“I sat down with a bunch of contracting officers and said I’m going to build a bot. And I had people look me dead in the eye and say, ‘I will never trust a bot,'” Kinnard, Labor’s director of innovation and engineering, said at the UiPath Together Public Sector summit.

Fast forward to today, and now 140 people use that bot on a daily basis and save “hundreds of thousands of dollars every year” in doing so, she said. And under Kinnard’s leadership, the department has further expanded its RPA work to other areas like HR processing, hiring, and other administrative tasks.

How was Kinnard able to make believers and willing users out of skeptics? “You have to bring people along on the journey,” said Kinnard, who has led emerging technology at DOL for a number of years and was recognized by the Partnership for Public Service’s Service to America Medals program for her work with RPA.

“These contracting officers go to be part of our development process,” from the early steps to build the bot to working through when it didn’t work the first time, she said. “And now they are the biggest champions of automation. They are not only coming to me saying let’s build more bots, they are going to the rest of the organization and saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got this really great bot, you guys need to get a really great bot too.'”

Kinnard said government agencies like Labor are “at this really great nexus where the culture is finally ready to say yes, bots are an amazing tool to help us get our job done.”

And there’s an opportunity to build off of the increased appetite for bots, — particularly as federal agencies innovate and pilot robotic process automation use cases — to share and connect applications across agency borders, she said.

“There is the really great opportunity to say: ‘You have a system over here, I have a system over here. Let’s really make the systems the most powerful they can be by letting them talk to each other through automation,'” Kinnard said. “That’s really where I see the next few years of automation going to next.”

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The launch of the bot comes amid a push across federal government to use robotic process automation to streamline agency processes. It will automate the currently manual process of paying invoices every month and updating budget lines items needed to pay invoices to customers or vendors. 

“It’s the first time we’re actually automating something through robotic process automation. So that’s what makes it so innovative for us is because the bureau doesn’t have bots right now, we were just sort of like putting our toes in that world,” Peter Sursi, head of finance modernization, accounts payable and relocation services said at the Adobe Government Forum in Washington on Tuesday. “So for us to get one on the finance side for us is pretty exciting. It’ll save us a lot of labor hours.” 

The tool would affect all 56 FBI field offices and approximately 250 task force officers that process the financial payments within those offices as well as FBI customers who get paid through the invoices which were previously manual processed and time intensive.

Sursi said the new finance bot was created in the past two months and is in final stages of testing, which has energized his team to create a longer list of FBI finance projects that could be automated and made much faster thanks to bot automation.

In March, State Department CIO Kelly Fletcher revealed that her agency had used robotic process automation to cut the processing time for its monthly financial statement from two months to two days.

Speaking at FedScoop’s ITModTalks, Fletcher said financial reporting was one of several areas where the agency is using AI to improve the efficiency of back-office operations, which has the ability to substantially improve reporting processes because of State’s federated structure and global operations.

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Speaking Wednesday at FedScoop’s ITModTalks, Fletcher said financial reporting was one of several areas where the agency is using AI to improve the efficiency of back-office operations. State’s federated structure and global mission can make the process especially challenging, according to the IT executive.

“To make a monthly financial statement was making two months … [u]sing RPA we’re now doing it in a couple of days,” she said.

The CIO also cited the organization of COVID-19 repatriation flights as another area where State has deployed robotic process automation (RPA) to great effect. Previously, diplomats requiring return flights to the United States had to fill out forms by hand, which were subsequently typed up by other State Department employees. 

Fletcher said that in this example, RPA had helped reduce the number of staff needed to carry out the mundane task of data duplication and had also increased the speed at which staff are being reimbursed for expenses incurred while abroad.

She said also that while State has used the two automation initiatives to create more efficient business operations, the agency is ultimately focused on giving United States diplomats the highest quality data wherever they are.

“Our core mission is diplomacy for that mission, our biggest asset is the data we have. This is often in the form of narratives that diplomats have been writing for decades,” Fletcher said. 

Cultivating a data-focused culture and piloting and scaling AI and machine learning applications to accelerate decision-making are core goals of the State Department’s three-year data strategy, which was made public in September 2021. 

Speaking last April, then-CIO of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research Dom Cussatt said data streaming the use of new cloud programs to ensure diplomats’ devices have the highest quality data “could be a gamechanger.”

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Speaking with FedScoop Tuesday, Krista Kinnard said early conversations are crucial to ensure that new attended automation systems are relevant.

“It starts with responsibility – engaging with people and understanding what it is their challenge is before bringing technology to the table, and ensuring that the technology is actually solving the problem,” she said.

Kinnard spoke with FedScoop after receiving the emerging leaders medal at the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America awards for her work automating repetitive administrative processes at the Department of Labor. 

She won the accolade for overseeing the use of robotic process automation to slash the time needed to format and organize personnel performance reviews from 40 hours to under three minutes.

“[The work] started by engaging with Department of Labor staff: what is the part of your job that you hate the most. What is the most tedious, repetitive, mundane thing?,” Kinnard explained.

“How can we automate that so you can focus on the work that you’re trained to do? That requires that intelligence and training and compassion that you have as a human.”

Under her leadership the Department of Labor has gone from using bots to deploying more than 30 to allow federal staff to focus on more high-value work.

Kinnard added that the framing of new tech implementation is also key, to ensure agency employees are included in the development process, and emphasized the importance of strong governance for the new technology.

“We certainly don’t want to be building bots that are replacing people or hurting people or introducing any kind of bias.”

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RPA uses software technology that enables humans to easily build, deploy and manage digital robots that can perform manual, often repetitive functions. Over the last several years, it’s been having an impact across the government — including in the Air Force.

“RPA and artificial intelligence are not about cutting personnel,” Air Force Deputy CIO Winston Beauchamp said Tuesday during a UiPath event produced by FedScoop. “We realize that our mission set is growing and continues to grow. We’re not going to get more [staff], but we are going to continue to be asked to do more and more with the resources that we have. So in order to take on those new missions and continue to adapt to the technologies and challenges that we face in an ever-evolving world, we need to be able to make better use of the people that we have.”

The military service is leveraging emerging AI-aligned technologies like RPA to make decisions faster and better.

Air Force officials have seen some progress developing such solutions. But to drive more — and faster — innovation, they launched the RPA accelerator to simplify the making of relevant human-assisting software bots. 

Beauchamp highlighted some of the unfolding RPA use cases that are maturing with support from the accelerator, including bots associated with automated target recognition — and separately, automation to enhance critical weather models with additional data. 

More than 400,000 military service members each year typically receive orders to make a permanent change of station (PCS) for their next assignments. For many military insiders, Beauchamp said, PCS can introduce unnecessary complications or frustrations. So, his office is also working to deploy technologies to automate PCS-related processes.

“This is an area that I think is a pain point for a lot of people. It’s a retention issue, frankly, when people have to wait a year for their household goods to show up, for example,” Beauchamp noted. These are the sorts of things that give people pause about reenlisting or staying in the military.

Beauchamp later told FedScoop more about his office’s journey driving new automations. He said the five deployments that only took a week to launch through the accelerator demonstrate that “the barriers to entry are low” — and Air Force officials want to keep it that way.

“We are, to the maximum extent possible, trying to make this organic, coming from the functional areas, proposing and introducing areas to do RPA,” Beauchamp explained.

“We are fully aware that we don’t have all the answers at the Pentagon, and that the real innovation is happening in the wings and the squadrons. They’re closest to the work, and frankly, they’re unique. Every airborne platform and every weapon system has its own quirks, and the folks that are closest to it know where it makes sense to [deploy the technology and] where it doesn’t. But there are some things that are universal,” he said.

It’s ultimately those common “pain points,” like PCS processes, that the Air Force wants to consider automation to solve in the near term, he added.  

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The agency is leaning more and more on robotic process automation (RPA) to automate repetitive tasks and unburden its workforce. 

“I firmly believe that every organization has something that can benefit from RPA,” DLA’s Procurement Process and Systems Division Chief Rusty Wells told FedScoop. “What we kind of did at DLA was like, ‘hey, if something’s not coming to mind, go ask your end users what frustrates them. What do they hate to do as part of their daily job?’ Because I guarantee you, they’ll probably tell you. Then start small, grow the mindset. You may not get it exactly right. You might fail a little bit. You may not be able to automate the whole process. But you’re going to learn from something, you’ve just got to get started.”

In a recent interview, both Wells and DLA’s Robotic Process Automation Program Manager, Frank Wood, briefed FedScoop on what makes their agency’s automation-pushing program so unique, and how and where it’s going.

More than just hours saved

Operating as the nation’s combat logistics support agency, DLA manages the end-to-end global defense supply chain for all five military branches, 11 combatant commands, and other Defense Department components. The organization, which has about 26,000 employees deployed globally, buys about $42 billion in goods and services annually to enable the Pentagon’s missions, including food, clothing, equipment and information technology. 

The agency is increasingly turning to RPA to automate repetitive tasks and free up staff to execute on such massive volumes of business. 

“Today, we’re up to 136 use cases built and that includes, by the way, 36 enhancements to original use cases to which additional capabilities have been added,” Wood said. 

He noted that such enhancements don’t involve “just a tweak,” but actually go through the same governance and software development lifecycle process as any new use case. RPA software firm UiPath supports DLA’s many deployments.

Wells highlighted some of those evolving RPA applications that he’s seen making waves from his perch leading procurement. 

“At DLA, we do a lot of contracts. In fiscal year 2021, we issued about 10,000 contract actions per day. So, going over a course of a year that’s roughly 3.7 million actions,” he said. “When you have that many actions, even if you have a small percentage of things you can’t get to, it adds up quickly. So, anything we can do to automate some of those manual steps is definitely beneficial.”

A relatively new bot developed and unleashed for his team helps alleviate some of the annoyances associated with closing out long-term contracts at the end of their duration — tasks that Wells noted are “not exactly the most glamorous part of the job.” 

Essentially, the bot they produced identifies scenarios where contracts can be closed out automatically, without the end user or the contract administrator having to take action because all the delivery orders are paid and there are no unliquidated obligations.

“We could have this bot go in and take those off the work that people would have to go in and manually do,” Wells noted, adding that “RPA is definitely helping us along the way here.”

Another bot was created to help ease some of the challenges that surfaced when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It concentrated on post-award requests (PARs) that DLA handles, where suppliers can submit requests to contract administrators when there are potential concerns or issues after the contract has been awarded. 

“When the pandemic started two years ago, we said you know, we probably need to do some tracking of anything related to COVID-19,” Wells said.

The team came up with an idea to create a new and specific code for PARs related to supplier performance of contracts impacted by COVID-19 and then have an automation tool go in every day and look for the certain coded elements in new or in-process items. It would report those details to selected personnel within the agency so that they could have more advanced notice about issues arising. If contracts were critical, they could then see and address them more quickly.

It took about one month to implement that RPA tool, which is still up and running today.

About 160 transactions a week were flowing in with that special code after the launch. Now, there’s additional capabilities that bot performs, like opening the request, pulling the information into a spreadsheet and sending it to the humans that can address it.

“If you think about that automation, it expanded our ability to do something we weren’t touching before because we just didn’t have people doing it. So, it was kind of a new area for us and it’s still running. And when we looked at what we thought it would do for us, I think we’ve gotten about 10 times the benefit that we originally thought we were going to get from it,” Wells said.

While reporting on RPA use cases often centers on time saved by the technology, Wood noted that “there’s more to it than just the number of hours saved.” He said there are instances where automation is enabling a workflow to survive a technology-driven increase, like an uptick in transactions. 

“Also, it could be an enabler to do a workflow that’s not otherwise possible, for which there is no manual workflow today. I’m doing a couple of use cases where they need something done — and if we don’t do it, it’s not going to get done, and it’s an actual programmatic workflow,” he said.

He continued: “And then there’s integration, right? You have two systems that need to be integrated. They are integrated today by a human who does a swivel chair between two web interfaces, say. And of course what we’re doing there is we’re integrating those two systems, making sure there’s communication and information. That is either not possible without RPA or even if it was possible some other way, that other way is, you know, untenable in terms of expense or the time it would cost to get there,” he explained. 

Wood added that it’s important to remember that RPA lives in a continuum of automation technologies. 

“The RPA that does a job today may not be needed next week for all the right reasons. We’re very sensitive to that,” he said.

Getting Smarter

Of the agency’s 136 bots, 123 are running in an unattended manner. 

“That means it’s being executed automatically by a software entity — a digital worker — not a human,” Wood said.

The attended bots are run by a human, via a laptop, using credentials that come from their common access card (CAC). DLA’s unattended bot servers have their own credentials within the agency’s active directory, according to Wood.

“About 96% of our population of use cases are unattended,” he said. “That’s highly unusual within DOD and all of the government. My fellow programs out there, at least in DOD, I think there’s a total of about four or five unattended use cases out there. I have 123 within my program.”

So many unattended bots require the agency to implement much tighter IT controls in general, and cybersecurity controls in particular. 

There are multiple approaches to using automation, and Wood emphasized that “one size or style doesn’t fit” every organization. But in speaking to colleagues at other federal agencies, he’s found that “the reason we’re so far ahead of other folks is we actually start from the center” by establishing — from the beginning — an enterprise RPA effort built around compliance upfront.

“What do I mean by that? Our particular platform instance is what we call on-prem. It’s within our own virtual enclave. So, our virtual machines which comprise our platform run within a DLA enclave,” Wood explained.

The team is planning to migrate that over to the Defense Information Systems Agency eventually, but for now they control it in a logical and physical network environment. Logical network environments are basically virtual representations of all or some of the physical network environments.

DLA also implemented a hardware security module solution that interacts with the bot servers within the enclave to give them the same software certificate level of credential that a human would have with their CAC. 

“So that’s the ‘secret sauce’ — to do the network stuff, physical and logical, and have the identity stuff solved through a hardware security module. But you’re not done there,” Wood added.

There are also processes in place to ensure that the deployed bots have the identical restrictions that humans would have in accordance with controls to complete certain transactions in many, often financial, systems. 

All of this automation is unfolding as DLA is going through a much broader digital business transformation. 

Within that context, Wood noted that officials also formed a DLA steering committee that represents and involves all of the agency’s constituent organizations, as well as process owners. Once an automation goes through the software development lifecycle and reaches technical feasibility it goes into a backlog that is prioritized and voted on by that committee. From there, other steps are taken, including running the bot through a series of testing code standards. Then it’s put into production by a configuration management working group.

“So, that bot doesn’t do anything that everyone hasn’t agreed it should do. That further assures the bot. If you think bots are out there, you know, like Hollywood [movies show] doing what they decide — they can decide nothing. They haven’t the intelligence. What we do tell them to do is under great oversight through the central program, above and beyond any of the technical stuff we talked about,” Wood said.

Wells is a member of the steering group. 

“We get bot ideas from top to bottom within the organization. Some of our senior leaders have commented on things and it gets people thinking about where we can automate,” he noted. 

Looking to the future, Wells is eager to find new opportunities involving RPA that benefit not only DLA’s personnel, but also the agency’s broader supplier community and close industry partners that run similar operations. 

Wood is excited to continue building momentum and to grow the existing RPA platform in volume — and intelligence.

“Right now, we do RPA, which is a very simple technology. It actually mimics, in a robotic fashion, processes that a human does. It is not very smart. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make it smart. So, our antenna is up all the time to integrate with other technology areas within DLA, within that digital business transformation context. As they develop additional capabilities, we’re looking for ways to kind of drive more cognition into our platform. So, our ears are on and we’re excited that that day is coming very, very soon,” Wood said.

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The Scalable Ways to Implement Flexible Tasks (SWIFT) contract is mostly oriented around software. It spans apps across four domains: Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), collaborative services, visualization and hyperautomation.

ICE planned to release the solicitation, ushering in a new procurement model, in January but delayed a month and later extended the deadline for Phase 1 of proposal submissions to March 14.

“SWIFT is available for use to ICE, and on a case-by-case basis approval may be granted to other
DHS components by the ICE SWIFT contracting officer and SWIFT program manager,” reads the combined synopsis/solicitation.

ICE plans to post responses to industry’s questions about SWIFT via an amendment to the solicitation as soon as possible. The amendment will include any additional extensions to Phase 1 that ICE determines are necessary based on industry responses.

Phase 2 of the process doesn’t have a start date yet but is slated for later in 2022.

SWIFT’s $340 million value will be split among the contract awardees, of which there can be up to eight  — two per domain. The PaaS and collaborative services domains are unrestricted, but the visualization and hyperautomation domains are set aside for small businesses.

Vendors may win awards in multiple domains, provided they submit separate proposals for each, and ICE hasn’t set any limits on teaming arrangements.

The PaaS domain covers ICE’s ServiceNow and Dynamics systems, as well as emerging technologies, with the goal of developing workflow automation improving user experience through self-service and mobility.

Hyperautomation combines technologies like robotic process automation (RPA) and machine learning (ML) to identify, vet and automate IT processes. ICE uses UiPath and Power Automate for RPA, and a potential hyperautomation use case is creating a predictive algorithm identifying future staffing needs.

The visualization domain covers dashboards and reporting using Tableau, Qlik, PowerBI and emerging services with the goal of deploying a mobile app by the third quarter of fiscal 2022.

Collaborative services support SharePoint and ICE.gov, as well as a digitized intake process for customer initiation.

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The DHS sub-agency plans to support agile development of Platform-as-a-Service, hyperautomation, visualization and collaborative services applications through the procurement.

According to ICE, outsourcing the work to contractors with strong DevSecOps processes will allow it to scale the new procurement model agency-wide and evaluate emerging technologies, software and hosting options.

“Automation, continuous integration  and continuous development are viewed by the Office of the Chief Information Officer  as paramount to being able to successfully deliver value to our customers,” reads the draft performance work statement (PWS).

The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) domain covers the ServiceNow and Dynamics systems, as well as emerging technologies, with the goal of developing workflow automation improving user experience through self-service and mobility.

Hyperautomation combines technologies like robotic process automation (RPA) and machine learning (ML) to identify, vet and automate IT processes. ICE uses UiPath and Power Automate for RPA, and a potential hyperautomation use case is creating a predictive algorithm identifying future staffing needs.

The visualization domain covers dashboards and reporting using Tableau, Qlik, PowerBI and emerging services with the goal of deploying a mobile app by the third quarter of fiscal 2022.

Collaborative services support SharePoint and ICE.gov, as well as a digitized intake process for customer initiation.

ICE currently plans to make two awards per each of the four domains, with the hyperautomation and visualization domains set aside for small businesses and PaaS and collaborative services domains full and open competition. Task orders will be issued under each domain.

Vendors may win awards in multiple domains, provided they submit separate proposals for each, and ICE hasn’t set any limits on teaming arrangements.

Unlike the Repository for Analytics in Virtualized Environment (RAVEn) data analytics contract, for a platform only Homeland Security Investigations will use, SWIFT supports all of ICE.

Vendors have until 10 a.m. EDT on Dec. 30 to provide feedback on the draft PWS.

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Goldsby estimates the automations will achieve close to $2.5 million in cost avoidance and save about 78,000 work hours annually starting in the first quarter, she told FedScoop.

That’s in addition to the 66 automations already in production — representing $5.37 million in cost avoidance and about 156,000 work hours saved annually — fast becoming a key piece of USDA‘s digital transformation.

“RPA is absolutely recognized as strategic, not only at the Office of the Chief Information Officer level but at the department level,” Dave Peters, associate CIO at USDA’s Digital Infrastructure Services Center, told FedScoop. “As the new leadership has come on board, this is one of the programs that’s really gotten a lot of positive attention because of the strong financial and operational results.”

USDA’s nine-step governance process begins with a value assessment submitted to the RPA Center of Excellence for review. Part A covers basic information about the automation and the anticipated return on investment (ROI), while Part B constitutes a second meeting addressing whether the data being processed is structured or unstructured, optical character recognition is needed, and the automation will be attended or unattended.

One of USDA’s in-production automations will help the U.S. Forest Service process invoices faster to pay vendors on the fly when it’s fighting wildfires in the field. Optical character recognition (OCR) will read the invoices and consolidate the data they contain into a file input into the agency’s processing system.

USDA began the project this quarter and is currently working with a subject matter expert (SME) and the process owner, the U.S. Forest Service, to document the current and intended processes. A process definition document (PDD) will be developed and handed off to developers once the business owner, where the project funding comes from, signs off — a process that takes four to six weeks. From there the automation will take nine to 12 weeks to develop, with an estimated reduction in 5,000 to 10,000 work hours annually upon completion.

USDA’s goal is to then take the automation enterprisewide, Goldsby said. Department automations are a mix of centralized, where a vendor develops them for USDA, and federated, where an agency either hires a contractor to create the RPA or does so in house.

The department launched a Bot Tracker in 2019 to document all its automations.

“We have every automation at the intake, development or production stage logged into our catalog,” Goldsby said. “So we can easily access data and information that is pertinent when it’s requested at a given moment.”

That data includes process names; descriptions; types; the mission area, agency and division they were developed on behalf of; and the return on investment. All the data is displayed in a dashboard to help senior leaders make decisions and other agencies reuse the code.

Goldsby is active in the federalwide RPA Community of Practice. Through her involvement, USDA partnered with the General Services Administration and successfully piloted the latter’s contractor Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number automation. The RPA application allows contracting staff to put a DUNS number, an identifier for vendors doing business with the federal government, in an email and receive back a list of eligible contractors for a request for quotation.

USDA is working to set up an attendant so the entire department can use the RPA and hopes to partner with GSA on similar projects in the future, Goldsby said.

A common criticism of RPA automations is they break easily.

“We did find that if something moves on a website, or a URL is changed, that a bot will break of course, so the way we are dealing with that is we have an RPA operations and maintenance service that we provide our customers that they can sign up for,” Goldsby said. “We monitor their automations on a daily basis for any breaks, and if their automation does break, we automatically get a notification sent to my team’s remedy mailbox, where we’ll pick up that ticket and begin looking at where the error came from.”

The department’s one-year-old operations and maintenance (O&M) service can usually fix a break within a couple of hours, test and redeploy the automation. Major changes to an interface break RPA in ways that take longer to fix because they require working with the process and application owners.

An O&M service was absolutely needed with so many automations going into production, and the service has added professional service hours to add code to automations,” Goldsby said.

Still there’s no better fix than getting things right the first time.

“What we always do mainly is to build a good RPA to begin with, so they don’t fail,” Goldsby said. “If an RPA does fail, it’s primarily due to something being changed within the application that it’s integrated with, and definitely the benefits outweigh not automating a business process.”

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Rob Smallwood, VP, Digital Modernization and Enterprise IT, GDIT

It’s hard to argue against the urgent need for modernizing federal IT systems. What’s often lost in the discussion, however, are the practical considerations of modernizing, given the sheer complexity inherent in managing so many legacy applications across today’s on-premises and cloud environments.

Add to that having to maintain the government’s stringent security requirements; the need to work within multiple security domains; and the challenges of ensuring that data can be accessed safely and at scale anywhere in the world.

That’s why it’s essential for agencies to take a closer look at the power of integrating and automating a combination of state-of-the-art technologies, to handle the astronomical cross-domain workloads that our nation depends on now and in the future. Automating classified cross-domain IT on common infrastructures, for example, would better enable the U.S. to collaborate across security domains, and with our foreign mission partners at previously unrealized scale and efficiency.

That said, the actual work of implementing automation across today’s patch-worked IT systems remains anything but automatic — especially in government and defense circles.

The reasons are as varied as they are familiar. Government policies, acquisition regulations and security demands — on top of an endless sprawl of siloed systems — have buried government IT engineering and maintenance teams under layers upon layers of complexity. As a result, implementing IT automation effectively and securely remains immensely complicated, requiring enormous technical skill and experience to integrate solutions across a wide range of commercial and customized platforms.

Those challenges are increasing as on-premises and cloud-based systems not only become more interconnected, but also more dynamically driven.

Take the Department of Defense, for example, which has committed to establishing a Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) platform, aimed at gathering and analyzing data from across all domains (sea, air, land, cyber and space) and distributing that information back to those who need it, where and when they need it.

One of the distinct challenges in that endeavor revolves around automating IT services capable of sharing information with our coalition and mission partners. Dynamically provisioning secure and classified IT capabilities across so many security boundaries — and ensuring those capabilities are executed reliably at the “speed of need” — requires mapping out a vast array of digital checkpoints before automating.

Compounding matters are government acquisition rules that historically slow down modernization efforts to a pace some some would describe as the “speed of the policy.” As a consequence, it remains difficult for agencies and their contractors to take advantage of emerging technologies — and the tools to integrate them. The reality is, the rigidity of contract regulations tend to leave little room to anticipate new technology developments coming onto the market, or an avenue to fold them into an existing program.

A better approach

So how can we set up better scenarios so that more and more IT workloads and provisions can be automated within the confines of a single contract?

One way is to transfer the risk of responsibility and the implementation of modernized IT capabilities more fully onto the backs of qualified contractors, using outcome-focused managed IT services model with fixed-priced contracts, much like today’s cloud computing models.

That helps agencies avoid the inevitable traps of cost-plus contracts, which, because of their long runways, routinely lead to technology build-outs that are already out of date by the time they’re turned on— and tend to cost more than expected. Properly structured contracts effectively alleviate the need for agencies to commit to technologies that inevitably become outmoded.

Transferring the burden of risk and liability to experienced contractors it not only incentivizes contractors to innovate more rapidly; it also facilitates automating IT services — and the benefits that automation brings — more quickly.

Those benefits can be immense. Secure automation helps to provision, operate, and sustain critical IT services automatically and dynamically. That in turn speeds up the ability to process, store, analyze and share information that drive and support enterprise missions.

Given the sprawling complexity of government IT systems, the security and regulatory rules that govern them, and the risks inherent in modernizing them, it makes increasing economic sense to partner with contractors deeply familiar with those rules and risks. But agencies should also look for partners with proven experience in assessing the larger, enterprise-wide operating picture across all silos and seams.

That means, for instance, choosing contractors capable of grasping the most complicated operational scenario that an agency might face, and then solve backwards from there. As importantly, you want partners who know how to transition legacy infrastructures and have the ability to field new capabilities and services at the same time.

One of the most extreme scenarios GDIT has tackled, for instance, is how to automate managed services for sharing information of different military classification levels with coalition partners. The task involved not only automating the nation’s most stringent security requirements, but also doing so across some of the most diverse IT environments that exist around the world.

Agencies also need to consider contractors familiar with delivering services on a global scale — while also adapting them to specialized environments. GDIT, for instance, has delivered large swaths of enterprise IT services on defense programs, ranging from the U.S. Battlefield Information Collection and Exploitation System Extended (US BICES-X) to milCloud 2.0, which connects competitively priced, highly secure cloud service offerings to DoD networks. MilCloud 2.0 provides turnkey, high-performance cloud solutions that enable DoD agencies and partners to manage big workloads across different security classifications in ways that commercial providers can’t match.

President Biden recently stated, “America’s alliances are our greatest asset.”  Our ability to connect to them in cyberspace continues to be critical to that alliance. Connecting these governments together in a more automated fashion will remains an ongoing and essential task. Choosing an experienced partner who knows what that looks like, and has the necessary talent and skills, is a key step to getting to the speed of need.

Learn more how GDIT is helping defense and civilian agencies capitalize on the power of IT automation.

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