The new application — GigEagle — will be powered and scaled by Eightfold AI in partnership with Carahsoft Technology Corp. through a recently awarded other transaction prototype contract with DIU, the companies announced Tuesday.

“GigEagle is probably, in all seriousness, a revolution in talent discovery,” Marine Innovation Unit Chief Talent Officer Michael Hallinan said.

It’s no secret that the Pentagon is confronting a nonstop struggle to recruit and retain the nation’s top personnel with technology expertise, and it’s only getting tougher.

Unveiled almost a year ago as an app like Uber but for placing DOD talent, GigEagle is intended to help highly-skilled military members — particularly, Reservists and National Guard members — embedded in units where they are often undiscoverable by the private sector or other Defense components. The aim is to increase their visibility and match then with short-term, project-based duties that contribute to Pentagon missions.

The tool employs AI and machine learning algorithms and methodologies to identify the right officials — based on their rare and valuable skill set — to serve in specific roles where there are gaps.

These “gig-like” projects will be conducted in-person at onsite facilities, remotely, or some combination of both. Funding for the work will be provided off-platform through traditional channels. Digital know-how in AI, information technology, human systems, autonomy and space is of particular interest.

At this point, the platform is accessible by invitation-only. It’s slated for testing by initial cohorts later this year.

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Called the Integrated Personnel and Pay System-Army (IPPS-A), the app is available on Apple’s App Store and is expected to have roughly 1 million users among active-duty personnel and members of the Army National Guard and Reserve by December when the third update of the app.

It will serve as a modern hub for the Army’s human resources system, allowing users to send in help requests on personnel matters, updating records and monitoring personnel actions.

“The IPPS-A mobile app is a force-multiplier. Access and situational awareness of personnel transactions will be delivered at your fingertips, giving the total Army more transparency than ever before,” said Col. Gregory Johnson, IPPS-A functional management division chief.

It’s the first paperless app where soldiers can connect to Army HR systems and avoid a trip into a personnel office. It will also be available from the Google Play store. Android users can also download the app through the Army Training and Doctrine Command App Gateway.

The app claims to have “the same level of sophistication and security that secure banking and personal service apps have today,” according to its website.

The Federal Procurement Data System shows several companies having contracts for work related to the app, including Booz Allen Hamilton, ASM research, IBM and others.

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Alarmed by the outbreak on the aircraft carrier and on other ships, the Navy turned to the Defense Digital Service in March to help track the exploding number of cases. Within several days, DDS had launched an app, “MySymptoms” to collect data from sailors. Later the app was expanded for use at 17 Navy locations to help stem other outbreaks.

The process taught the tech-development agency a lot about its potential, Deputy Director Katie Olson said Thursday during FedTalks, the virtual conference presented by FedScoop.

“The pandemic has pushed the upper limit of what even DDS is able to do,” she said. DDS was able to pull together the app within 48 hours, setting a new speed record for the agency and a higher bar for its work, she said.

It was a prime example of the agile development practices that government technology leaders often talk about in the abstract. In this case, the product helped save lives. Olson credited DDS’s aggressive talent recruitment for some of the success.

“This is a priority, to hire the best tech talent in the world,” she said.

The app was also featured in a New England Journal of Medicine study of the outbreak on the Theodore Roosevelt. The Navy used the app to help collect and analyze health data every 12 hours, and health officials were then able to follow up with crew members who reported recurring symptoms.

DDS also helped the Navy when its hospital ships were used in New York and Los Angeles to support the overwhelmed medical systems in the pandemic’s early months. Coders deployed an anti-unmanned aerial vehicle system to stop rouge drones interrupting medical services. The anti-drone technology was used to keep hobbyists and unsuspecting drone users at bay from restricted air space above the military ship, DDS officials previously told FedScoop.

Olson also highlighted non-coronavirus related technology the agency has deployed during the pandemic. DDS partnered with the part of the DOD that onboards new employees at the Pentagon, the Washington Headquarter Service, to help them get people to work remotely and set them up for teleworking.

“DDS helped WHS apply technology and acquire equipment to help continue onboarding,” Olson said.

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The Trump administration’s goal is to make sure agencies don’t stifle innovation when issuing rules intended to serve consumers or protect national security. As software makers expand their use of AI, the federal government is likely to be called upon to step in to regulate the technology.

“While narrowly tailored and evidence-based regulations that address specific and identifiable risks could provide an enabling environment for U.S. companies to maintain global competitiveness, agencies must avoid a precautionary approach that holds AI systems to an impossibly high standard such that society cannot enjoy their benefits and that could undermine America’s position as the global leader in AI innovation,” the memo states.

Agencies also might need to address inconsistent, burdensome or duplicative state laws that hurt the national market for technology, the memo says.

The Office of Management and Budget issued the document Tuesday, nearly 21 months after President Trump called for it in an executive order on Feb. 11, 2019. It was supposed to arrive no more than 180 days after the order. The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, Domestic Policy Council and National Economic Council also participated in drawing up the memo.

“Through this memorandum, the United States is taking the lead to set the regulatory rules of the road for artificial intelligence,” said Michael Kratsios, U.S. Chief Technology Officer, in a statement. “The U.S. approach will strengthen the nation’s AI global leadership and promote trustworthy AI technologies that protect the privacy, security, and civil liberties of all Americans.”

OMB lists 10 stewardship principles for federal oversight of AI applications:

• Public trust in AI, such as regulations that reduce accidents or protect privacy to build support for the technology.
• Public participation —allowing people to provide feedback and engage in rulemaking, especially when AI uses their information.
• Scientific integrity and information quality, so agencies can defend the need for regulation.
• Risk assessment and management, for transparently determining when AI harm is unacceptable.
• Benefits and costs — not only in using AI, but also the in liabilities for the decisions it makes.
• Flexibility in development, including making AI technology-agnostic and building it in a way that can compete internationally.
• Fairness and non-discrimination, to eliminate bias AI may introduce into decision making.
• Disclosure and transparency — helping non-experts understand how AI works and technical experts how the technology made a decision.
• Safety and security, such as instituting proper controls, protecting data and countering adversarial AI, as well as considering national security ramifications.
• Interagency coordination — ensuring federal agencies share experiences and keep AI policies predictable.

The memo says agencies should always consider nonregulatory approaches to address AI risks — such as issuing sector-specific policy guidance or frameworks, creating pilot programs and experiments, and instituting voluntary consensus standards or voluntary frameworks.

The development and use of AI will benefit from agencies controlling access to federal data and models for research and development purposes, communicating pros and cons to the public, releasing standards like metrics that industry can but isn’t obligated to use, and consulting international frameworks and coordinating with trade partners, according to the memo.

AI regulating agencies are expected to submit their plans to comply with OMB’s memo to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs by May 17, 2021. Those agencies must identify their regulatory authorities and AI-related datasets they collect from entities they regulate.

“The agency plan must also report on the outcomes of stakeholder engagements that identify existing regulatory barriers to AI applications and high-priority AI applications that are within an agency’s regulatory authorities,” the memo says. “OMB also requests agencies to list and describe any planned or considered regulatory actions on AI.”

As OMB thinks about AI in the broader economy, federal agencies like the General Services Administration have been testing commercial machine-learning models for their own use. The National Institute of Standards and Technology also has prepared guidance on technical requirements of trustworthy AI.

The Government Accountability Office is working on an AI oversight framework for continuously monitoring agencies progress with the technology, and the Department of Defense exploring methods for combating adversarial AI.

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Called SkillTree, the platform is designed to teach the best ways to use complex applications and implement best practices in software development. It’s a tool and not a specific curriculum. The NSA developed it in-house but posted it to the Microsoft-owned public code repository GitHub with ways for the broader development community to collaborate on its code and fix bugs.

SkillTree, which is a tool and not a specific curriculum, follows a “gamification strategy,” the NSA says, by allowing users to track their ranked progress and earn achievements as they reach new levels of success. SkillTree was designed under the NSA’s Developer Experience (DevX) program and follows what the agency is calling a “skills-as-a-service” model.

“The DevX team will be integrating SkillTree into various DevOps tools and workflows to enable new and experienced developers go grow their skills,” an NSA official told FedScoop. “Given [that] it’s open and flexible in nature, it can and will be used for other types of tools geared towards non-developers as well.”

The idea is that the platform can conform to the needs of managers looking to improve the skills of their employees on any number of applications that can link to the dashboard through its application programing interface (API).

The agency hopes SkillTree will help modernize employees’ DevOps practices, in particular, according to a news release about the platform. It is one of many initiatives underway to bring the agency in up to date on development best practices.

“The DevX team genuinely cares about igniting positive change for NSA developers and consistently embraces innovative and secure ways to do so. Software Development is an art; the DevX EcoSystem team understands that your canvas and paint brushes are important,” said Terrence Pugh, DevX ecoSystem lead, in the news release.

The spy agency also has been expanding its efforts to promote cybersecurity education and has been doing more public outreach in general over the past year.

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The department’s Bureau of Information Resource Management had to adjust to delivering, in many cases, the minimum viable product needed so people could work, McGuigan said. Although the department is used to networking its facilities around the globe, setting up tools for teleworking employees was a new challenge.

State had spent the months prior to the pandemic ensuring its entire staff had cloud access, so many core communications capabilities were already in place. But adding a layer of “scores of applications” was another process entirely, McGuigan said during the AFCEA Bethesda 2020 Tech Summit.

“We had this existential demand that the longer we took to provide access to these applications, the longer people were unable to work at all,” he said.

One of those apps was Microsoft Teams, which employees quickly embraced once it was deployed, McGuigan said. Collaborative software has allowed remote workers with the department’s new Center for Analytics to model emerging events irrespective of where employees are located, McGuigan said.

At the height of the pandemic, the State Department was responsible for ensuring U.S. citizens abroad made it home safely as airports closed and flights were constantly being adjusted. The department needed real-time information and machine-learning algorithms more than ever.

“I see more and more opportunity, as a result of becoming more digitally enabled, to have diplomacy move at the speed of technology,” McGuigan said. “And that’s a really exciting byproduct to what we’re doing.”

The Center for Analytics predicts the likelihood of events like diplomatic unrest by convening a task force of its experts remotely to model potential scenarios. That way the State Department already has a response planned when an event actually happens.

McGuigan intends for the resulting culture change at the department to stick long after the pandemic resolves. His comments Wednesday come as State Department officials have spoken publicly about other lessons learned from the pandemic, including the need to improve enterprise data management.

“The ability to dynamically form a team, share information, share analytics, make a decision, and then execute is something we want to continue,” McGuigan said.

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The pilot, involving about 1,000 people for now, is scheduled to be completed this month, and Army CIO Lt. Gen. Bruce Crawford and others in his office are eager to expand it, according to Michael Payne, deputy project director of Enterprise Services. Most of the participants are soldiers who access training material remotely by logging in with authentication from a physical token or an app.

If the pilot is deemed successful, the Army will purchase more of the USB tokens, called YubiKeys, and expand access to the authenticator app. The program is not designed to replace the CAC, but instead expand access to those who might not have the card or card reader that are needed to authenticate a login credential. Using off-the-shelf YubiKeys could be especially beneficial to members of the National Guard or first responders working with the military during national emergencies. “It is easing the accessibility to those soldiers,” Payne told FedScoop.

The token has been tested longer than the app, but so far each are showing promising results, Payne said.

“They are very interested, we are working very closely with [the Army CIO],” he said.

Users with the YubiKey tokens put them into a USB port, and the token’s unique signal authenticates their other login credentials. For users with the phone app, a unique secure code is generated for them, and they type it in while logging in — much like a text message code that a bank might send to a consumer.

Soldiers — and one day first responders — will be able to use their own phones with the app.

“Multifactor authentication for the Army is a game changer for our Soldiers,” Lee James, project director for Enterprise Services, in a news release.  “It allows Soldiers the convenience and capability of conducting business in a secure way from their own devices and on their own time.”

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By the end of the fiscal year, ATF wants to have all of its users transitioned over to a new commercial cloud environment and plans to close down the data center and repurpose it for office space, bureau CTO Mason McDaniel told FedScoop.

McDaniel detailed ATF’s transition to this point as a law enforcement agency with two vastly different IT environments. Prior to kicking off its modernization efforts in 2016, the bureau had been “really ignoring” its IT, McDaniel told FedScoop in a December interview before speaking at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.

The writing was on the wall after ATF shut down its disaster recovery data center in 2013 and moved remaining computing instances to the primary center. The bureau needed to make quick changes to its IT environment or risk losing critical functionality if something were to happen at that facility. “So we had no disaster recovery at all,” McDaniel said.

In 2016, such a crisis almost occurred when a huge snowfall forced the agency to evacuate the data center for two days for safety reasons, leaving it up to chance that systems would stay online running smoothly. “If they went offline, they would be down until we could get back in,” McDaniel said.

It was an eye-opening moment that forced McDaniel and other IT officials to communicate the risk of holding onto this technical debt, which he described as “not doing stuff” that the agency should have.

“The way you have to communicate to the executives who are largely not technical is trying to take whatever the technical debt is you’ve accumulated through not doing stuff in the past and communicate it in business terms,” he said. “Again if that data center goes away, then all ATF systems drop offline with no primary and failover and no estimate for times to restore.”

Investing in the ‘invisible’

McDaniel described the situation as a prime example of why IT management and modernization is so difficult in the federal government, and why technical leaders must learn to communicate in terms of business and mission.

“Invisible IT has to be invested in, even if it seems to be running for the users,” he said. “It’s really easy to understand how body armor, bullets, vehicles directly support the ATF mission. But it’s a lot harder to see why they should invest in IT when users are using the systems every day” seemingly without problems, especially when the bureau is struggling to keep the administration from trimming its budget.

But once IT leaders had amassed meaningful evidence of how neglecting IT could backfire in bigger ways, such as the data center snow day in 2016, “the executive buy-in was amazing,” McDaniel said.

Then the hard work started. After convincing leadership that the move to a commercial cloud was the right choice, McDaniel said, “we moved data from our development environment over, our test environment and we moved all production data for all ATF apps into AWS and got it fully security reviewed and accredited for live use before we ever tackled the first app. So we got all the operational data over there and then we started one-by-one going through and refactoring the apps.”

Cleaning up apps so that they functioned properly in the cloud proved more than challenging. For instance, “in one of our biggest applications, 80 percent of the source code didn’t work,” McDaniel explained. “It’s a whole lot more iterative and it’s a lot slower” than you would expect.

“There’s a lot going on — it’s amazing the dirt we discovered inside our systems that we just had no idea,” he said.

“The US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is a great example of how thinking big can allow government agencies successfully manage the move to cloud, and retire decades of technical debt,” said Dave Levy, Vice President of U.S. Government at AWS. “We remain committed to supporting the ATF’s critical mission and for technology to continue driving positive mission outcomes.”

Governance matters

On top of the coding issues, the agency collided into a roadblock with the policy and governance that enable the technical work.

“The technology is all fantastic and this is hard as hell,” McDaniel said. “There’s nothing easy about it. But what’s taken a similar amount of effort is on the process and policy side … It doesn’t do you any good if you can build a virtual machine or container in five minutes if it takes a month to get it through your change control process.”

McDaniel’s team wrote a new governance framework from scratch to account for automated testing and deployment needs that weren’t in the ATF’s legacy IT environment. “We’re hoping that as we get all of the technology in place to do the automated deployments, the policies and processes will be there to actually support and enable those,” he said.

Now, though about “two years behind where we wanted to be,” McDaniel said, ATF is planning in the February and March timeframe to switch users over to about three-quarters of the application portfolio in the cloud. Then sometime this summer, the bureau will switch users over to remaining applications.

When the data center is taken offline and everything is in the cloud, users won’t necessarily notice a change, “aside from that the systems don’t go down every day” and general performance should improve, McDaniel said.

However, slowly but surely, the benefits will begin to stack for users. “What they’re going to see soon after that, once we finish this part, is a focus back on the actual processes themselves,” McDaniel said. “Many, many of the processes that out users and analysts and agents have to go through require them to go from system to system to system because of how we built things in projects over time. Every time something new was needed, the teams that developed the old ones were gone. And over time, we’ve got all the tiny little disconnected systems so the users have to manually go back and forth between them to do stuff.”

With applications seamlessly connected in the cloud, it will cut down by “half or more the amount of time it takes them to do a lot of their daily activities,” he said. “That’s when they’re really going to start seeing the benefits.”

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The RFIs solicit contractor help with an initiative to modernize the Federal Annuity Claims Expert System (FACES), which federal retirement counselors use “to adjudicate about 80,000 federal retirement benefit actions every year,” OPM says.

FACES is “accurate” and “reliable,” according to OPM, but it was built with tools that are “no longer supported by the manufacturer, which makes it difficult to update and maintain.”

The RFIs are for two separate but intertwined projects — OPM is looking to replace the FACES desktop app as well as the calculator that that app relies on.

For the app redesign, OPM wants a “model web app” designed with the needs of the system’s users in mind. The agency also wants a contractor that will provide tools and trainings to allow OPM’s CIO to maintain the system over time.

When it comes to the calculator, meanwhile, OPM wants to “replace the current calculator with a calculation service.”

“Rather than replicating an approach based on formulas, the service will introduce a system for managing business rules that, when applied, will result in calculations,” the RFI reads. “The calculator will be wrapped in an Application Programming Interface (API) that will provide access for the FACES app, as well as for applications created outside of OPM.”

The RFI is only open to awardees of GSA’s $15 billion Alliant 2 small business contract. The version of the RFIs posted to GitHub implies that all 81 Alliant 2 awardees received an email about the opportunity with further instructions on how and when to respond.

In July OPM’s CoE team issued its first RFI — one seeking two backup mainframes to protect the agency’s most critical workloads in the event that one of its existing mainframes should fail. The CoE initiative, which was launched out of the White House Office of American Innovation in summer 2017, began working at OPM in May.

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The Federal CIO Council recently released its Application Rationalization Playbook — a six-step guide to “structured” IT portfolio management. Essentially the document aims to help managers figure out what applications or programs are well suited to the cloud computing environment, and which would be too difficult or too expensive to move. It’s part of the administration’s Cloud Smart policy.

“The speed of technological change means there is constant investment in new applications, decommissioning legacy IT, and refactoring applications to reflect changing technology and business environments,” the document reads. “Agencies must routinely and continuously update and rationalize their portfolios to enable IT managers to make informed business decisions.”

As such, the six steps outlined in the playbook are meant to take place on a loop. The steps laid out in the document are:

1. Identify needs and set the governance for the application rationalization effort.
2. Inventory the applications that are in-scope for the effort.
3. Assess the business value and technical fit of all applications in the application inventory.
4. Assess the total cost of ownership of each of the applications, and compare the current cost against total cost of ownership in a future state of architecture.
5. “Score” applications based on the business value, technical fit and total cost of ownership.
6. Determine application placement based on the “scores” developed in step five as well as other information, like input from stakeholders.

The 37 page playbook includes more detailed descriptions of each step, including case studies.

“For some agencies, migrating on-premise applications to the cloud is prohibitively expensive and does not enhance service delivery,” it states. “For other agencies, the benefits of hosting applications in cloud environments, such as increased productivity, scalability, agility, and operational resilience, justifies the upfront costs. This playbook encourages agencies to take a holistic view of the costs and benefits.”

The playbook was developed by the CIO Council and the government’s Cloud & Infrastructure Community of Practice, with the help of “key federal IT practitioners and industry representatives.” It’s not official policy, but aligns with the tasks that the CIO Council set up for itself as part of the drive to “accelerate” cloud adoption in government.

Creators say the document is intended to evolve with further practitioner feedback. “There is no one-size-fits-all application rationalization process, so agencies need to tailor their approach to fit mission, business, technology, and security needs,” the playbook reads.

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