As its own ‘client zero’, IBM identified its human resources function back in 2017 for transformation with artificial intelligence. Today, the function is fully automated, and IBM has a wealth of insights and learnings to share that they hope can help federal agencies avoid some of the same pitfalls.

IBM took an AI-driven approach to transforming its HR function. For its test bed, the company used itself and came away with valuable lessons learned.

Now IBM can help federal agencies apply those lessons and — hopefully — avoid some of the same mistakes. That’s according to Mike Chon, IBM’s vice president and senior partner of talent transformation for the U.S. federal market.

“IBM has gained the efficiencies, it’s delivered on the employee experience, it has achieved a lot of the automations [and] productivity gains,” Chon said.

He cited statistics that tell the story. IBM employees have had nearly two million HR conversations with a virtual agent. Those have achieved resolution in 94% of the cases, meaning the employee didn’t need to proceed to a conversation with a live person.

Manager productivity

When seeking HR efficiencies, organizations tend to think initially in terms of self-service for employees. But Chon urged IT and HR staffs to think more broadly to include managers too.

“I also want to emphasize manager self-service,” he said. “I think that’s where the additional value can come in.”

It also requires a bit of rewiring of manager habits. Chon said that initially, he, like many experienced managers, was less inclined to invoke a chatbot than to simply call his HR representative with questions.

“I myself did not really adopt that [AI] paradigm right away,” he said. “My muscle memory was to call an HR person. Clock forward to today … I actually tend to go to our AI chatbot more than an HR manager.”

He added, IBM managerial uptake of the HR chatbot has reached 96% worldwide, accounting for 93% of the transactions.

HR presents a natural entry point for AI because it touches everyone.

“By introducing AI through HR, you’re really having this ability to embed the use of these tools throughout your enterprise,” Chon said. “I think that really starts to get people more comfortable.”

Use case approach

Having chosen the HR function, Chon said, IBM initially tried an overly comprehensive approach.

“When we first started this journey, we tried to boil the ocean. It was this big bang approach,” Chon said.

The company realized almost immediately that the tool wasn’t quite right, and people weren’t embracing it.

Lesson learned?

“Never seek the silver bullet,” Chon said. “It really forced everyone to put the brakes on this process” and rethink their approach.

The rethinking resulted in what Chon called a building block, use case-by-use case approach. The team started by identifying specific high-frequency or highly repetitive tasks, the automation of which would allow the team to spend less time on routine tasks and more on strategic, value add work. Data connected to each task helped with this identification, which  ultimately allowed the team to identify two use cases: employee time off and proof-of-employment letters. Before AI, employees would ask their HR representative how many vacation days they had left, and it could take days for HR to prepare and send employee proof of employment letters, Chon said. These tasks represented some of the most repetitive and time consuming for the function.

“AI gave employees the ability to find out their vacation days in seconds and generate their own employee verification letter from anywhere, anytime. And they get instant satisfaction because it happens right in front of them,” Chon said.

In the employment verification letter  use case, AI took the form of robotic process automation, he added.

Moreover, if a particular step to a task doesn’t work, HR and IT could simply turn it off and improve it, without affecting everything else that’s working well.

It’s also important to understand that in a small percentage of cases, employees will need to interact with humans; no AI agent can do everything. Therefore, Chon said, “we always give people the ability to connect to a live agent.” Careful data analysis of what leads to “off-ramps” helps with continuous improvement of the AI tool, he said.

Ultimately, Chon said, the HR AI-driven self-service option for employees and managers lets HR professionals become more productive, taking the drudgery out of HR processes, leaving people more time for “tackling things like recruiting and other high value activities like talent development.”

Ultimately, the key lessons learned from IBM’s experience center on employing a use-case driven approach. AI is successfully adopted with small wins, building blocks and steps. Larger, more strategic and transformational use cases don’t have one clear answer or outcome. The key is finding a use case — a workflow, process or task — that could be accelerated or improved through automation. This also allows for easier scaling to other parts of the agency.

“Now, I would say, seven years later, each time the team launches a new use case, it’s actually getting better and better,” Chon said.

Listen to the full show:

The post This vendor tested its AI solutions on itself first appeared on Federal News Network.

The National Archives and Records Administration will be moving away from analog records and are now requiring agencies to transfer records to them in digital format. NARA’s digitization standard is expected to begin at the end of June 2024.

“The deadline is June 30. In little more than six weeks, there’s going to be a major shift in how NARA accessions records from agencies. Arguably valuable permanent records that are part of our nation’s treasures. We got the biggest set of records covered first. Those standards are very detailed. They are almost like a checklist. And they explained to agencies and the vendors supporting agencies what needs to happen to create that digital image, that version of that permanent record that is coming to NARA. We are not accessioning the paper and the digital image, we are only going to be bringing in the digital image,” said Lisa Haralampus, the director of Federal Records Management Policy and Outreach at NARA, on Federal Insights — Records Management.

NARA recently opened a new digitization center in College Park, Maryland to evolve and provide better access to federal government records and expand its capacity.

“For the last year and a half or so, there was a renovation effort in our archives building at College Park. And we’ve renovated 18,000 square feet and established a modern state-of-the-art digitization center. A mixed use space that colocates our work processes. So archival prep, preparation of records before digitization, metadata capture and then ultimately scanning. We brought the different functions together in one location. We have a fleet of top of the line imaging equipment that ranges from overhead camera setups, flatbed scanners, microfilm and microfiche theatres. And we purchased three new imbl HP FUSiON 8300 high speed [scanners] that will exponentially make more records available online,” said Denise Henderson, director of digitization for the Office of Research Services at NARA.

NARA’s digitization is a multi-part process with different records requiring different techniques to scan and digitize. For agencies, all permanent paper records and print photos must have digital copies of its records as part of the digitization standards for NARA’s archives.

“We have format standards that we use at the National Archives; their records have been created in so many different formats over time by so many agencies depending on what they’re doing. We will take PST files, we will take EML files, we will take XML files, but we won’t see Lotus Notes on that email list. We need the email to be sent to us in a format that we can maintain. Unless your federal mission is really unique, and you are the standards authority, we try to base our standards on what’s common practice. So when we were developing the digitization standards for permanent records, we went and looked, well, what would we base them on? We at the National Archives, our job is to preserve our nation’s history,” Haralampus said.

NARA also requires digitized permanent records to meet Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) standards in order to be added in the archives. FADGI guidelines set standards for federal agencies to follow as best practices when processing digital historical, archival and cultural content. This includes maps, documents and prints.

“We are a cultural heritage institution. So we are using the Federal Agency Digitization Guidelines, because those were standards that were created to handle cultural heritage materials. The FADGI standards gives us our basis for the technical component of scanning, including things like what is the allowable error for noise. How do you test and make sure that you’ve got a calibrated workstation, so you know your image is what you produce,” Haralampus told the Federal Drive with Tom Temin. “When we wrote these digitization standards, we had the idea of modern textual records in mind; that’s where we started. Eventually, the FADGI standard that we produced would cover any type of record whether it was onionskin from the 1940s or maps. So our standards cover all types of records.”

Modern Textual Records (MTRs) refers to documents created by modern office paper. If the records are before 1950, or if that specific MTR has value, NARA will accept it along with the digital record.

“We created a disposition authority structure that has a check in it. An opportunity for NARA and for the agency and actually members of the public as well to weigh in and say yes, those records, we want to take the source record as well as the digitized record. So for us, modern textual records, we’re not anticipating those as having intrinsic value and coming to the National Archives,” Haralampus said.

When it comes to optical character recognition (OCR), NARA is not requiring that as a standard for agencies to perform. Haralampus said that will be standard to look at in the near future, but as of now they can’t find an OCR standard equivalent to the digitization standard.

“Most agencies are not digitizing records just to send them to the National Archives. They’re digitizing records because they need them to perform their mission. And as they’re performing their mission, the output of that is you should digitize to our permanent record standards. Don’t waste the digitization effort happening across the government,” she said.

The post NARA to remove analog records as part of new digitization standards first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is only a few months away from having 100% of its systems in the cloud. That’s the culmination of almost eight years of effort, said Mason McDaniel, ATF’s chief technology officer. He said that’s been such a large lift because there are no commercial, off-the-shelf products for missions like criminal investigations, firearms dealer regulations or firearm tracing. And because those systems weren’t compatible with the cloud, ATF needed an environment that allowed them to be rebuilt from the ground up.

“We really refocused on building an enterprise, continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD) environment, rebuilding all of our processes around automation, and really focused on building this pipeline that let us rebuild our applications quickly, efficiently, deploy things quickly, and then we use that as the enabler to go through application by application and try to get those rebuilt. And we are just about at the end of that journey,” McDaniel said on Federal Insights — Best Practices in Secure Software Development.

One key part that McDaniel said ATF prioritized was not changing the business processes, in order to minimize retraining. Instead, ATF focused on wrapping modern frameworks and automation technologies around those, to set the stage for modernizing those business processes as rapidly as possible in the future.

Automating cybersecurity

That also gave ATF the opportunity to embed automated cybersecurity processes throughout the development lifecycle, said ATF Chief Information Security Officer Hillary Carney. That includes penetration testing, endpoint detection and response tools, security information and event management logging tools, and more. That gives developers the feedback they need to address vulnerabilities from test cases through production, as well as lifetime visibility.

“One of the things that I think cloud really helped us with is that near-real time visibility; it allows us to be so much more agile, not only for meeting the business mission need, but for the security testing portion as well,” Carney said. “And being able to interact with the operations teams and say ‘we monitor on a daily basis through our tools. And we’re seeing this change; the posture has changed, and we need you to get in there, and diagnose why that’s happening.’ So cloud has been essential in order to move our program forward, to be a lot more responsive to both mission and then to cybersecurity.”

“But just like the tools have gotten better, so have the adversaries. That’s really what’s driving this. It’s an arms race. So if we are not on top of it, someone else will find it. They will exploit it,” she added. “I am over the moon with the progress we’ve made and being able to do more near real-time analysis, do more agile testing. However, as we get better, they get better. So there is no rest for the weary.”

That’s why the next thing on ATF’s cybersecurity to-do list is to begin using the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s software attestation form. Eventually, Carney said, the goal is to get to using Software Bills of Materials, but that’s too much of a culture change all at once. She said, much like ATF has done with it’s CI/CD program, the intent is to start slow and build the case as they build the program.

Containerization

But in the meantime, ATF is leveraging its new CI/CD capabilities along with a push toward containerization and virtualization to enhance its systems’ resiliency. McDaniel said using automated deployment and containerization limits the configuration creep of patching, because every new instance is automatically deployed from a known-good state. When paired with ATF’s more frequent deployments, that shrinks the window that adversaries have to create a persistent presence in the systems.

And as ATF uses this method to re-architect its systems, it’s also implementing zero trust principles like least privilege, and continuous verification of identity and authorization. That’s an ongoing process McDaniel said will help ATF protect its application programming interfaces.

“Identity is so foundational to our cloud journey as well as the zero trust mandate. We’ve started some work on device. We’ve made inroads in multiple pillars,” Carney said. “What we need to do now, and we’re trying to drive towards, which is difficult in these constrained budget environments, is really getting that integrated plan to move together, to ensure that we’re taking everything into account as we’re planning our featured architectural state. So it’s a work in progress.”

Information sharing

All of this has been bolstered by increased information sharing among Justice Department components, both Carney and McDaniel said. Many of ATF’s systems are law-enforcement specific; there’s no need for agencies outside DoJ to have them. That limits the applicability of information sharing in wider venues, like the Chief Information Officers Council. But within DoJ, they’re sharing strategies that they find to be more effective than “the traditional, ‘let’s throw 500 FISMA controls at it’” strategies, Carney said.

“So we’ve been figuring a lot of it out as we go and refining our processes and sharing a number of our lessons learned with some of the other components,” McDaniel said. “And then for those that have been on the same path, we’re certainly taking what we can from them. But there’s definitely active lessons learned sharing going on, between all the components.”

The post ATF begins looking to new cyber strategies as it nears 100% cloud migration first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Marine Corps is close to testing out a key piece to its upcoming Fighting Smart concept.

As part of its goal to create an integrated mission and data fabric, the Marines will pilot an application programming interface (API) standard to better connect and share data no matter where it resides.

“Really over the next 12 months, we hope to have the autonomous piece of this API connection implemented in our environment in what we call the common management plane that allows us to execute enterprise data governance where we can then use the capabilities rather than the native capabilities within our environment to develop those data catalogs, to tag data, to track the data from its lineage from creation all the way to sharing and destruction within our environment and outside of our environment,” said Dr. Colin Crosby, the service data officer for the Marine Corps, on Ask the CIO. “We’re working with what we call the functional area managers and their leads on the data that they own because this is all new in how we’re operating. I need them to help me execute this agenda so that we can then create that API connection.”

Like many organizations, mission areas own and manage the data, but sharing because of culture, technology and/or policy can be difficult.

Crosby said the API connection can help overcome many of these challenges.

“Our first marker is to have a working API connection on test data. Once that happens, then we’re going to start accelerating the work that we’re doing,” he said. “We’re using logistics data so what we’re doing is using a dummy data, and we’re going to pull that data into our common management plane, and then from that CMP, we want to push that data to what we call the  online database gateway. Then, by pulling that into the OTG, we can then push it into the Azure Office 365 environment, where we can then use that data using our PowerBI capabilities within our environment.”

Testing the API before production

Once the API connection proves out, Crosby said the goal is to push data into the Marine Corps’ Bolt platform, which runs on the Advana Jupiter platform.

He said there is a lot of excitement from logistics and other mission areas around the Marine Corps to prove this API connection technology.

“As we get more comfortable moving forward, then we will bring on the next, what we call, coalition of the willing. As of now, we have a line because we have other organizations now that are like, ‘we want to be a part of this,’” Crosby said. “The training and education command is ready to go. So we’re excited about it because now I don’t have to work that hard to get people on board and now I have people knocking on my doors saying they are ready to go.”

Crosby added that before the API connection goes live with each new organization, his team will run similar tests using dummy data. He said building that repeatable process and bringing in some automation capabilities will help decrease the time it takes to turn on the API tools for live data.

Without these new capabilities, Crosby said it takes weeks to pull CSV files, thus delaying the ability of leaders to make decisions.

“With the API, we’re going to near-real time type of pull and push, which is speeding up the decision cycle,” he said. “Then there are opportunities to expand on that by building applications that will aggregate data and then being able to look at data to check the maintenance on equipment, and then it’d be a little bit easier to understand what we need and when. The goal is to shrink that decision cycle a little bit.”

The API connection tool is one piece to the bigger Marine Corps effort to create an integrated mission and data fabric. Crosby said that initiative also relies on the unification of the Marine Corps enterprise network to bring the business side and the tactical side together into one environment.

“The fabric is a framework and approach of our environment today and how we want to connect our environment in an autonomous fashion using APIs, so that we can pull data and we can share data, regardless of the cloud environment that it’s in, regardless of whatever database structure the data resides in,” Crosby said. “It allows us to be flexible. It allows us to scale and to really push data and pull data at a speed that we’ve never done before. What I love about the fabric is it really gets to that decision making. It allows our commanders to make sense and act within real or near real time.”

The post The Marine Corps’ plan to further breakdown data siloes first appeared on Federal News Network.

HHS’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) on Monday announced a “Universal PatchinG and Remediation for Autonomous DEfense” (UPGRADE) program. The goal is to build tools that help hospitals and healthcare systems more easily find and fix cyber vulnerabilities in their systems.

In a statement, HHS Deputy Secretary Andrea Palm said the new program would help build on the HHS cybersecurity strategy for the healthcare sector.

“We continue to see how interconnected our nation’s health care ecosystem is and how critical it is for our patients and clinical operations to be protected from cyberattacks,” Palm said. “Today’s launch is yet another example of HHS’ continued commitment to improving cyber resiliency across our health care system.”

UPGRADE program manager Andrew Carney said a major challenge is modeling the complexities in the myriad software used in any given healthcare facility, leaving many open to ransomware attacks.

“With UPGRADE, we want to reduce the effort it takes to secure hospital equipment and guarantee that devices are safe and functional so that health care providers can focus on patient care,” Carney said in a statement.

A special notice announcing the new project details how ARPA-H envisions the new program developing a “revolutionary new cybersecurity platform for hospitals and health systems.” The idea is to help hospital IT teams manage the “massive complexity” of many health IT environments.

“UPGRADE envisions a semiautonomous cyber-threat mitigation platform that promotes proactive, scalable, and synchronized security updates, adaptable to any hospital environment, and across a wide array of the most vulnerable equipment classes,” the special notice states.

“This software platform will contain a suite of tools that enable real-time evaluation of potential vulnerabilities, and how corresponding security updates might impact hospital operations,” the notice continues. “This will empower hospital decision makers to deploy security remediations without risking the real-world operational downtime that threatens the continuity of patient care.”

ARPA-H detailed how the program will focus on four distinct technical areas, including creating the vulnerability mitigation software platform; developing “high-fidelity” digital twins of hospital systems; automatically detecting cyber vulnerabilities; and “auto-developing” custom cyber defenses.

The research agency said it plans to make multiple awards under the UPGRADE program. It will hold a proposers day on June 20.

ARPA-H’s new project comes amid sustained attention on health sector cybersecurity in the wake of the Change Healthcare ransomware attack. The February cyber incident took down the systems of the major health transactions provider, crippling the operations of hospitals and health systems across the country for weeks.

In addition to investigating the response by United Healthcare, Change Healthcare’s parent company, lawmakers have been probing the response of HHS, which is responsible for overseeing the cybersecurity of the healthcare sector.

“We must also assess the response of the federal government, which plays a critical role in these efforts,” Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) said during a May 17 Senate Finance Committee hearing on the Change Healthcare breach. “HHS has a responsibility to serve as a central hub for coordination, convening insights from other branches of government and the private sector to deploy timely information about active threats, as well as best practices to deter intrusions and resources should an attack occur.”

HHS officials say they are elevating the role of the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) to serve as a hub for the agency’s sector cybersecurity efforts, which span multiple components and offices.

The post HHS research arm to spend $50M on ‘revolutionary’ cyber tools first appeared on Federal News Network.

New military aircraft designs don’t necessarily require super jet engines or hundreds of billions in development costs. A case in point: The Navy’s bid for a light plane that can take off and land in less than a football field. The Naval Air Systems Command recently hired a company called Electra to study the development of such an electrically-powered plane. For more, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with the founder and CEO of Electra.aero, John Langford.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin And just a brief technological description of what your company does. It’s more than just planes that can land in a short space, but it’s the propulsion that’s radically different.

John Langford Exactly. Electra.aero is a US company started about four years ago, whose focus is sustainable aviation. We believe that the whole next generation of aviation, at least commercial aviation, is really all about decarbonization. And we’re working in a part of the market that we think is relatively unaddressed within, but with enormous market potential, which is sort of the short haul and regional air mobility market. What Electra is doing is developing a hybrid electric, extreme short takeoff and landing airplane. Think of something with the operational flexibility of a helicopter, but with the cost structure at or below existing fixed wing airplanes. Electra uses a technique called blown lift, which is an idea that has been around for many years, was pioneered by NASA back in the 60s and demonstrated by NASA and the Air Force in the 70s, but which has never yet reached commercial utilization, primarily because the engines that existed at the time were not well suited economically to this idea of blown lift. But electric propulsion, distributed electric propulsion is really the breakthrough, which, combined with the idea of blown lift, makes this new category of airplanes possible. That’s what Electra it’s all about.

Tom Temin Blown lift then makes the wing feel like it’s going faster than it actually is. So the plane goes up even though it’s not going forward as fast as usual, rotation speed.

John Langford Exactly. The idea of blown lift is you bathe the wing in accelerated flow from many different propellers on there, and it accelerates the flow over the wing and it effectively makes the wing look bigger than it physically is, which is how we get the eventually the high lift coefficients. Then the slow flight speeds and the slow speeds are what allow you to do the really short takeoff and landings.

Tom Temin And have you tested it with a barn door yet?

John Langford We’ve tested it with a whole range of things, from pencil and pen calculations to computer fluid dynamics to subscale models. And now today, we have a full scale manned demonstrator flying right out at Manassas Regional Airport. And it’s really neat to see how all of the theory actually translates into practice very well.

Tom Temin And what has the Navy asked you to do to prototype a plane for its use, or to study the concept? What is the actual contract deliverable here?

John Langford So Electra’s primary focus is a commercial product aimed at, commercial operators. But at the same time, there’s a lot of government uses for an airplane that can take off and land very quietly in very small spaces. Our biggest financial backer to date from the government has been the Air Force through their Agility Prime program, which is helping sponsor the development, not only of the test program that we’re flying today, but also of a prototype airplane of the nine seed airplane product. As they’ve seen, the Air Force interests, both the Army and the Navy, have now become interested in how this technology might actually benefit them. And the Navy contract that we announced last week is really the first study of how that might be applied in the marine environment.

Tom Temin So they need not just the technology, but it sounds like they’re looking for a use case for this type of craft.

John Langford Absolutely. An airplane that can operate in sort of helicopter like spaces, but at the very low cost, comparatively, of a fixed wing airplane has a lot of potential uses. And commercially, what we’re trying to do is get in and out of the Wall Street Heliport, which would allow fixed wing airplanes to fly right into Manhattan, which is a little bit of a mind boggling idea when you think about it. That would enable direct air service from Manhattan to Washington, DC, right on a on a fixed wing airplane, not on a helicopter. And if you can land on that, if you’re familiar with what that heliport looks like. Barge in the East River. And that’s where the space of 300ft by 100ft, our operating requirement  comes from there. Once you can operate in a space that size, there’s all kinds of other places you can go the top of parking garages, literally any soccer field. And as you start to look at the marine environment, you start to go, wow, when you have a little wind over the deck, now you’re talking about distances that are even shorter than the 300 foot or the 150 foot ground rule that we’re talking about. These  airplanes take off and land between 25 and 30 knots, which is down in the range of ships can achieve that. And if there’s wind over the deck, either generated by ship motion or by by the wind itself, you can get into situations where these airplanes literally can almost take off vertically. There are historical examples of previous Stol airplanes, not blown lift airplanes, but previous Stol airplanes that can do essentially a vertical takeoff in the right wind conditions. And that’s really the heart of the study we’re going to be doing for the Navy is, well, what does this really mean? Some of the ideas we’re thinking about is this allows you to take container ships. And use a container ship to add aircraft, fixed wing aircraft operations off a container ship, off an oil tanker, off anything with a space of 50 to 100ft. That’s part of the study. How you treat some of these, the idea that now you have a reliable wind over the deck condition. What does that really mean for the operations of an airplane like this, which only needs 150ft ground roll to begin with? How does that really work in practice in the marine environment? That’s the focus of this initial study.

Tom Temin We’re Speaking with John Langford, he’s the founder and CEO of Electra.aero. And what is the status of this propulsion technology? Because pure electric planes have been flown, but they’re kind of like electric motorcycles. Lots of fun if you don’t want to go anywhere.

John Langford Exactly. When you look at conventional jet fuel, and you look at the very best batteries, there’s still a factor of between 50 and 100 in the amount of energy you can contain for a given amount of weight. And in cars, if your car weighs twice, your battery car weighs twice what your, gas car weighs, nobody really notices. The people who have to maintain the roads or the people who sell you the tires, they notice. But the average consumer doesn’t really realize how much heavier their electric cars are. Aviation weight is everything. Absolutely, the name of the game is how you get this high performance at low weight. And so batteries are not really well suited to aviation today. They may well be as the battery technology progresses over the next, 10, 25, 50, 100 years. But today it’s only in very limited cases that batteries buy their way on to an airplane. So what we are focused on is a hybrid solution. Think very much like, a Prius where there is both batteries and there is, in our case, a small gas turbine engine. Think of it like an auxiliary propulsion unit or something like that. They will work together in normal operations for takeoff and landing. Either one can power the airplane in an emergency. So one of the cool things the hybrid does is it gives you lots of redundancies that you don’t have on an airplane normally in this weight category. And then they allow lots of really neat advantages. Essentially what we do is we operate the gas turbine at a single fixed operating point, and we run it that way for a really long time.

John Langford So the two big drivers of maintenance cost on jet engines are how many throttle cycles you do, and how many times you turn it off and on. So both of those are dramatically reduced in the hybrid thing. And all of the throttle excursions are taken up by the batteries, which are actually pretty good at changing their loads very quickly. So we think it’s really a nice combination that is going to work well, and not just in our nine seat airplane. We actually think this technology is very scalable. We’re already talking with NASA about ideas about how this might scale up into airplanes as large as several hundred seats in a passenger. I think the whole idea of hybrid electric airplanes is actually something we’re going to hear a lot about over the next couple of decades. And we think Electra is really just a pioneer in that in the technology and in the market space.

Tom Temin But just to be clear, you do have craft built and flying around with this technology.

John Langford Absolutely right. We started out companies four years old. We spent the first two years developing and proving the hybrid electric system before we even built any kind of airplane. We spent the first two years developing and testing the hybrid electric propulsion system, and then we built an airplane. We wrapped the airplane around it. And that airplane, is called the, the EL2, goldfinch. And it’s flying today out in Manassas. It’s a two place airplane about the size of a Cessna 172. And it’s being used to validate all of the systems before we build the actual product, which is a nine passenger version.

Tom Temin It strikes me you could have the future locomotive at your fingertips also.

John Langford The electrification of things is going to be a big part of the next industrial revolution. And over the last 20 years, it’s all been how do you put everything on the internet. The next 25 years is going to be how you make everything, some version of electric. Whether it’s pure battery, whether it’s hybrid. I’m a big believer of hybrid. These are steps towards a future that may be hydrogen based or something like that, but there are steps that can be taken today with the existing technology, and they don’t require a rework of the entire distribution system. And so they’re very practical even if they’re only interim steps. And by interim, I mean this makes several generations 25 to 50 years, which is still a pretty good product lifecycle.

The post Navy hired this company to develop a new type of aircraft first appeared on Federal News Network.

When it comes to understanding their customer experience data, agencies are dipping into the cybersecurity lexicon.

More and more organizations want to view customer, employee, structured and unstructured data through a “single pane of glass,” a term typically reserved for pulling together data from a variety of cybersecurity tools.

And like in the cyber world, agencies are starting to see the need to view this total experience through an integrated platform that brings together a variety of data sources.

“For our customers, we want them to have a simple, seamless and secure experience when interacting with a digital service as well as a human-based service,” said MaryAnn Monroe, vice president of total experience solutions and services at Maximus, during the Federal News Network’s 2024 CX Exchange.

“That’s really critical because that really taps into our employee experience — and the tools that we provide at their fingertips as well as our managers and supervisors — to be able to have that view of the operation and also the customer and employee experience in one single place.”

Making sense of data in real time

The spillover of cybersecurity concepts into CX isn’t surprising. Agencies are facing similar challenges and opportunities in both realms given the amount of data they are collecting, the need to understand what’s happening in real time and the impact on the mission.

Monroe said the agencies Maximus work with are looking for the “pulse of the public” and for very specific insights from the public around different topics.

“Having that data at our fingertips and being able to use that and inform the agencies that we work with is very critical because it also helps inform decisions. It also tells us where pivots may need to be made or information needs to be developed — trying to bridge the gap in many cases where information doesn’t exist or maybe doesn’t exist as clearly as it needs to be based on what the public is telling us,” she said.

“We see that across agencies that are really trying to get that information much more clearly and not have to look in 10, 12, 15 different systems to cobble that together to understand the story. We’re getting better and better with our technology platforms and being able to pull that together to be able to tell that story from a single pane of glass.”

Taking advantage of AI, other advancing technologies for CX

Of course to deal with all the data, both structured and unstructured, agencies also are starting to turn to artificial intelligence and advanced data analytics. Agencies can apply these tools to improve operations as well as improve the employee experience.

“In several of our large programs supporting agencies, we’re able to pull in more unstructured customer and employee data about our actions or words spoken or customer intent. These are things that they care about and things that they’re asking about,” Monroe said. “We’re able to leverage AI to pull that information in so that we can actually understand the pulse of the public a little bit better, so that we can tell a better story or see what those impacts are in the program that we need to elevate to our agency stakeholders.”

She added several Maximus programs use AI, such as agent assist, to understand the topics citizens are asking and then bring back particular information that employees can use to answer questions more quickly.

“Those days where employees had to flip through a gazillion different pages of information, whether it’s digital or in a notebook, are over. We’ve certainly come a long way. AI is enabling very specific topics to be served right up to the desktop for them to click on and use as a resource to answer questions,” Monroe said.

Not only does this approach help make the employee experience more efficient, but it also allows integration of other forms of omnichannel communication into the interactions, she said.

“For example, if somebody has called for a particular piece of information, health information, for example, we’re able to integrate and say, ‘Would you like us to text that information to you or email it?’ Many times we can text it right to the customer while they’re still on the line and check to see that they’ve received it,” Monroe said.

Not all technology needs to be cutting edge. Many agencies also are turning to more straightforward automation tools like robotic process automation to improve the efficiency of services.

Monroe said no matter the tools agencies use, transparency and security are paramount to create long-standing trust. She warned that AI and similar tools, if not used correctly, could erode trust in the service or organization.

That’s why Monroe recommended agencies start small, with pilots, before expanding use of AI and other CX tools.

“We are all in with improving digital experiences where it makes sense and where people need those services,” she said. “The fact is that we need to understand who we’re serving and be able to provide those services. In many agencies, in-person services are still vitally important — at Social Security, the IRS, the Agriculture Department, the Department of Veterans Affairs. Those are very important services that the American public relies on and definitely have to factor into this equation of how we strike that balance with technology.”

Discover more customer experience tactics and takeaways from Federal News Network’s CX Exchange 2024 now.

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The journey to reach customer experience excellence is a matter of constants. Agencies need constant feedback from customers. They need constant input from employees. And all of this is leading to constant change.

“It’s having that strategy that you’re constantly monitoring, measuring and acting on — being able to continually do that,” said David Werner, senior client partner for Verizon’s connected experience solutions, during the Federal News Network’s 2024 CX Exchange.

“You want to make sure you have high-quality, diverse, well-labeled datasets so that whatever models we’re building within artificial intelligence can truly improve its accuracy and reliability. It’s just really knowing what those models are and what the limitations of AI are, so that you can address everything proactively to be effective.”

Technology like cloud services, AI and automation — combined with new and improved processes — help agencies make it easier on their employees to understand customer needs.

Balancing AI use and workflow changes

Werner said many agencies are still figuring out the right balance between technologies like AI and the ever-changing role of employees in driving better customer experience.

“With both AI and the people working together, they are actually smarter and more efficient. Then, the whole key, I think, is really to figure out how AI can augment the human interactions and roles, versus replace, which I think some people were concerned about,” he said.

“With AI, there’s so many different ways that it can enhance the interactions with customers. It can increase personalization to make sure people are getting the content that they want, when they want it, and providing real-time insights and recommendations to customers as they’re asking you for information. All of that enhances the whole human interaction in that it helps the agencies to better understand the customer feedback.”

Agencies then can rely more on using sentiment analysis and using AI to more quickly figure out what is impacting interactions between a citizen and the government. By understanding the data in real time, Werner said, agencies can “break free” from those predefined journeys based on an old set of rules and understandings.

“Being able to access large language models, customers are able to ask open-ended questions that define the experience in their own way. It really improves their whole experience and makes them happier,” he said. “Then, from the employee side, AI, at its core, is an assistive technology. It really helps to enable digital assistants, which we’re seeing that already. But beyond that, it actually enhances and enriches the employees’ experience. Employees basically are able to leverage better training, which gets to shorter onboarding time.”

And, perhaps most important, Werner noted, “It leads to better outcomes.”

Tapping AI to help speed customer responses

Another big benefit for employees is they can more quickly find the answers to citizens’ questions, which improves the satisfaction of agency services.

For instance, one large Verizon customer is taking advantage of these tools in its contact center through different platforms and services as part of it efforts to develop a successful CX and AI strategy.

“We are helping government agencies figure out where they can create a sandbox, start to evaluate their data, how their data can be manipulated in a better way. We are working with customers to create what we call a center of excellence, which they can actually transform from a technical emphasis of the information to more operations focused to better support their business objectives,” Werner said.

“The key is helping to establish that data modernization journey. What’s the data? How did they gain the most from it? And then, constantly monitor, measure and act on that. The key is helping them from that sandbox, being able to create those evaluation processes. Then, once you deploy, you’re continually in that process to learn, grow, change and learn again — so that you’re evolving constantly.”

Discover more customer experience tactics and takeaways from Federal News Network’s CX Exchange 2024 now.

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Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) are introducing the “Strengthening the Federal Records Act of 2024” today.

The bill would tighten disclosure requirements for “non-official messaging accounts” used to carry out government business, while also strengthening the ability of the National Archives and Records Administration to hold agencies accountable for complying with record-keeping rules.

“Federal agencies must maintain adequate records so that the American public can hold officials accountable, access critical benefits and services, and have a clear picture of how the government is spending taxpayer dollars,” Peters said in a statement. “We must also update the law to keep pace with rapidly changing technology and ensure that we are not sacrificing transparency as we embrace new forms of communication.”

The bill would prohibit federal employees from using “non-official” messaging applications to carry out government business unless the messages are backed up or otherwise saved in an official account.

Beyond texting, government officials have also increasingly turned to platforms like WhatsApp and Signal in recent years. Those “ephemeral” messaging applications allow users to permanently delete messages after a set amount of time.

“American taxpayers deserve a full accounting of federal records, including across all forms of digital communication,” Cornyn said. “This legislation would help make sure technological advancements do not hamstring the government’s ability to provide greater accountability and transparency for federal records.”

The proposed FRA reforms do not address record-keeping at the White House. Those practices are governed by a separate statute, the Presidential Records Act.

But the legislation comes after numerous federal record-keeping controversies at the agency-level in recent years. For instance, the Secret Service lost key text messages from the day of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, reportedly due to an IT system update.

The Department of Homeland Security inspector general, who had been investigating the missing Secret Service texts, more recently admitted to lawmakers he routinely deletes texts off his government-issued phone.

And during a hearing held by the homeland security committee earlier this month, Republicans pointed to a National Institutes of Health official who had told colleagues he used his personal email account to avoid having his records pulled under a Freedom of Information Act request.

“Records are the currency of democracy,” Anne Weismann, a former Justice Department official and law professor at George Washington University, said during the hearing. “They are the way we hold government actors accountable. And we have seen too many examples, whether it’s at NIH, whether it’s at DHS, whether it’s the Secret Service, where federal employees are either willfully or unwittingly avoiding or contravening their record keeping responsibilities. And as a result, the historical record of what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, is incomplete.”

Certification requirements

Under the legislation, federal employees would also have to certify their compliance record-keeping requirements before leaving an agency. Weismann pointed to reports that senior officials in the Trump administration may have deleted crucial messages regarding Jan. 6 before leaving government.

“If they had been required to certify upon leaving government that they had complied with their record keeping responsibilities, that might not have happened, or there would have been some ability to hold them accountable for what they did,” Weismann said during a hearing held by the homeland security committee earlier this month.

The legislation would expand a NARA program that automatically captures the email messages of senior agency officials.

The “Capstone” program would be expanded to automatically capture other forms of electronic messages, including through the “culling” of transitory messages and personal messages “as appropriate,” per the legislation.

Justice Department referral

Peters’ and Cornyn’s bill would also require NARA to refer repeated violations of the FRA to the Justice Department, including cases where employees unlawfully remove or destroy records.

Weismann had told lawmakers that NARA has been reticent to refer violations of records laws to DOJ, especially in cases where records were allegedly destroyed. She said that’s despite the fact that the Archives admits it doesn’t have the resources or authorities to investigate and punish record-keeping violations on its own.

“[NARA] is not well equipped, they don’t have the investigative resources, for example, that the Department of Justice has, which is precisely why we think it’s so critical that the obligation to make that referral be made clear,” Weismann said.

The bill comes as federal agencies and NARA manage an increasing amount of electronic records. NARA will stop accepting permanent paper records from agencies starting this summer.

Numerous advisory committees and advocacy groups have warned that agencies have largely been unprepared to handle the growing influx of digital data over the past two decades, impacting everything from classified information sharing to FOIA processing.

The Peters-Cornyn legislation would also set up an “Advisory Committee on Records Automation” at NARA. The committee would be responsible for encouraging and recommending ways that agencies can take advantage of automation to ingest and manage their electronic records.

The bill has garnered the support of multiple advocacy groups, according to statements provided by the Homeland Security Committee. They include the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Americans for Prosperity, Protect Democracy, Government Information Watch, and the Association of Research Libraries.

“Government records are ultimately the property of the American people and agencies are responsible for maintaining the emails, texts, and documents they create,” Debra Perlin, policy director for CREW, said in a statement. “The Strengthening Oversight of Federal Records Act would update and bolster our federal recordkeeping laws to account for changes in technology, and make it easier for organizations like ours to ensure that records are created and preserved during any administration.”

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That, plus the technology’s sudden emergence in media and at so many industry conferences and gatherings, has organizations worried. They want to avoid rapid obsolescence by failing to adopt generative AI right away.

David Knox, the chief technology officer for industrials, energy and government at Oracle, urges federal agencies to take a measured approach. He says you might be able to do anything with generative AI, but you can’t do everything. Knox recommends starting with what he called proving grounds — low-risk, low-complexity processes with which to try out AI.

Even in such entry use cases, it’s wise to test the work in an isolated “sandbox” environment while you evaluate the benefits and ensure the requisite security and privacy controls remain in place.

If the resulting AI-powered application does work as intended, agencies then need to be able to create “a path to production,” Knox says. That means knowing your compliance framework and requirements in advance, as with any new technology deployment.

Identifying the proving ground generative AI applications will enable users to operate in what Knox calls the “find/fail fast/fix” mode. For example, nearly every agency deals with human capital processes such as hiring, retention and performance management. Knox advises choosing a single process and using real data to test both the efficacy of generative AI and whether the resulting process retains those crucial compliance measures. Then, if it does, apply the process in a limited production scope before scaling to agency-wide use.

Given the wide potential of generative AI, nearly every federal process is a candidate for its application. Knox says a less intuitive, perhaps, but potentially large payoff candidate for generative AI would capture and preserve institutional knowledge held by the generation of federal employees eligible to retire, the boomers and late millennials.

Such people “have an incredible amount of institutional knowledge of just what are the programs, what are the processes, how to get things done,” Knox says. The information may or may not be written down, and if it is, often no one knows where. Recording knowledgeable people’s answers can create an unstructured database to which the application of generative AI can be ideal. He cautions that unstructured knowledge capture can be risky, especially when using generative AI to capture it. Knox advised a trust-first mindset, with human supervision, rather than using people’s answers to directly train AI.

Knox cited procurement as another internally facing function where such knowledge capture would have big payoff, asking senior practitioners about systems, policies, acronyms, norms of operating, compliance rails and other things to be aware of.

One externally facing area for applying generative AI is citizen serving applications. Here, Knox said, agencies can use AI for what he termed document understanding. He defined that as going beyond optical character recognition and parsing data in individual fields, and beyond converting documents to digital images by essentially turning them into an interactive knowledge base.

In all cases of AI deployment, Knox said, it’s important to keep in mind the human factor, because people often think AI will somehow replace them. Given the complexities of federal procurement, HR management, finances and accounting, grant-making and program management, Knox said, people will realize instead how AI will benefit them — not by replacing them, but rather by augmenting their decision-making and removing routine or repetitive tasks connected to their jobs.

“We didn’t get rid of people when we invented calculators,” he said. “We’re not going to do that with generative AI.”

The post Generative AI: Start small but scale fast first appeared on Federal News Network.

When it comes to speed to decisions, the Army Software Factory offers an important use case. The organization leaned into automation and collaboration tools to disseminate information two to three days faster than through other means — like email or meetings.

This simple, but real-life example is helping the Army, and the Defense Department more broadly, fill the communications gulch that can exist in organizations, especially as agencies continue to adjust to a hybrid workforce.

“What we are most excited about is actually seeing these collaboration technologies that have been so successful in the private sector make their way into the public sector,” said Rob Seaman, senior vice president of platform product at Slack, during Federal News Network’s DoD Cloud Exchange 2024.

In addition to the productivity benefits from leveraging a collaboration platform, GovSlack’s recent FedRAMP High authorization means security conscious public sector agencies can rest assured their data is well protected, Seaman said.

“There are a few key aspects of these collaboration technologies that can help with some of the larger agencies that are interconnected and geographically dispersed or may have people that are working both in the office and at home,” he said. “Some of the primary benefits we see from these collaboration technologies are alignment and speed, as well as the ability to get people together and aligned around a particular initiative or topic where they can work faster than you ever have been able to do before.”

How to stay connected without meetings

Seaman said employees can work together or asynchronously without missing a beat or feeling like they were left out of a discussion.

He said executives at Slack, for example, encourage employees to write documents or record an audio or video clip in lieu of a meeting.

“We do this all the time, where instead of scheduling an all-hands call for the company, every other all hands we will actually do asynchronously, and our executives will just record clips, and then people can go in and watch them at two times speed whenever they like,” he said. “They can actually just read the transcripts instead of watching it if they aren’t in a place where they can listen to audio or it might be interruptive to what they have going on at home.”

Another benefit is the integration with third-party applications that collaboration and productivity tools bring, Seaman said.

How to reduce friction, increase agency speed

At Salesforce, Slack’s parent company, executives manage all of their approvals — from expenses to leave requests — right in Slack using the platform’s integration and automation capabilities.

“We’ve seen a reduction in the median time it takes to approve expense reports from 2.4 days to 1.7 hours  — across 80,000 employees,” Seaman said. “We see a ton of value in actually bringing the systems that your people need to use into where the communication is happening. When somebody needs to approve an expense report or somebody needs to approve a project brief or creative brief or something like that, just bring it to where they’re communicating. It’s also like a notification that may spark a conversation or requires a human to take an action.”

That integration with other software as a service applications is something any large organization in the public or private sector can take advantage of, he suggested. Too often organizations force employees to “context switch” between applications that don’t talk to one another, causing frustration and friction in their daily work, Seaman added. Slack has 2,700 apps that are integrated out of the box.

Seaman said authorizations like FedRAMP High and additional compliance features like application programming interfaces  for e-discovery and data loss prevention tools help engender confidence in the tools.

“The fact that using tools like this — that allow you to achieve a higher level of alignment across your organization, and all of your initiatives will ultimately make you as an agency faster — it allows you to embrace hybrid work,” he said.

“One of the ways that you can achieve that is by bringing more and more of your systems into where the communication is happening. Don’t make people go search for tasks. Bring tasks they need to do to them, and allow them to quickly act on them. You’re going to be faster, you’re going to save money, and, ultimately, they’re going to be happier and more productive.”

Discover more articles and videos now on Federal News Network’s DoD Cloud Exchange event page.

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The new system, called Direct File, is a free online tool. Taxpayers in the selected states who have very simple W-2s and claim a standard deduction may be eligible to use it this tax season to file their federal income taxes. The program will also offer a Spanish version, which will be available starting at 1 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday.

“This is a milestone,” said IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel during a Tuesday press conference to announce the expanded availability of the program. Tax season officially began January 29 and the filing deadline is April 15.

“Direct File marks the first time you can electronically file a tax return directly with the IRS,” Werfel said. “And you can’t beat the price — its free.”

The Treasury Department estimates that one-third of all federal income tax returns filed could be prepared using Direct File and that 19 million taxpayers may be eligible to use the tool this tax season. So far, roughly 20,000 people have participated in the pilot program, according to the IRS, and expect participation to grow to 100,000 filers in the coming weeks.

Certain taxpayers in Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, Wyoming, Arizona, Massachusetts, California and New York can participate. Direct File can only be used to file federal income taxes, taxpayers from states that require filing state taxes will need to do so separately.

“Direct File will offer millions of Americans a free and simple way to file their taxes, with no expensive and unnecessary filing fees and no upselling, putting hundreds of dollars back in the pocket of working families each year, consistent with President Biden’s pledge to lower costs,” said National Economic Advisor Lael Brainard.

Werfel said a component of the program that enhances filers’ usability is the live chat feature that allows taxpayers to interact with the IRS while they complete their taxes.

The Direct File pilot is part of the agency’s effort to build out a new government service that could replace some taxpayers’ use of commercial tax preparation software, such as TurboTax. It’s meant to be simple and provides a step-by-step walkthrough of easy-to-answer questions.

Derrick Plummer, a spokesman for Intuit, said in an email that Direct File “is not free tax preparation but a thinly veiled scheme that will cost billions of taxpayer dollars to pay for something already completely free of charge today.”

“This scheme will cost billions of taxpayer dollars and will be unnecessarily used to pay for something already completely free of charge today,” Plummer said.

Several organizations offer free online tax preparation assistance to taxpayers under certain income limits and fillable forms are available online on the IRS website, but the forms are complicated and taxpayers still have to calculate their tax liability.

When asked whether the Direct File program will likely be built out and available in the 2025 filing season, Werfel said: “I don’t want to prematurely reach a conclusion,” he said, but positive reports from users “have been encouraging.”

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Hussein reported from Washington, D.C.

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The Associated Press receives support from Charles Schwab Foundation for educational and explanatory reporting to improve financial literacy. The independent foundation is separate from Charles Schwab and Co. Inc. The AP is solely responsible for its journalism.

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The Volker Alliance, a premier good-government group, has added a prominent federal technologist to its board. She was the deputy U.S. chief technology officer and founded Code For America, a non-profit that helps government at all levels with digital challenges. For an update, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with Jennifer Pahlka.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin And since starting code for America, which you’re no longer associated with, but it’s kind of got a life of its own. What have you been up to?

Jennifer Pahlka I had the brilliance to step down about six weeks before the shutdown for the pandemic. And my idea was to write a book, which I did. But with the pandemic chaos, I also ended up helping match technologists with governments who needed them during those first couple weeks of the pandemic. And that became something called U.S. Digital Response, which should not be confused with United States Digital Service, which I helped stand up in the White House in 2013-2014. So that was an amazing ride, I’m still on the board of USDR as well. Then went and wrote my book and did some other consulting during the time. And now I’m a senior fellow at both the Niskanen Center and the Federation of American Scientists, and just excited to join the board of the Volcker Alliance, which I’ve just had such high regard for so long.

Tom Temin And with respect to that helping government when the pandemic hit, it must have been somewhat satisfying to see the technology base that was in place already at the federal government that allowed it to quickly pivot, in most cases to everybody teleworking and in some sense not really missing a beat.

Jennifer Pahlka I think there were so many things that government at all levels, did incredibly well during the pandemic that we take for granted, because that’s what we always do with government. If it goes well, we take it for granted, and if it doesn’t, we are quite concerned. Yes, there were the missteps too. So one of the other things I got pulled into in the first summer of the pandemic was a strike team, as they called it. I call it a task force because it sounds less violent for the state of California’s backlog of unemployment insurance claims. And that end up being the first three chapters of my book. And I thought it was it was a great lesson for me to learn, and that I could share through the book about what really underpins the problems of government technology. The technology looks like it’s the problem, but there are much deeper dynamics underlying them that we need to grapple with.

Tom Temin And tell us more about that book, because it sounds like something that the current crew and past crews and future crews ought to read, maybe to help the government keep moving along the digital journey.

Jennifer Pahlka It’s a book that I think a lot of people think is about technology. It has a QR code on the cover in a flag. So it’s clear that we are talking about U.S. government here and some degree of patriotism. But it’s really about sort of what I came to conclude is a driving force of our dysfunction in government technology, which is fundamentally this idea, that policy is this thing over here and the delivery, the implementation of that policy is something separate, that separate people do, and they don’t really talk to the policymakers. And of course, we think of it as sort of a waterfall, a cascade, a linear process from maybe Congress creates the law, gets handed down to agencies and policymakers, etc.. And down at the bottom of this big waterfall, you have the implementers. Well it turns out for many years people have been challenging those assumptions and realizing that those two things should not be thought of as separate. That when we think of them as separate, we are causing ourselves much more pain than we really need to. I’m excited to see so many people start to grapple with these ideas and really put them into practice and stop sort of saying, let’s fix this on the edge here and really go to the core cause.

Tom Temin Yeah. So the implication is that good technology implementation really starts at the collaboration stage between people that make policy and people that have to implement policy.

Jennifer Pahlka Yeah. I’ll give you one example from the book, though there are several. This is a local and state level issue. But when I was at code for America many years ago, we started on the problem of clearing criminal records where legalization of marijuana in many states had meant that somebody who has a past marijuana felony no longer should have it on their record so that they can access things like jobs and housing. But it’s a year long paperwork process that most people can’t persist through. It’s just so much sludge and paperwork and really, there’s no need for it. And so we figured out that if these are just records in a database, you can query the database, find all the people who are eligible for that expungement and clear them in bulk. So that’s automatic expungement. But the problem is some laws are written in such a way that there’s no way to query the database and find all of those people. We had a law here in California called Prop 47 that was written to reclassify burglaries under $950, and I think it was in commercial locations. Well, you cannot query the database. You’d have to go looking in every single person’s file and try to read handwriting of a cop who took that case and see if they noted what kind of camera was stolen, and try to figure out if that was $950. So these laws are simply unable to be automated, and therefore they’re really going to have very little effect on the people. But if you consult with the people who understand the implementation of the law before you write it, you might make different choices in what you actually make expungement so that the law can have a real effect. And that’s a kind of thinking that is rare, but it’s starting to grow. And I’m just really happy to see that we can get implementation kind of all the way up front at the process instead of all the way at the end.

Tom Temin We were speaking with Jennifer Pahlka. She’s former U.S. Chief Technology Officer and now author of Recoding America. And that example of where the law doesn’t fit, really, with what the policy actually is to say in this case, it’s okay to expunge these records. This is something I was talking to Senator Warner about not long ago, with respect to artificial intelligence and the many ways that Congress could act on that by simply doing little block and tackling legislation to make things in sync in the way you’ve just described for that particular function of expungement in another domain, which gets to the big issue, that Congress can’t even do those little things anymore when everyone agrees this is the policy, all we need to do is change clause A, subchapter one, paragraph B of this law, and it’ll all match up. They don’t even do that. That must be frustrating.

Jennifer Pahlka Well I think we’re going to have opportunities for the kinds of legislation that I’m interested in, because this stuff is nonpartisan. There’s no culture war at risk here. We’re really just talking about stuff that benefits everyone. And I think there will be windows for it. But no, I can’t fix congressional dysfunction.

Tom Temin Anyone that could would be a genius and would be showered with a crown of America. Let me ask you this. Since you were in government, golly, a decade ago, that’s kind of light years in a technology sense. And now we have a company called Nvidia, been around for ages. People used to be happy to get one of their cards in your computer because it could really rev up the gaming. Now they are worth a couple of trillion dollars thanks to artificial intelligence, which has come on the scene in a big way. What are your thoughts about good ways for government to bring this in to the whole digital effort? Really, that’s never ending.

Jennifer Pahlka Yeah. I used to work in the video game business. I ran the Game Developers Conference for eight years, and so I knew Nvidia back in the day when it was gaming that drove their business. Artificial intelligence is fascinating to me, and I think I came to it a little bit late because I had been fatigued by the hype around blockchain. But when I started really paying attention to it, I started to see that this is a profound opportunity to bring our government forward. And I’ll tell you one thing that brought me along. I was visiting the Department of Labor in New Jersey about the spring before I did my book, and ChatGPT had just come out. Now, you had this great team at the [Department of Labor (DOL)] and also the new Jersey Office of Innovation, wonderful folks that they were working to make unemployment insurance just better every day. It’s a fantastic strategy. They’re not going for some big procurement, they’re just bringing on people who know what they’re doing and really fixing it week by week. One of the things that this designer was doing was rewriting the letters that people get, their emails that are letters you get in the mail about your claim about adjudication. And they’re so hard to understand. They’re written in legalese, and it’s one of the reasons people don’t reply. And then you get a longer backlog. Well, she had been rewriting them for a sort of eighth grade, ninth grade level and then going to the policy team and saying, is this still correct? And then if it is, let’s bold the call to action, put it in big letters, then we read the letter and then people start to interact with unemployment insurance a lot easier.

Jennifer Pahlka Well, ChatGPT had just come out and she was just feeding those letters into ChatGPT with the prompt, rewrite this so I can understand it better. Now. She still went to the policy team and checked it with them. This is not giving over decision making to AI. It’s an AI as an assist to somebody. And I asked her, so is it really helping you? She said, I think we’re getting through these letters about 4 or 5 times as fast as we used to. It’s not an automatic process, it’s an assist. And I thought, that is a fantastic use of AI. We should not be getting things like that. We should just let people do this. Now there are things that are going to need some review. And of course, the AI executive order has called out some of those things. I think we need to be really careful that the guards that are put in place through things like the AI EO for really risky applications don’t get applied to these really low risk, high value applications. And the use of them to make letter simpler is just one example. There are dozens, hundreds of others where we really want to enable. We want to put our foot on the gas, not on the brakes, I think in, in those areas. The one area that I think we do need to have caution about, that is not the one that most people talk about, like we don’t want to give over decision making to AI. I think that that is much less important than people think, and there’s so many other applications. But we have such complex rules and regulations like unemployment insurance. We’ve been adding rules and regs for 90 years. We never take them away. So you’ve got thousands and thousands of pages of regs that cover this pretty simple program. I think a lot of people are excited about AI’s ability to sort of manage that complexity. And I want people instead to be excited about AI’s ability to help us simplify that complexity, not just like, ok, we’ll be able to get through this, but here are some proposed simplifications that state legislatures and Congress ought to really take seriously, so that if you’re trying to do unemployment insurance in the next downturn, you have 100 pages of regs to deal with, not 9,000.

Tom Temin And I want to bridge to another use of AI and the generative AI, which is to make computer programs. And as someone whose endeavors usually have the word coding in them, one technologist said the other day, well, thanks to the generative AI, English is the new programing language. What’s your thought on that?

Jennifer Pahlka I think that is part of a trend that’s been happening for a long time. Technology is sort of the ability to make things that other people can use has been democratized for a long time. AI is for the next phase in it. But go back to that time I talked about right when the shut down sent us all home and all these governments were reaching out to volunteers through USDR. It happened to be a time also when no code, low code tools were becoming available. And about a half of the requests that we got from state and local governments at the time. Can you stand up a form for emergency rental assistance, for example. Those were actually pretty easily filled, not by some fancy tech team, but by a couple of volunteers teaching local government officials themselves how to use something like Airtable. It’s just that much more powerful than Excel. And you can really actually run a benefits program. That’s not too advanced off of it. And I think that is part generally of how we’re going to make all of these things that used to be very specialized, really possible for anybody to do.

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Discussions about how to get started in artificial intelligence tend to focus on use cases. Agency staff ask themselves, in effect, “What could we do with AI?” or with machine learning or robotic process automation.

Kathleen Featheringham, the vice president for AI and ML at Maximus, suggested a variation of that question, the answer to which will get agencies faster to real, measurable value from their AI investments.

AI success “is more about what are you struggling with? What are the problems, the mission elements, the things that you need to actually make things more successful?” Featheringham said during Federal Monthly Insights – Operationalizing AI. “Starting there helps really define what are good use cases.”

Featheringham said this approach also points more accurately to the right type of program to apply to the problem, whether RPA, a traditional AI algorithm or generative AI.

Program managers and agency executives needn’t bring AI expertise to the problem solving, just details of what they want to accomplish.

“It’s more about, hey, what are the issues, and then work with their technologists to be able to break it down for what type” of AI to use, Featheringham said.

Often, she said, organizations find that functions with rote activities, like sifting through large quantities of documents or images, often provide the uses cases with the fastest returns on investment. A useful approach comes from thinking as an assistant would, asking what would most aid a particular workflow and the person or people performing it.

“How many times you go and do searches in different databases,” Featheringham said. “Let’s say you have to search through seven different ones. Robotic process automation would be great for that.”

Augmenting people

Even AI used to create new outputs, such as analyses or summaries of existing documents, Featheringham said, would not replace people doing those functions because of the need to check the work of the algorithm.

She likened deployment of generative AI to a new employee, regardless of how well trained and educated, asked to turn in a work product.

“Would you just turn in what they gave you? Probably not,” Featheringham said. “Would you go through it, fact check it, really refine it? Absolutely.”

It’s wise to ask people doing the day-to-day work about their obstacles and pain points. But Featheringham advised also observing people’s work directly.

“I’ve spent a lot of time going and standing behind people for, ‘show me how you do your job. What do you do?’” she said.

Featheringham added experienced people may become so skilled at integrating multiple tasks and processes that the observer needs to ask why people do certain things in certain ways. That questioning can lead to a much deeper understanding of where to apply AI.

“You get the initial [ideas] of what they think are their needs,” Featheringham said. “But then you also really see it in action. With any of these types of emerging technologies, you can’t just go straight off requirements, you have to see how it’s going to be put into action, how the people would be interacting with it.”

One function Maximus has helped agencies with is making work easier for communications writers. By generating some pro forma elements of a piece from automated research, the AI lets writers spend more of their often-limited time crafting creative pieces in their own voices.

AI at scale

Beyond specific applications at the individual level, agencies must think about how to deploy AI in the context of modernization and at the enterprise level. That in turn, Featheringham said, requires understanding how AI differs from traditional enterprise software.

“AI is not just the same as any traditional software application,” she said. “There are some nuances that come into play that have to be accounted for.”

Among them: The fact that AI requires training data which the agency must curate so as to avoid bias. Another is that AI, by definition, changes its own logic as it learns.

Featheringham recommended a ModelOps approach, modeled after the DevSecOps methodology many organizations have adopted for continual secure software development. It lets organizations deploy regular, incremental software releases with reliable functional and security characteristics. The alternative is slow, expensive “bespoke” applications that require custom work for every use case.

The key to ModelOps lies “in how you can build the controls and measures into the systems so that you can bring different types of AI models and tools in safely,” Featheringham said. “You can actually monitor what they’re doing.”

ModelOps, when designed properly, ensures the agency can see and account for the way given inputs result in changing outputs as AI models learn and adapt.

She added that ModelOps must also take into account that the different flavors of AI vary in the degree to which their performance is probabilistic — very high for generative but low for RPA, which is more deterministic.

Listen to the full show:

The post How to ask the right questions to define AI use cases first appeared on Federal News Network.

One reason the Defense Department can’t get to a clean financial audit has to do with its multiple and outdated financial management systems. The DoD does have a plan to modernize the systems, but the Office of Inspector General (OIG) finds a little trouble with how officials are going about it. For the latest, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin  talked with OIG project manager Chris Hilton and Shelby Barnes.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin And fair to say, this was an audit, not so much of DoD finances, but of the systems that make up the financial network there and of their plans to modernize it. That a good way to put it?

Shelby Barnes Yes. So I think that’s a great way to summarize what this audit was. We focused on the DoD financial systems specifically. We reviewed the systems that were subject to the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act. Essentially, this is a law that requires that systems capture data and record transactions properly. And the DoD has established goals to, as you said, modernize its systems environment and to update its systems or stop using some of its old systems by 2028. However, what we found in our audit was that goal wasn’t aggressive enough. And without a more modern systems environment, we found that the DoD will just continue to spend a lot of money on systems that don’t record those transactions properly.

Tom Temin And just to define the scope of this, it’s not just the Pentagon and the fourth estate agencies, but does this also include the armed forces and they’re often multiple financial systems?

Chris Hilton Yes. It definitely includes all of those systems and all those parts and pieces of the DoD. We looked at basically any plans related to maintaining the DoD’s IT system environment and how they impact the DoD financial statements. By the numbers DoD’s IT environment contains over 400 systems and applications and over 2000 interfaces. This complex environment contributes to many of the DoD challenges.

Tom Temin Right. And it’s not simply the multiplicity of them, but in some cases, the age of them and the fact that they can’t interoperate with one another in some cases. Fair to say?

Chris Hilton That is absolutely correct. I think some of the systems that the DoD still uses today are from the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s. Obviously, they weren’t necessarily always intended to produce financial statements. That’s a newer requirement. So those are some of the challenges that the department is dealing with.

Tom Temin Right. Because in the 1950s and 1960s, they could count the beans, so to speak, but they don’t meet what are considered contemporary standards for financial systems.

Chris Hilton Correct.

Shelby Barnes Yes. That’s correct.

Tom Temin Plus, there’s a certain cost in maintaining these old systems, and the multiplicity is a cost multiplier itself. Fair to say.

Chris Hilton That is fair to say. One of our highlights in our report is that the DoD maintains 37 purchasing systems throughout all its components and pieces. And obviously, that presents challenges from the perspective of, well, if you have a challenge across 37 systems, and you have to have 37 corrective actions, so that does present significant challenges for the department.

Tom Temin Right. And you mentioned they have 400 systems with 200 interfaces. So that’s even beyond the purchasing systems.

Chris Hilton 2,000 interfaces. I wish it was 200.

Tom Temin Yeah, I didn’t write the third one down on my sheet here. Ok, so we’ve got the full scope of that. And let’s talk about the scope of the plan. That is to say, what do they hope to do by 2028 at this point. What’s their envision for all of this.

Shelby Barnes Yeah. So that’s actually one of the things that we identified within our audit that wasn’t particularly clear. The DoD has multiple plans, all of which focus on a simplified systems environment. That is the department’s desire and that is the DoD’s goal. But what we found was that the plans didn’t clarify what systems the DoD plans to keep and what systems they plan to retire between now and 2028. And so that was one of the things that we highlighted within our report, that the DoD does need to clarify what systems it plans to update, to modernize, and which of those systems it needs to stop using. And we recommended that they stop using them as swiftly as possible.

Tom Temin Right. It sounds therefore like the plan is more of a guidance to a future vision than a detailed modernization plan.

Shelby Barnes Yes, I would say that’s exactly what we found within our audit.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Shelby Barnes and Chris Hilton. They are project managers in the Office of Inspector General at the Defense Department. And did you find that they’re putting sufficient resources against this modernization effort? And is it in the right place? That is it a CIO project? Is it a CFO project or is it across different boundaries?

Chris Hilton I would say there are definitely putting a lot of resources in the area. I think our audit found that there was approximately $4 billion they spent in 2022 on these financial management system. And I think that’s one of the challenges we identified, obviously, from the perspective of you’re spending so much on these systems that aren’t going to get you where you want to go in the current year. And if you just kind of do things as swiftly as possible, like Shelby mentioned, they will get the department to a lot better place.

Tom Temin I mean, is there a strategy to say take within one of the armed services, for example, or in something like [Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA)], which is a large component agency, and just consolidate within that piece that component, which would maybe eliminate dozens. And then try to get the Air Force and the Army and DISA together. I’m just making that up, but that idea.

Shelby Barnes There definitely are goals that each of, you mentioned, like the Army, Navy and Air Force, they all have their own goals, the plans that we were looking at work for the entire DoD. So I think that what you’re speaking about definitely exists at that individual component level. Our review just determined at the entire DoD level. Was the plan detailed enough to get the department where it wants to go?

Chris Hilton I would also add to that that there’s significant initiatives there to move the department in the right direction, and there are indications that they’re doing so. I know, for example, U.S. Marine Corps, they transition to a modern ERP in an effort to attain a clean on their opinion. So there is definitely traction there. I think one of the biggest things talking about, like it being a CIO challenge or a CFO challenge or a military department challenge, is really a team effort. And this is one thing that Mr. Stephens, the deputy chief financial officer, has really focused on. This is a team effort being DoD. DoD is not going to get across the finish line without everyone pushing in the same direction. So that’s one thing that has been a laser focus of the department. It’s really like this is a team effort, both horizontally across CIO and CFO, but also vertically down to the components and up to DoD.

Tom Temin And what were your major recommendations then?

Shelby Barnes So one of the most significant recommendations that we made was for the department to create a strategy where it basically determines for all of its systems, whether or not they’re going to update their system or if they are going to retire and stop using that system. Essentially, the DoD needs to we believe that the strategy is important because the DoD really needs to wrap their arms around what they have now, and they need to determine what’s going to remain and get those systems updated so that they can start producing good and reliable data.

Tom Temin And these financial systems, are these a subset of the business systems that comprise the DoD? Because they’ve had several runs at business system modernizations over the years, at least the 20 years I’ve been looking at it closely. There have been several gambits to try to get around the business systems, financial systems, a subset here?

Chris Hilton Yeah, there are actually, approximately 4600 DoD IT systems, and only about 5% of them currently fall in the category of financial management systems. So it’s a actually a quite small subset of the bigger DoD system environment. And obviously trying to get our arms or DoD trying to get its arms around that environment is needed, obviously, to produce good financial data and hopefully obtain an audit opinion.

Tom Temin And in general on the plan they have, which doesn’t have the detail that you feel they do need, but their plan to 2028, is this basically an in-house effort or do they have integrator support and programmer contractor support?

Chris Hilton It’s kind of a mixed bag. I mean, obviously there’s a lot of contractor support in this effort. So it is diverse I guess, in how they’re addressing the issue.

Tom Temin All right. And would you say that this is an urgent set of recommendations, this audit. And this publication.

Shelby Barnes I would say yes. We feel that this audit report and this recommendation is really imperative. We know that the DoD is working very hard and putting a lot of resources towards modernizing its systems. But we feel that some of the recommendations within this report are really going to put the department on the right track to modernize their system environment, maybe quicker, and that has a direct impact on so many things operationally. And then also the financial statement office.

Tom Temin And your memorandum went to the secretary, the deputy secretary, the undersecretary, the Comptroller, the CIO, the auditors, and so on of the different armed services. They know they’ve got a problem, fair to say.

Chris Hilton That’s fair to say.

Tom Temin And did they generally concur with your recommendations?

Chris Hilton Yes. Actually, we had 31 recommendations, quite a few. They concurred with all but one, and the one that they didn’t concur with we did ask for further comments. And I think we’re kind of headed in the right direction with that one as well. So they know it’s a problem. That’s one thing we did find during our audit was there’s already a lot of efforts going forward. We’re just making sure that they’re best positioned to make maintain systems that produce good data, uses taxpayer dollars efficiently. And like Shelby said, obtain an audit opinion by 2028.

Tom Temin And in the meantime, we could use a few years without continuing resolutions that might help.

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