And while the title is borrowed from the corporate world, the actual job description is a lot more government-native — and it remains adjustable according to the priorities of a given administration at a given time.

Of course, the role, like all presidential appointments, may soon be taken over by a new administration and a new individual. Former Democratic candidate Andrew Yang, for example, has been suggested as a possible Biden administration CTO. What this will look like remains to be seen. But, perhaps a look back at the history of the role will give it some context.

Aneesh Chopra sets the scene (2009-2012)

Aneesh Chopra didn’t think he was lining up to become the first U.S. CTO when he joined the Obama transition team and helped to develop a job description for the role.

“I assumed it was going to go to a Silicon Valley luminary,” Chopra told FedScoop in an interview last fall. “I was hopeful I could join the administration as a CTO role for the Department of Health and Human Services.”

Still, he says, it was a “pleasant surprise” to get the offer.

While on the campaign trail, Obama made the pitch for a U.S. CTO role as part of his pro-innovation agenda. “In the 21st century, our economic success will depend not only on economic analysis but also on technological sophistication and direct experience in this powerful engine of our economy,” campaign material from the time reads. Obama also positioned the CTO as a government transparency driver — an administration official who would use technology to solicit feedback from citizens and use it to improve government functions.

It was Chopra, though, who operationalized this campaign concept and developed the three key responsibilities he says characterize the role. First, the U.S. CTO should think about how to apply technology, data and innovation to solve for economic growth. Second, the CTO should apply this same set of tools to the other “national priorities” of the administration. And third, the CTO should advocate for and support opening up government data for use by the private sector.

One big definitional element to Chopra’s tenure involved setting out the responsibilities of the new CTO vis-à-vis the federal chief information officer. The CTO is an assistant to the president embedded in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, while the CIO is a position within the Office of Management and Budget. To Chopra, it was very obvious that the CTO should complement but not compete with the Federal CIO. So while Obama’s initial pitch for the CTO position made more allusions to the kind of inside-government work that is done by the CIO’s office, Chopra decided to decouple the jobs.

“On a simple basis, you know, inside-outside,” Chopra said, describing the turf of each role. “The role of technology inside the government would be led by the CIO, the role of technology outside the government would be let by the CTO, and then a lot of collaboration at the interface between the inside and the outside around things like open data, open APIs and so forth.”

Chopra gives this example of how the roles and responsibilities were divided: It was Federal CIO Vivek Kundra who was in charge of creating data.gov in 2009, but then once created, Chopra says, his office “nurtured” the community of stakeholders surrounding the platform.

This close collaboration and division of responsibilities, he says, was an important feature of his time on the job.

Todd Park and the talent legacy (2012-2014)

Todd Park, the second U.S. CTO, also came to the role with data bona fides. He’d been at HHS working on open data initiatives, and he brought this enthusiasm for the power of open government data to create innovation and jobs with him.

Park continued this work in the White House and then, after the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov in 2013, spent a good deal of his attention reviving this signature administration initiative.

But the most distinctive feature of Park’s tenure, and arguably his legacy as CTO, would turn out to be something else: attracting new talent.

Park was a key figure in the 2012 launch of the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, which brings tech-savvy developers, designers and entrepreneurs into the federal government for a limited-term “tour of duty.”

“We’re bringing 15 of the most badass innovators on the planet to come into the government and work on five game-changing projects with the goal of delivering significant results within six months,” he told Fast Company in an interview in 2012.

The program, which has survived in the Trump presidency, in turn helped to create other government tech talent initiatives like the General Services Administration’s 18F team and the U.S. Digital Service. And the impact goes beyond short term appointments — many former PIFs have gone on to continue their careers in government technology in more permanent capacities.

Park also seems to have viewed the talent recruitment job as a long-term feature of the role. “You know, someday in the year 2040, the U.S. CTO is going to attend TechCrunch Disrupt to recruit the next generation of public servants,” he said. “And the people there are going to say, ‘Well, of course, the government is here. That’s not surprising at all.’”

After leaving the CTO role in 2014, Park returned to Silicon Valley (he’s quipped that his wife threatened to divorce him if he stayed in D.C. any longer), but continued to help recruit tech talent for the federal government.

Megan Smith and a dash of data science (2014-2017)

Megan Smith, who left her job as a vice president at Google to become the third U.S. CTO, continued in much the same vein as her Obama-era predecessors.

“As described, [the job is] how do you help the president and the team harness the power of data, innovation and technology on behalf of the American people,” she told FedScoop in an interview in March. She talks about the job as being a “very plus-one role,” where the CTO is present to offer suggestions for ways in which technology might support other policy efforts, such as those to create more economic opportunity or a higher quality of life for American citizens.

For example, Smith’s team was responsible for creating and releasing the first national strategy on artificial intelligence in 2016, a report that explored the opportunities, challenges and impacts arising from this particular technology, as well as what federal research and development priorities in this area should be. Smith’s office demonstrated a commitment to collaboration during this process by seeking active public engagement in the creation of the report, including through a series of national AI town-halls.

In addition to this policy work, she continued to “incubate” government tech talent in her office. Smith scaled the Presidential Innovation Fellowship program and set it up for permanence while also advocating for civic tech talent across the federal government. Working with Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, Smith and Deputy CTO Alexander MacGillivray created the Tech Policy Task Force, an internal coalition chaired by Smith that brought technical talent from various White House teams together to deliberate about and share input on topics such as broadband, data privacy, patent reform, diversity in tech and federal open source policy.

Smith additionally supported the growth of a tech-in-government ecosystem regionally in the U.S., and internationally through groups such as the Open Government Partnership.

And Smith expanded the purview of her own role a little too.

“We added a lot of data science,” she said. For example, it was during Smith’s tenure that the chief data scientist role, filled by DJ Patil, was created at OSTP. And Smith’s office helped kick off The Opportunity Project in 2016 — an ongoing initiative that encourages private sector companies, nonprofit and academic organizations to tap into available federal open data to create new technology tools. Her team also worked on issues like precision medicine, big data and building data science communities of practice within the federal government.

Michael Kratsios focuses in on national technology policy (2019-present)

By his own admission, Michael Kratsios has taken a “very different track” compared to those who previously held his job.

Fresh from a job as chief of staff at Peter Thiel’s venture firm Thiel Capital, Kratsios was named deputy CTO in 2017. For a while, he was in essence the de facto leader at OSTP — acting both as Director of OSTP and Presidential Science Advisor. Dr. Kelvin Droegemeier eventually joined the Administration to fill those roles in an official capacity in 2018. Officially, the CTO role remained empty until he was promoted and then Senate-confirmed to fill it in August 2019, making him the fourth person to hold the title and the first under President Trump.

The job is still fundamentally a policy advisory role, but one much more focused on policy that pertains to technology itself.

“What we’ve focused on, which I think is new and is also a reflection of the times we live in — this office has been, since inauguration, focused on driving national technology policy,” Kratsios told FedScoop in an interview. “We work to ensure American leadership in emerging technologies.”

This approach was evident very early on — a White House “tech week” in July 2017 focused on drones and the creation of 5G infrastructure. Artificial intelligence, too, has continued to be a key priority.

“Everything from the changing face of artificial intelligence to quantum computing to 5G, even issues like internet privacy, um, encryption … these are all questions that are critical to our nation’s security, and our nation’s future, and it’s important to have a team that’s dedicated to driving policy outcomes in those areas,” Kratsios said.

“Broadly, across all tech issues, we focus on research and development, workforce issues and regulatory issues, and we drive and develop national strategies on our most important technology domains,” Kratsios said. He also highlighted the role he’s taken on the international stage, representing the White House at various intergovernmental group meetings.

This transition of focus at the office of the CTO was solidified by the creation of the Office of American Innovation, run by presidential son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner. This new office, both Kratsios and Chopra noted, has taken the lead on some of the internal government tech modernization that previously might have been the purview of the CTO. It was OAI that originated the idea of the IT modernization Centers of Excellence now housed at GSA, for example — arguably one of the Trump administration’s flagship government IT projects.

Still, some priorities of the role have remained very similar over time, including the expansion of access to government data. And some mechanics of the role are similar too — Kratsios says that the “inside-outside” model created by Chopra still largely defines how his office interacts with that of the federal CIO. On the American AI Initiative, for example, one of Kratsios’ office’s flagship projects, OSTP collaborates closely with the Office of the CIO on the task of further opening data collected and held by federal agencies.

To Kratsios, the role as it is currently crafted reveals the priorities of the administration he works for. “For us to be able to have senior leadership here driving a singular issue, that being technology, is an indicator of how seriously this administration is taking tech policy,” he said.

And arguably there’s a certain conceptual similarity here too: Throughout the history of this role, revealing priorities has always been what it does best.

The post What, exactly, is a U.S. CTO? appeared first on FedScoop.

The change marks an evolution for one of USDS’s oldest agency teams, the organization’s leadership says. But the shift also took place under the shadow of conflict between VA leadership and the consultative technology unit, which is formally housed within the Executive Office of the President.

Then tension started with a report written by USDS in early 2019 that criticized the VA’s handling of the rollout of the 2018 MISSION Act, drawing public ire from the department’s secretary. Shortly after, leaders of the digital service team left the agency and the remaining team members were subsumed into the Office of the CTO, which reports to the VA’s CIO.

Is this the story of a fraught partnership between two very different organizations, or a story about the successful adoption of digital service principles in an agency-native way? Could it be both? What on the surface may appear like a demotion, could, in fact, be what assures the team’s long-term sustainability.

Whatever the case, the VA team’s situation shows a potential path forward for scaling digital services in government, and it serves as an example for how the USDS concept — deploying highly skilled, tech-focused teams to work inside agencies — is changing in an era when politically appointed leaders are more apt to elevate and consult with their IT experts.

A ‘natural progression’

There wasn’t a single moment or snap decision that led to the reorganization, Charles Worthington, CTO at the VA, told FedScoop.

Rather, moving the USDS team, known as DSVA, from its previous seat in the Office of Information and Technology’s Enterprise Project Management Office over to the Office of the CTO happened over time. The new structure, he said, shows VA’s “appetite” for human-centered design, agile development and other elements of the USDS way of operating.

“For whatever reason, I think we’re at a point at VA where we’re ready to really scale this stuff,” Worthington said. “It’s really been about how can we do this for real, across an entire IT organization, not just in little bits and pieces where we’re able to get a specialized team in. We’re still learning how do we best do that … but we’ve seen really promising results.”

The U.S. Digital Service has been working with the VA since late 2014, helping to modernize the online systems that veterans use to interact with the agency and receive benefits.

In November 2015 the group launched a beta version of the user-centered web portal Vets.gov, which was expanded and ultimately migrated to the VA’s primary web domain (VA.gov) in November 2018. Vets.gov was lauded by the community — in October 2018 DSVA executive director Marcy Jacobs and her team won a Partnership for Public Service Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal award for the work.

Other USDS projects with VA include an improved Appeals Status tool — which shows veteran users exactly where they are in the appeals process, what needs to be done next and how long they can expect it to take — a Disability Compensation Claim Tool and more.

There has been a certain kinship between DSVA and the CTO’s office for some time. In July 2013, former Presidential Innovation Fellow Marina Martin was named VA CTO and went on to found the USDS presence within the agency.

Worthington is cut from a similar cloth — he was a PIF in the class of 2013 and went on to work in the White House and as acting deputy administrator of USDS before being named VA CTO in 2017. Worthington’s position is more technical than his VA CTO predecessors, though. His office sits in the Office of Information and Technology and he reports to the CIO.

For Worthington, the “alignment” between the Office of the CTO and DSVA makes the partnership a no-brainer. It became “pretty clear that the right move was to move the Digital Service team and align it under the Office of the CTO because the two organizations had pretty similar things we were working on, goals, technical skills,” he said.

Eddie Hartwig, deputy administrator at USDS, sees the transition as a “natural progression” as digital service concepts and talent spread across government.

“The environment has changed,” he said. “We’re in a world in which we are now… five-and-a-half years old, and we have four-year terms and some people stayed four years and then decided that this experience was the career that they wanted.” People like Worthington, and Clare Martorana who worked at USDS before taking the role of CIO at the Office of Personnel Management, open up “a whole new way of working,” he said.

“It’s not a firefighting model and it’s not a teaching-human-centered-design model — it’s a collaborative partner model,” Hartwig said.

That said, there has been a marked change in the way the U.S. Digital Service does business with the VA. The group’s charter with the VA expired in early 2019, and director Marcy Jacobs and her deputy David Bao left the agency in October 2019.

Still, work on DSVA’s projects continues and the status of the agency’s relationship with USDS is “basically stable,” Worthington told FedScoop. He and his team are creating a new Digital Experience and Product Office within the Office of the CTO, which will manage veteran-facing digital products like VA.gov and others. U.S. Digital Service employees are helping to get this office off the ground.

“The difference is now … it’s not just Digital Service people that are on the VA.gov project,” Worthington said. “It’s also people coming in through other pathways. But VA continues to have a close relationship with the Digital Service.”

Hartwig says the expiration and non-renewal of DSVA’s charter isn’t a big deal — it’s just another indication of the changing environment. “Charters were more important in the early days of USDS than they currently are,” he said. “Back then, agencies were wondering what a Digital Service was. Now that we are better known, we focus on how we can best get great work done together with agencies.”

And where the team can best get great work done now, he says, is in the Office of the CTO.

Charles Worthington speaks at FedScoop’s IT Modernization Summit on a panel about the Technology Modernization Fund. (FedScoop)

The MISSION Act sprint report

While the transition of the DSVA team to the Office of the CTO may not have a singular cause, the timing did coincide with increased tension between VA leadership and the digital service group.

A USDS discovery sprint report, which ProPublica obtained and published in May 2019, warned of flaws in a tool being developed in order to implement the expansion of veteran access to private healthcare as required by the 2018 MISSION Act.

“Given the high level of risk surrounding the timeline, planned engineering implementation and usability concerns, USDS anticipates that [the Decision Support Tool], if released into production, will negatively disrupt the physicians workflow and reduce daily appointment capacity within [the Veterans Health Administration],” the report stated, before going on to recommend that VA stop work on this version of the tool and “redirect development efforts towards a reimagined DST that serves both VA Clinical Staff and Veterans.”

VA Secretary Robert Wilkie publicly denounced the report’s findings. “I will refute everything in that report,” he said in an interview with Colorado Public Radio. He also took a shot at USDS’s competencies: “For an outfit that’s supposed to be all about technology, about 90 percent of that report was about policy, which I think if you look at their charter, they were not competent to do,” he said.

For his part, Hartwig told FedScoop that the idea of moving DSVA to the Office of the CTO predates the publication of the sprint report — but he didn’t deny that it placed a strain on the relationship.

“It made us re-examine our relationship with the VA,” Hartwig said. “That report was never intended to be public, and because of that it was intended to be direct and honest with the VA.”

The report represents just “one moment” in a long and successful partnership with the VA, he said. “The reality of it is that we stuck it out with the VA, we continue to support the programs there.”

Above and beyond the specific, however, the trajectory of the Digital Service team at the VA reflects a broader change in the country’s political environment.

“In order to effectively solve a problem — any problem — you need leaders that prioritize results and facts, even when they are inconvenient and uncomfortable,” Emily Tavoulareas, who worked with DSVA from January 2015 to January 2018, told FedScoop of the VA’s top-most leadership. “The last administration had leaders like that. In the transition we, like all public servants, found ourselves in a fundamentally different environment: one which relentlessly pursued headlines, and dismissed [or penalized] facts and truths that did not align with political needs and rhetoric.”

Find the truth, tell the truth

One of the U.S. Digital Service’s six stated values is “find the truth, tell the truth.” The independence that USDS enjoys as part of the Executive Office of the President in the White House is valuable for this end. And the perspective that USDS employees bring to an agency — that of technologists rather than policy or government bureaucracy experts — is valuable too.

But these perspectives and cultural differences sometimes place USDS at odds with its agency partners.

“Does it ever ruffle feathers? The clear answer to that is yeah,” Hartwig said. But he added that as USDS’s relationships with agencies mature, it gets easier to tell the truth without upsetting anyone.

There’s also the issue of where a Digital Service team sits in the organizational structure of an agency. At the VA, the USDS lead has traditionally had a close relationship with the agency’s deputy secretary, and this privilege sometimes led to resentment multiple sources told FedScoop. (Hartwig characterized the relationship as a “dotted line.”) Typically, the USDS teams at agencies report to top leadership, like a secretary or deputy secretary, often circumventing the CIO. It was a concern the Government Accountability Office raised in a 2016 report on measuring the success of the digital services team.

“I think there’s always this dynamic of, you know, coming in from the outside in a prominent role or sort of a more senior role, you’ve got to figure out how can you be most effective,” Worthington said. While this isn’t unique to USDS, he said, it does present a challenge to navigate.

Hartwig told FedScoop that USDS likes to sit at a high level at agencies because it allows the team to look holistically across the enterprise. But finding the right organizational structure is about “balance,” he said. “This is what we have always struggled with … how do we get things done, how do we get things done quickly and how do we do it in a way that is permanent and is acceptable and adopted by the agencies that we work with.”

“We have made mistakes,” he went on. “We have pushed too hard in some agencies. We have moved to fast. We have built things that the agency does not accept.”

And ruffling some feathers at the top doesn’t necessarily spell an end for the USDS regardless of what agency it is. It’s in the organization’s blood, after all, to go where the work is.

“In a very real way, the USDS people that remain at VA are staying true to another USDS value: going where the work is,” said Tavoulareas. “At the end of the day, veterans still need help, and VA services still need improvement. If the secretary layer is too toxic for the work to happen, then it goes elsewhere.”

Moving the USDS team at the VA into the CTO’s office means aligning the team with VA’s traditional IT infrastructure in a new way. The team could gain a new kind of legitimacy, but it may lose elements of the high-level cover it had before, too.

“I do think that standing up a permanent part of IT that is in charge of the running of the digital experience products, to sit alongside the other product offices … I do think that that will be a way to more effectively integrate with the main body of IT folks,” Worthington said.

“This is an experiment for us,” Hartwig said. “This seems to be the formula that’s working. VA has adopted these principles, they’ve adopted these methodologies, they are now hiring directly into their ranks designers and product managers and engineers and we fully support that. So we’re going to stick there, we’re going to use our pipeline to make sure Charles has great people and then as that builds up we will go back to product-facing work and work with Charles on that or we will remain, as we are for every agency, available in case there is an emergency.”

The post Looking for ‘balance,’ U.S. Digital Service team adapts to changes at VA appeared first on FedScoop.

It helps that until recently, Whittaker was the deputy director at the Centers of Excellence, another IT modernization initiative housed — like 18F — within the Technology Transformation Services at the General Services Administration. Outside of an age difference — the CoEs sprung up only about two years ago — he says the organizations are very similar.

Brian Whittaker. (Courtesy photo)

“At their core, you have immensely talented, smart, civic tech-passionate people that come into government to make an impact,” Whittaker, who took over as acting director of 18F earlier this month, told FedScoop in a recent interview. “We all believe in agile, we all believe in transparency, we all believe in inclusion, and being humble and human-centered design so those things are sort of at our core. And everything else is extra flavor seasoning.”

“People have been very warm and welcoming and have been helping me to get up to speed really quickly,” he added. “They’re allowing me to make mistakes, and I’m welcoming all the feedback and coaching that I can get.”

The biggest thing he’s been working to get used to so far? The digital communication style of a remote team.

Since its inception, 18F has operated with a “remote-first” mindset. Its roughly 100 employees work from wherever they are — at home or from federal office buildings across the country. Whittaker, like the rest of the team, uses online communication tools like video conferences and Slack to stay in touch.

“Where the Centers of Excellence are very huddled around a table, iterating, talking back and forth, building on ideas real-time — being able to reach out to someone on Slack and have them understand your intent … being intentional about those things [is something] that I’m working on,” said Whittaker, who is based in D.C.

Beyond learning the lingo, though, Whittaker told FedScoop he has goals to scale 18F’s impact and build bridges of collaboration between 18F and other GSA initiatives during his time in this leadership role. Whittaker hopes his familiarity with the CoE program and other parts of GSA will serve to help him “bring all the families” together on a project.

“I want to find the ideal partner agency that’s all in on a digital transformation and really open to us bringing all of what TTS, [the Federal Acquisition Service] and GSA has to bear in this domain,” he said. “The opportunity to collaborate across organizations has me excited, and the opportunity to build on the foundation that 18F leadership has provided for me.”

The post New acting 18F chief Brian Whittaker is learning lots about effective communication via Slack appeared first on FedScoop.

It can help humans surface relevant information from overloaded databases, review government-granted security clearances, read address labels quicker and more accurately, and much more. But AI isn’t a good teammate. It can’t fundamentally understand humans — their beliefs, intentions and restrictions.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants to change this.

The agency recently kicked off a new research project called Artificial Social Intelligence for Successful Teams (ASIST), which holds the immodest goal of figuring out how to imbue machines with social intelligence.

Human and machine teaming is an emerging field of study with big potential, project lead Dr. Joshua Elliott told FedScoop. But machine social intelligence is, for the moment, a huge missing piece in the puzzle. Humans have a skill called the theory of mind used to infer the cognitive states of the humans around us. This, understandably, is a crucial skill for working in teams. But computers just don’t have it.

Can this change?

DARPA and its contractors on this project are going to try to figure that out. The project began in December 2019 and will run for the next four years.

Project contractor Aptima, which comes to the table with a background in the social science of crafting high-performing teams, will design an experiment using an urban search and rescue challenge in the video game Minecraft. In the experiment the AI will “observe” a human teammate using sensors, wearables and cameras and use this data to predict what the human will do, Dr. Jared Freeman, Aptima’s chief scientist and principle investigator in this team, told FedScoop.

Researchers will begin by exploring whether the AI can use gathered data to understand one single human partner; in later stages, the machine intelligence will work with teams of multiple humans.

Elliott admits that the project is “very ambitious.” It’s what he calls a “DARPA-hard problem,” meaning it might take years to solve, if it proves to be solvable at all. If successful, though, he says this research could translate to a substantial leap in the functionality of AI assistants and remotely operated vehicles.

Freeman also sees huge potential. “We are at the front edge of a new generation of teams,” he said.

The post DARPA wants to build AI that can be a true teammate appeared first on FedScoop.

The Ethical Use of Facial Recognition Act is a partnership between Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., that would also create a congressional commission to study facial recognition and give suggestions to Congress on how to regulate it.

The newly created commission would be comprised of 13 people from a range of different backgrounds who would advise on how to balance privacy and civil liberties concerns against the value of facial recognition. They’d be tasked with answering questions like “in what circumstances, if any, government officials should be permitted to use facial recognition without a warrant” and “in what situations individuals should be able to opt-out or required to opt in to the use of facial recognition technology.”

“Facial recognition is a powerful and rapidly evolving technology, but without proper oversight it poses a serious risk to privacy and safety,” Booker said in a statement. “To protect consumer privacy and safety, Congress must work to set the rules of the road for responsible uses of this technology by the federal government.”

Recent hearings on facial recognition have revealed skepticism about the technology and some bipartisan interest in regulating it.

In December, Sens. Chris Coons, D-Del., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, introduced a bill that would put some guardrails on the use of facial recognition technology by federal law enforcement agencies by requiring them to get a warrant to use the tech for surveillance.

Currently, law enforcement and security agencies including the Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the FBI are using facial recognition for various applications. There have also been reports that the Department of Housing and Urban Development is using facial recognition at federally assisted housing properties.

The post Senate bill would put a moratorium on federal facial recognition use appeared first on FedScoop.

Weichert announced her departure on Friday — she will ultimately leave in mid-March and plans to join Accenture as a managing director in their commercial practice.

“It’s been an honor and a privilege to serve as the Deputy Director for Management,” Weichert said in a statement. “I’m extremely proud to have had the opportunity to work alongside a talented group of Federal employees to modernize and streamline our Government…. I’ve valued the opportunity to work with talented public servants, who are dedicated to improving how we deliver mission outcomes, improve service, and strengthen stewardship of taxpayer dollars.”

Weichert was nominated for the deputy director of management role in 2017, and sworn-in in February 2018. Since then she has been a vocal advocate for the President’s Management Agenda, progress on the cross-agency priority goals that support this agenda and the White House’s GEAR Center effort.

In October 2018 she was tapped to lead the Office of Personnel Management. During her tenure in that role, the White House floated the idea of a reorganization of OPM that would essentially “lift and shift” the agency’s services under the General Services Administration. Weichert argued that this change would help OPM deal with its legacy IT environment, but lawmakers weren’t so sure.

According to an OMB press release, Weichert’s successor will be “identified and communicated” before she leaves.

The post Margaret Weichert to depart OMB in March appeared first on FedScoop.

Ed Simcox publicly announced his intentions via a blog post. He said that while it was a “difficult decision” to leave, he is looking forward to what comes next.

His last day was Friday.

“Serving this department and the American people has been an honor and privilege for which I am immensely grateful,” he wrote. “The CTO team that leads and supports our efforts is nothing short of incredible. I am also humbled to have worked with the leaders and civil servants across HHS. Their dedication to mission is unrivaled in federal government.”

Simcox became the agency’s CTO in May 2018. He previously served as deputy CTO under Bruce Greenstein. He also filled the role of acting CIO from August 2018 until Jose Arrieta was selected in May 2019.

“In this role, I experienced first-hand the magnitude and complexity of federal IT in the largest civilian agency in the world,” Simcox wrote in his farewell blog post. “I was again humbled by the CIO staff’s dedication and loyalty to mission. The American people can rest assured that the civil servants caring for IT and cybersecurity at HHS are doing a great job enabling and protecting HHS.”

It’s unclear who will fill the CTO role once Simcox is gone.

The post HHS CTO Ed Simcox departs for the private sector appeared first on FedScoop.

The project will focus on the “modernization of DOL’s acquisition capabilities using Robotic Process Automation (RPA) expertise,” and will leverage the initiative’s newest center, the AI CoE.

“The Department of Labor is always looking for ways to integrate new technologies into our operations,” Deputy Secretary Patrick Pizzella said in a statement. “By partnering with GSA, our Department will modernize our procurement process to better serve the taxpayers.”

“We’re eager to hone in on the specific challenges faced by the Department to achieve solutions that meet their needs, but are also repeatable and scalable,” Technology Transformation Services Director Anil Cheriyan said in a statement. “Our main focus is on improving outcomes for our agency partners and we’re pleased to serve as a catalyst to help them develop a culture of innovation. Robotics Process Automation in combination with Artificial Intelligence capabilities is gaining momentum in government, and is a strategic focus area for TTS this year.”

DOL is the CoE’s sixth client. Others include the Department of Agriculture, Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Department of Defense’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC). In addition to AI, the CoE’s help agencies modernize with regard to cloud adoption, contact center, customer experience, data and analytics and infrastructure optimization.

Earlier on Thursday Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Mark Meadows, R-N.C. introduced a bipartisan bill in the House that would codify the CoEs as a permanent fixture.

The post Department of Labor brings in the CoEs for acquisition modernization appeared first on FedScoop.

The lawmakers call the Modernization Centers of Excellence Program Act a “light touch” codification of the existing initiative, which helps agency clients undertake IT modernization projects in the five subject matter areas of artificial intelligence, cloud adoption, contact center, customer experience, data and analytics and infrastructure optimization.

“Congress should take every opportunity possible to make government more effective and efficient as we work to better serve Americans everywhere,” Meadows said in a statement. “By bringing the best of private sector innovation to the federal government’s IT systems, these Centers of Excellence will allow agencies to better communicate with the Americans they serve, all while saving the taxpayer tens of millions by making agencies more efficient.”

The bill would give the CoE’s five key responsibilities:

• Modernize IT and how a customer interacts with an executive agency
• Improve cooperation between commercial and executive agency IT sectors
• Assist executive agencies with planning and adoption of a more efficient commercial cloud computing system, tools to help Americans receive support from and communicate with an executive agency; contact centers and other related customer supports; efficient use of data management, analysis, and reporting; and optimized infrastructure, including for data centers, and to reduce operating costs.
• Share best practices and expertise with executive agencies
• Other responsibilities that GSA’s director of Technology Transformation Services may identify as necessary

The CoE concept, which aims to “accelerate” IT modernization across government by creating central repositories for “best practices” that can move from agency to agency, was first discussed by the White House in summer 2017 and then formally introduced in the fall of 2017. “The ultimate objective of the CoEs is to build change management capacity for enterprise-level change in the federal government,” White House special assistant Matt Lira told FedScoop in December 2018.

While the concept grew out of the White House Office of American Innovation, it is currently housed under GSA’s Technology Transformation Services. The CoEs currently work with the Department of Agriculture, Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Department of Defense’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC).

CoE leadership says the lessons learned at one agency are generally super applicable to the others, lending the model a certain scalability. “It gets better with size,” executive director Bob DeLuca told FedScoop.

The post House bill would codify IT Modernization Centers of Excellence appeared first on FedScoop.

“I know that blockchain is used extensively on databases and registries in other countries,” Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass, said Wednesday during a hearing on the 2020 census. “Are we looking at anything like that where we can use a more secure system, a distributed system, one that is less vulnerable in terms of where the census is going?”

The Government Accountability Office’s Nick Marinos, the watchdog agency’s director for IT and cybersecurity, replied that while he is “not aware” that the technology was explored for the 2020 census, it “may be an option for the bureau to consider” for 2030.

Despite some pockets of “strong interest” in blockchain in the federal government, the distributed ledger technology is generally unpopular among many members of the civic technology community. It’s seen as a poster child for hype, shiny object syndrome and government tech solutionism. It’s also a technology with a narrow range of use cases — and it’s either unnecessary or inefficient to use outside of these cases.

Lynch hinted that he might be interested in ordering the Census Bureau to conduct a study on “blockchain viability within the census,” and suggested that GAO should “take initiative” on such work. Lynch is a member of the panel’s Government Operations Subcommittee, which helps shape federal IT policy, and is chairman of its National Security Subcommittee.

Wednesday’s hearing followed release of a new GAO report on the 2020 census that details “mixed” readiness for upcoming census operations. Marinos testified that while the bureau has successfully delivered several operational systems to date, it still faces “schedule risks” for five out of the 11 remaining deliveries including on the system for internet self-response.

Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham, meanwhile, maintained that the systems are on schedule and will be delivered as needed. He told the Oversight Committee that he’s confident the online self-response system will be able to deal with any surge in user numbers, because it has been designed to “far exceed” the bureau’s expectations.

In total, the 2020 census will rely on 52 new or legacy IT systems.

The post Rep. Lynch wants the Census Bureau to look into ‘blockchain viability’ for 2030 appeared first on FedScoop.