Agenda
December 14
10:00 AM
Introduction
10:10 AM
Nominee Presentations
Adrienne Cox
Senior Marketing Communications Advisor, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
Larry Hale
Director, IT Security subcategory, Office of IT Category Management, General Services Administration
Brendan Applegate
Lead for Fleet Experimentation and Exercises at Naval Surface Warfare Center Port Hueneme Division
Selma Al-Salam
Lead Software Engineer, NSWC Dahlgren, U.S. Navy
Melissa Crawford
Information Technology Specialist, Library of Congress
Steven McAndrews
Director of Federal Cybersecurity, Executive Office of the President, Office of Management and Budget
2:30 PM
Award Announcements
Advancing Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics Award
Excellence in Cybersecurity Award
Advancing DevOps Award
Digital Experience Award
December 15
10:00 AM
Introduction
10:10 AM
Nominee Presentations
Keith Sonderling
Commissioner, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
Darlene Gore
Director, Identity Management Solution Division, General Service Administration
Tom Beach
Federal CDO Council Data Skills Working Group Chair | Interim Chief Data Officer, U.S. Department of Commerce
Dr. Marie Bernard
Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity, National Institutes of Health
Jeff Rhodes
Product Owner, Supervisor, Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS), U.S. Office of Personnel Management
Tony Ranard
Lead, Human Resources Information Systems, DoN, NAVSEA, Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division, U.S. Navy
Stephanie (Christel) Meredith
Eco-Management Analyst, U.S. Department of State
Allen Himler
Branch Chief, Enterprise Management Office, U.S. Office of Personnel Management
Ellery Taylor
Director, Strategic Solutions, General Services Administration
2:30 PM
Award Announcements
Workforce Innovation Award
Information Technology Modernization Award
Promoting Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) in the Federal Workforce Award
Tackling Climate Crisis and Promoting Green Government Award
COVID-19 Response Award
Nominees
Information Technology Security Subcategory (ITSS)/Risk Management & Analysis Support Services (RMASS) – Zero Trust Architecture Buyer’s Guide
Team Lead: Larry Hale, Director, IT Security subcategory, Office of IT Category Management, General Services Administration
Achievement: Within 30 days of the federal Executive Order (EO) for each agency to develop a plan to implement Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA), GSA developed the ZTA Buyer’s Guide giving agencies the ability to quickly identify products, services, and solutions to help them implement ZTA and meet the Presidential mandate.
Naval Logistics (LOG) IT Portfolio; PEO Manpower, Logistics, and Business Systems
Team Lead: Julianne Lefevre, Logistics IT Acting Deputy, U.S. Navy
Achievement: The LOG IT program is a capability differentiator and is critical to competing with adversaries and winning the high-end fight. This project involved capability rationalization and system migration from 200+ in-service systems down to four modernized systems.
USPTO Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning Working Groups
Achievement: USPTO drove AUTO-CLASSIFICATION to push beyond the limits of prior AI/ML models, solve complex problems, and deliver custom solutions that resulted in significant cost savings. Outperforming prior models, the new system runs at production scale with notable improved precision over manual classification.
COVID Vaccination Form
Achievement: Pursuant to the guidance issued by Safer Federal Workforce Task Force (SFWTF) in August 2021, agencies are required to collect the COVID-19 vaccination status of all Federal employees, onsite contractors, and visitors to their facilities. To comply with this requirement, an internal OPM working group was launched to work on an efficient and effective automated process. Within three days the team developed an online Certification of Vaccination form – a simple and efficient way to collect data from over 5,000 individuals across OPM, and display the results in an interactive graphical dashboard.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Security Operations Center (SOC)
Achievement: The agency needed an upgraded cybersecurity component to carry out its mission of providing critical enforcement and oversight capabilities. The ICE Security Operations Center (SOC) developed a 3-tiered approach to overcome growing and more sophisticated cybersecurity challenges. The new program allows for real-time tracking and availability of data/metrics conducted by the agency’s Tier 1/2/3 teams assisted by the establishment of agency-advancing Executive, Information Assurance Division (IAD), and Threat Intelligence dashboards. Each team tracks work quality, productivity, and development opportunities by applying these metrics. The result is a defense system with greater control, oversight and management of key data.
Initiative on Artificial Intelligence and Algorithmic Fairness
Team Lead: Rachel See, Senior Counsel for AI and Algorithmic Bias, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
The Center for Program Integrity (CPI) Application Programming Interface (API) Gateway
National Science Foundation Proposal Clustering Tool
Team Lead: Carlo Ilagan, Enterprise Architect, National Science Foundation
Achievement: Over the last 65+ years, NSF has supported many leading scientific and technological breakthroughs that have advanced our nation. To continue enabling innovations with broad societal impacts well into the future, NSF needs to speed up labor-intensive proposal processes to evaluate the ~60k proposals it receives each year on various science topics. The nominated team invented Machine Learning algorithms to “bin” the proposals under relevant research topics, which augments NSF program officers with AI to identify the best panel combinations, analyze overlaps and perform portfolio analysis, while significantly reducing their administrative burden.
Federal CDO Council Data Skills
Achievement: The Federal CDO Council Data Skills Working Group developed the Training Program Implementation Playbook, which is designed to provide both small and large agencies with a toolkit to develop their own data skills training programs. The playbook serves as a roadmap to the design, implementation, and administration of federal data skills training programs, and helps navigate potential implementation roadblocks.
CISA Unified Workflow Team
Achievement: CISA’s directive is two-fold: build a more responsive, innovative cyber capability, and bring greater peace of mind to the people that protect our government and institutions. A key modernization element is the Unified Work Flow (UWF), designed to channel agency resources, programs, and technology advancements through one platform. Its mandate, to unify all functions, arose from the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and concerns about organizational cyber protection and the supply chain. CISA was given a short turnaround to build and begin to deploy an Agency specific COVID tracking solution. Remarkably, it did so in just 12 hours. UWF has been game-changing ever since for other Divisions and Offices within CISA in applying new standards of automation and system capabilities.
Mineral & Lands Record System (MLRS)
Achievement: The Bureau of Land Management launched the groundbreaking Mineral & Lands Record System (MLRS) in January 2021 to revamp a decades-old legacy system used to process, store and share information vital to the administration of federal lands. The MLRS portal provides self-service capabilities for all customers, reducing the need for vehicle trips and other time-consuming transactions. Applications, forms and documents can be submitted online, with real-time case disposition, greater transparency, and automatic responses from BLM on applications. The interface is user-friendly, minimizes data entry errors, optimizes data quality, and offers visually enabled search options for land areas. Almost 10K customers now use MLRS to conduct their BLM business. After the new system launched, the agency saw a 100-percent increase in claims filed in just one two-week period. It is projected that MLRS will process up to 1 million transactions per year.
Naval Reactors NAVSEA08Y / Enterprise Applications
Achievement: Demonstrated contributions to digitizing back-office and manual tasks across the entire Command. Successful building and migration of multiple applications to improve the organization’s digital experience.
NASS – Cloud Technologies in Support of Modern Data Science Techniques
Team Members: Elaine Turville, Scott Nichols
Achievement: The National Agriculture Statistics Service (NASS) is responsible for providing accurate, timely, and useful statistics on US agricultural production via the collection and analysis of surveys. These reports inform research, tool development, and decision making both in the public and private sector. In 2019, however, a string of natural disasters revealed the limitations of survey analysis. As a result, NASS began to pivot to the use of cloud technology to enable its staff to use modern data science techniques to augment survey estimation and streamline data processing. While early in its cloud journey, NASS is already seeing the benefits by the rapid development of R&D concepts in support of its mission and the recruitment of top talent seeking to use modern data science methods in government.
Federal Web Council COVID-19 Response Team
Team Lead: Rachel Flagg, Digital Strategist, General Services Administration
Achievement: As the pandemic began in March 2019, the Federal Web Council swiftly moved into action to coordinate dissemination of clear, accurate, consistent, and timely digital communications related to COVID-19 across the federal government. Their goal was, and remains, to ensure the public could easily find the most current and accurate information from any federal website. The Council’s COVID response team worked with GSA’s USA.gov website to publish a Government Response to Coronavirus, COVID-19 page that functioned as a central resource for the public to find the latest local and national health and safety information from the government. The team also worked with GSA’s Digital.gov team to develop and publish Coronavirus (COVID-19) Guidance for U.S. Government websites and social media.
Enterprise Cloud Solutions Office / VA Enterprise Cloud
Team Lead: David Catanoso, Director, Enterprise Cloud Solutions Office, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
Achievement: The VA’s multifaceted IT modernization strategy to reduce reliance on legacy systems has provided the stability for the VA’s Enterprise Cloud Solutions Office (ECSO) to quickly accommodate a 400% increase in remote users, and telehealth visits surging from 25,000/month to over 40,000/day. Furthermore, ECSO developed the VA Enterprise Cloud (VAEC), a centralized platform for hosting and optimizing VA cloud applications—both new and existing capabilities. The VAEC now hosts more than 130 applications, including critical, user-facing systems like vets.gov, VA.gov and the Veterans Benefits Management System. VA modernization supports 12M+ hits per month on VA.gov and a ~40% increase My HealtheVet patient portal use. This all allows for continued service to veterans and families while maximizing safety and functionality for all.
Scientific Workforce Diversity (COSWD) Office, National Institute of Health
Achievement: The Scientific Workforce Diversity Office focuses on how diversity can benefit the scientific enterprise and works across the NIH’s 27 Institutes and Centers. Among other accomplishments, this Office spearheaded the NIH-wide inaugural Workplace Climate and Harassment Survey, and launched a Scientific Workforce Diversity Seminar Series, helped develop the Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) NIH Common Fund program, and co-leads the NIH-wide anti-racism initiative UNITE.
Department of Labor IT Accessibility Team
Achievement: The DOL Section 508 Program Office was launched in FY20 with a focus on sweeping cultural change within DOL and the message that “accessibility is everyone’s responsibility.” The nominated team partnered with 27 agencies and crafted a department-wide approach that led DOL agencies to “Measured,” as defined in the OMB Strategic Plan for Improving Management of Section 508. The team launched an intensive training initiative that in 2021 alone delivered two live 508 trainings weekly, eventually reaching 3000+ attendees. Finally, the team launched an intensive, multi-week Document Accessibility Program highly subscribed to be DOL agencies.
COVID-19 Executive Decision Lens
Achievement: The team spearheaded development of the NASA COVID-19 Executive Decisions Lens (EDL), a support platform that provides senior leaders with impactful views of cross-functional data, applies standards from digital transformation and agile development, and pairs existing NASA technologies with its teams to enable responsive data integration, visualization, and publishing through a scalable, shared-cost platform. EDL allows NASA’s analytics team to rapidly iterate and deliver timely insights at minimal cost, and build from – rather than recreate – intensive up-front work to connect and prepare authoritative data.
Promotion of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA)
Achievement: The Government-wide IT Accessibility Program has delivered resources during the pandemic that significantly accelerated efforts of agencies digital developing to meet the needs of all disabled users. It developed executive guides for Federal CIOs and agency executives, and created playbook guidance to help program managers build an effective IT accessibility program. The team also spearheaded the Accessibility Testing Accreditation Program (ATAP) designed to accredit test processes using the Section 508 ICT Testing Baseline for Web.
As a demonstration of its new focus on DEIA, the 2021 Interagency Accessibility Forum (IAAF) transitioned its celebration of the 75th observance of the National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM), and the 20th anniversary of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act becoming enforceable, to 100% virtual event. Their goal was, and remains, to ensure the public has the same access to information on improving and implementing DEIA incentives in support of the disadvantaged and underserved DEIA community.
Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act Program
Achievement: The SSA contributes to many interagency efforts that improve the development and testing of IT for Section 508 conformance. Most importantly, SSA contributed a powerful testing tool called ANDI (Accessible Name and Description Inspector) to the open-source community so all Federal agencies and the public can more easily test IT for access by people with a disability. ANDI is a popular testing tool used by tens of thousands of people across the globe and adopted by the Department of Homeland Security’s Trusted Tester certification training. SSA’s contributions with ANDI and test processes enable an inclusive workplace throughout the Federal agencies.
Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Mobile Security
Achievement: Government organizations recognize that cybersecurity is a public necessity, and more state and local governments embrace this responsibility with next-generation solutions and programs to protect their citizens through on-device mobile security. The nominated team worked to implement a mobile security initiative for LA metro, delivering citizens a defense against malicious cyber activity on mobile devices across Wi-Fi networks and beyond. This application provides the public with alerts about risks, threats, and attacks, including connections to unsecured networks, and provides residents with the peace of mind that the personal data on their devices is consistently safe.
IT Operations During COVID-19
Team Lead: Mittal Desai, Chief Information Officer, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
Achievement: The Office of the Chief Information Officer has successfully overcome the combined challenges of leading an organization through a global pandemic, managing the transition of FERC’s $104M IT contract to a new vendor, and delivering uninterrupted critical services to FERC employees all while remaining in a 100% remote environment. In addition to a “Chick-fil-A like drive-through for technology dissemination”, the OCIO put major emphasis on improving FERC’s telework culture through a suite of novel communication applications, integration of various collaboration platforms, and sponsoring virtual events. Productivity and satisfaction scores increased by 38% in 2020.
Microsoft 365 Enterprise Expansion: Teams Launch and Champion Network
Achievement: With collaboration a priority in today’s workplace, various tools and features are proliferating at a dizzying pace. As OPM found itself facing collaboration tool creep as a myriad of tools threatened creating silos and inefficiencies, the nominated team developed a comprehensive change management plan with training and communication, including a Champions Network, to transition all 5,000+ users to a single collaboration platform, resulting in improved productivity and cost savings.
USCIS Platform Delivery
Achievement: Leveraging cloud and enterprise platforms facilitated the adoption of Domain Driven Design, which allowed for a complete restructuring of the USCIS organization and the IT that aligns within the organization. This tremendous effort will bring IT and business more in-line providing valuable insight, common lexicon and a stronger understanding of application development and its necessary dependencies to the business and leadership with proper IT alignment. This in turn enables a more efficient and more seamless delivery of capability to the mission.
Advanced Naval Technology Exercise (ANTX) Coastal Trident 21-22
Achievement: The Advanced Naval Technology Exercise, or “ANTX,” is conducted by the Naval Research and Development Establishment in order to inform and align technical innovation with operational needs. The program facilitates collaboration between industry, academia, and government research and development organizations, providing a forum in which the naval community can evaluate the utility of new technologies before decisions are made on investment priorities.
Print Management Information System
Achievement: The team was nominated for exceeding expectations in implementing digital experiences for staff throughout the Library of Congress in the area of submitting print requests for any and all print jobs needed. Upon the creation of a unique print request system, the Printshop took a unique approach to train all Library employees on how to use this new system by creating a user friendly training video, demonstrating success in overcoming the challenges of primarily virtual communication.
Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency / Enterprise Data Broker
Achievement: The nominated team engaged with the organization’s highest level stakeholders to deliver on a prototype effort on agency-wide data strategy. The team worked to define an Artificial Intelligence (AI) architecture to allow cross-mission access to all data on a person, entity, asset, etc. and reduce the inefficiencies of siloed data repositories. The new initiative helps maintain data provenance and lineage, as well as standardized data classification across mission systems.
“Get Started With Medicare” – an Improved User Experience on Medicare.gov
Achievement: CMS launched an improved user experience on Medicare.gov to help people sign up and learn about coverage. “Get Started with Medicare” combines a wealth of information in a user friendly, easily navigable, and intuitively organized manner. By empowering users to take action, this new digital experience solution has increased customer satisfaction scores by 35% in the team’s “accomplished goal” metric, and by 30% in the “information provided” metric.
ZephAir Application
Achievement: This exciting app brings air quality data and health messaging right to your fingertips from monitors located at more than 60 U.S. embassies and consulates worldwide. Since its release last year, ZephAir has been downloaded nearly 20,000 times globally and is one of the Department’s highest rated apps. It has been leveraged by both Department and other USG personnel overseas and local populations to track important data so that they can protect their health against harmful air pollution. Additionally, new data from dozens of non-U.S. government reference grade monitors has been added.
U.S. International Trade Commission – Security Vulnerability Dashboard
Achievement: Daily security scans produce large volumes of data, usually in CSV files, making spreadsheets a default approach for reporting and tracking vulnerabilities. The nominated team created a Security Vulnerability Dashboard to achieve transparency throughout the organization around security risks. By adding a data visualization function, it not only gave the agency a historical overview of the vulnerabilities, but also an ability to identify, prioritize, and remediate new vulnerabilities, and track them to closure without the prior burdensome effort of manual gathering and organizing reports.
Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Software Application Design Project
Achievement: The IRS has over 200+ software applications designed to collect taxes and administer the Internal Revenue Code, the main body of federal statutory tax law of the United States. Just like any large, mature organization, the IRS has applications at various maturity levels. The many manual steps and rigorous testing from code check-in to deployment to production used to take as long as one year. After a decision to move to a DevOps model, the nominated team has implemented many samples and proof-of-concept projects, proving beyond any doubt that DevOps delivered the benefits sought by the IRS.
Executive Order 14028 – Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity
Achievement: The White House Executive Order 14028 on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity laid the foundation for the next generation of cyber initiatives across Government. The nominated cross-government team led the development, issuance and communication of key deliverables in the EO 14028. These deliverables focused agency efforts to bolster the cyber posture of government networks and systems. By understanding the Federal cyber landscape, the team developed cutting edge policy, rooted in aggressive, yet achievable outcomes, allowing the entire Federal Government to mature into success instead of relying solely on immediate results.
COVID Provider Relief Fund
Achievement: After the COVID outbreak, Congress tasked HRSA with managing the COVID payments due to providers. To access these payments, health care providers submitted tax forms, revenue documents, and other information, often exceeding a thousand pages per application. This highly manual, time-consuming, and error-prone process could lead to over or underpayment, fraud, or other issues with potential impact of millions of dollars of payments being approved or rejected incorrectly. The HRSA Office of Finance deployed an AI “Bot” to solve this relief payment challenge, helping tens of thousands of small businesses stay afloat and avoid economic calamity. The Bot was able to reduce processing time from hours per application to under 3 seconds, and eliminate fraud and errors.
Applications & Digital Solutions Office, Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), DOT Enterprise Content Management System Project
Achievement: In 2011, the Department of Transportation’s public web presence was a collection of loosely related sites and platforms. Each of its 10 operating administrations (OA), from maritime to aviation, had developed their own infrastructure, making it a challenge to effectively share mission objectives and accomplishments with citizens. The DOT’s Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) migrated 14 of their flagship websites to a shared Drupal platform. With the launch of the final website in August 2021, the OCIO team standardized the look-and-feel of all DOT websites, re-defining how DOT experts and content creators use the web to communicate with the public. The new website model has consolidated the website system architecture in the cloud, streamlined web content management process across the Department, and established a new digital citizen experience.
Department of Defense Comply-to-Connect (C2C)
Achievement: The Department of Defense (DoD) has thousands of networks, each with hundreds of thousands of connected devices such as servers, mobile devices and weapons systems. Staying on top of this activity while optimizing security is a challenge. Comply-to-Connect (C2C) enables the DoD to meet congressionally mandated requirements to “automatically comply with the configurations of the networks of the Department as a condition of connecting to such networks”. DISA’s C2C Program Management Office implemented an essential defense component that achieves C2C requirements and has proven efficacy in military environments.
HR Case Management and Correspondence Management Solution
Achievement: HUD’s mission is to strengthen America’s communities by improving the quality and affordability of housing and protecting consumers through the enforcement of fair housing laws. In support of their operations, HUD was in need of a solution to enable correspondence management and HR case management. HUD implemented multiple new features and enhancements for their software solution, integrated with the Census Bureau systems, and automated SAA updates. In addition, they were able to add intelligent reports that track everything from standardized checklists, actionable reporting on results, to resolution steps to ensure ongoing compliance. These enhancements provide real-time insight to actions and status, which empowers management decisions.
Office of Financial Management (OFM), Payment Accuracy and Reporting Group (PARG), Comprehensive Error Rate Testing (CERT) Program
Achievement: CMS’s PARG oversees the Medicare, Medicaid, and Children’s Health Insurance Program improper payment measurement programs. By enabling AI and ML solutions, PARG can transform the payment accuracy mission of CMS by reducing costs, improving accuracy, streamlining operations and fueling innovation. To achieve its mission to optimize resources and reduce waste and abuse of federal funds, 18 RPA bots have been deployed that support PARG’s payment accuracy operations. The CERT program is specific to improper payment reduction within the Medicare program. Three legacy websites have been replaced with a single modernized application with fully integrated collaboration capabilities, optimizing efficiency while reducing opportunities for waste and abuse of federal funds.
Cybersecurity Quality Services Management Office (Cyber QSMO)
Achievement: Cyber QSMO is a game-changing approach for delivering high-quality, cost-effective cybersecurity shared services to the 102 Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies. Through Cyber QSMO’s offerings, OMB estimates financial savings of as much as 30 percent of the government’s overall annual cybersecurity costs. Among the high-priority services mandated by OMB and offered at launch were a Vulnerability Disclosure Policy Platform, a Security Operations Center-as-a-Service, and a Protective Domain Name System Resolver service.
NIST Open Security Controls Assessment Language (OSCAL) Team
Achievement: NIST partnered with both Industry and the GSA FedRAMP PMO to develop this novel language to express security compliance data in both machine and human readable formats, dramatically accelerating the Authorization to Operate (ATO) process. OSCAL-based automation is not only applicable and beneficial to cloud-based solutions but reduces the length of an assessment from months to weeks for in-house systems with the same benefits of increased granularity and accuracy of the assessment and authorization process.
Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Dahlgren Software Factory Foundations Team
Achievement: As a part of the Hybrid Cloud Initiative at NSWC Dahlgren, The Software Factory Foundations Team was formed to assess and implement viable solutions for establishing a software factory at NSWC Dahlgren. The volunteer team members worked towards the betterment of the entire software community of practice across the warfare center. The team identified a foundational set of tools needed to enable any project/team regardless of experience, funding, or size to implement DevSecOps/DevOps leading practices. To prove value of an enterprise services, a pilot project was chosen to integrate into the environment.
Industrial Operations Analysts (IOA)
Achievement: Consistent with GSA’s mission of leveraging expertise to provide innovative and secure solutions for its customers, the Industrial Operations Analyst (IOA) team and technical leads from the GSA IT Hardware Category, collaborated to up-skill IOA employees. The up-skilled IOAs assess IT security practices of GSA suppliers, creating a secure marketplace for public sector clients. The assessments have significantly improved GSA’s awareness of supplier IT security practices and are creating opportunities for IT security improvements within the supplier base.
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission: eLibrary Team
Achievement: eLibrary is critical to the mission of FERC and provides access to electronic versions of documents received and issued by the Commission. Experiencing slow response times, outages, and unreliable search results, the team employed Agile principles to address these problems. By engaging internal and public users during development and release cycles, and working to understand broad goals and context, the team managed to deliver a modern user interface, powerful search capabilities, and improved system availability.
USDA Customer Experience Center of Excellence Team
Achievement: To better understand the OneUSDA Ecosystem and how USDA agencies might improve customer experiences through collaboration, the Customer Experience Center of Excellence mapped how USDA directly and indirectly benefits its customers. In order to create this service blueprint, the research team conducted more than 50 interviews with USDA employees and customers with unique insight into food safety and nutrition and examined USDA websites to see how each agency presents its programs and services to customers. The team then created the infrastructure and connected tools and systems to create the contact center AskUSDA. Now, USDA can view data, insights, and trends in real-time and make informed, data-driven decisions.
NSF By The Numbers Team
Achievement: NSF has a grand vision to communicate accomplishments to the external audience such as Congress, Research Community, and the general public using advanced Data and Analytics. The nominated team was creative, agile, and innovative in implementing a cutting-edge dashboard in less than ten months and rapidly scaled it for public adoption. Leveraging the design-centered thinking and agile methodologies concepts, the delivered public-facing dashboard titled “NSF by the Numbers” sets the stage for a unified, consistent, and modern enterprise view of NSF data.
Bureau of the Fiscal Service, Payment Strategy & Innovation Division
Achievement: The team is nominated for its work towards the Treasury’s Agency Priority Goal (APG) to reduce checks and increase electronic payments as a way to make the federal payment experience more modern, seamless, inclusive, and secure for all Americans. The team has helped agencies across the federal government plan, develop, and implement electronic payment solutions that meet the needs of their agency and their payees because electronic payments are faster, safer, cheaper, and more convenient.
Office of Information and Technology COVID-19 Scrum Team
Achievement: As the COVID-19 pandemic began, the VA Office of Information and Technology rapidly assembled a SCRUM team of technologists spanning the enterprise to quickly surge network and telehealth resources, break up logjams in the supply chain, fast-track equipment or provisioning, and provide seamless information for IT services that VA relied on to fulfill the Department’s mission. The COVID-19 SCRUM team facilitated a rapid response that enabled over 400,000 staff remote connection to the VA network, more than 12.5 million telehealth visits (averaging 40,000 visits daily), and accelerated deployments of technologies ahead of schedule.
Small Business Outreach Team
Achievement: ITC Initiative has made significant impacts in dealing with internal and external organizations to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. Efforts from this ITC team helped to promote a transformational change in shifting mindsets and challenges with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), as well as small and socially disadvantaged businesses.
Artificial Intelligence Module Implementation to Streamline Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Requests
Achievement: The team implemented a new AI Module that carries advanced features that better aid the agency in streamlining Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. With features like Automatic Named Entity Recognition, Custom Patterns and Automated Pattern Reactions, and History-Based Intelligent Redaction Suggestions, the program was able to highlight and redact sensitive information automatically. The DoS was able to reduce the time spent during the find-and-redact stage of FOIA requests, and intuitively streamline the workflow towards improved citizen dialogue.
Electronic Acquisition System integrated (EASi) Project
Achievement: The GSA Public Buildings Service (PBS), essentially the landlord of the U.S. Government with over 4,000 buildings and a million workers a day, is host to the Electronic Acquisition System integrated (EASi), a contracts writing system used by over 4,500 users to process more than 50,000 transactions a day. In 2021, the nominated team successfully led the development effort of the Acquisition Planning Module (APM), EASi’s sixth module, to provide a customized and focused user experience. Working with stakeholders and the business line to identify pain points and capture requirements, the team built a prioritized backlog and within eight weeks, the minimum viable product (MVP) module was developed. APM, which will be used by hundreds of GSA employees, is scheduled to go-live in December but has already garnered praise and excitement from the stakeholder community during user acceptance testing.
National Transit Database (NTD) Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning Project
Achievement: FTA hosts the National Transit Database (NTD) which is the primary source for detailed financial, operational, and capital asset data from over 900 transit providers for use in apportioning $8 billion funding and a key component of the nation’s infrastructure modernization plans. The NTD contains hundreds of hard-coded rules which have expanded greatly over the years and started to negatively affect the ability of the system to process timely data and adapt to ever-changing rulesets. Recognition that this challenge requires a different approach led to the creation of several pilots to leverage artificial intelligence for a data driven approach. Results of the establishment of the AI program at FTA and the implementation of AI for the NTD – FTA was able to identify $1M/year in cost avoidance from the current process.
Library of Congress Unified Cloud Platform
Achievement: By modernizing the Library’s legacy IT systems and migrating them to a unified cloud platform, the nominated team has increased the security of the Library’s IT systems and created a unified user experience for Library staff and customers. The team helped replace manual, paper-based processes, with modern tools such as Customer Service Management, IT Service Management, and Project Portfolio Management, made quickly available for all operational units and resulting in efficiency and project management best practices.
NASA Enterprise Digital Transformation
Achievement: For decades, NASA has been at the forefront of discovery, exploration, and inspiration, extending the frontiers of human achievement in air and space. Now the nation aspires to even bolder missions, but in an increasingly hyper-connected, technology-enabled, fast-paced, and competitive world… and NASA must modernize and transform its work, workforce, and workplace to deliver in this future. In FY21, the agency launched the Enterprise Digital Transformation (DT) strategic initiative to aggressively harness digital advances to accelerate and unify its collective efforts to transform NASA.
Identity Credential and Access Management (ICAM) Division Team
Team Lead: Darlene Gore, Director, Identity Management Solution Division, General Service Administration
National Science Foundation (NSF) DevSecOps Team
Achievement: With the formation of the DevSecOps team at NSF, the nominated team established a strong CI/CD development environment and successfully transitioned over 20 applications to the cloud. NSF’s Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) process is enabled by the employed tools which automate build, deploy and test processes across a rapidly modernizing collection of applications. NSF now releases well tested, low to no defect production code every month, which is a vast improvement over the prior waterfall code released a handful of times a year. The result has been faster development, retirement of legacy systems, near-complete shift of functionality to modern applications/platforms, and reduction of defects and technical debt.
OPM Retirement Service Call Center Implementation
Achievement: The OPM Retirement Services Call Center (RSCC) is where federal workers and retirees can speak with OPM agents for help with retirement benefits, issues, and complex cases. In an era of apps and online tools, the RSCC is where the magic happens – unless that magic is delayed by a busy signal. The RSCC handles 5,000+ calls daily but has also been measuring 20,000+ busy signal per day, impacting customer satisfaction and employee morale. The nominated team implemented a new scalable, cloud-based solution with innovative features. RSCC agents were trained and hit the ground running, as reflected in initial metrics. Busy signals disappeared overnight and with a “request for call back” feature, daily contacts increased by more than 40%. All call back requests, on average 2073 per day have been handled the same day. It’s been a great win for all.
IT Modernization – Managing Partner of the IPv6 Federal Task Force
Achievement: In the spirit of GSA’s purpose to support the agencies of the US Federal Government, the GSA OGP IT Modernization team helps agencies adopt federal IT policies, guidance, and best practices. For example, the IT Modernization team serves as the Managing Partner of the IPv6 Federal Task Force, which under the IT Modernization division’s leadership, facilitated industry and government collaboration through a June 2021 summit. With more than 600 attendees, this high profile event allowed industry, government, and academia to collaborate and ask questions to assist agency adoption of an IPv6-only infrastructure, a critical element of OMB Memorandum M-21-07 and a key component of Zero Trust and a secure IT infrastructure.
Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) Team
Achievement: In April 2019, when the sudden world-wide change forced the HR division to 100% telework, it lacked remote environment technology to support its typical 33 actions a week, each requiring up to 10 forms, status notifications to customers and tracking of key metrics. The HRIS Team took on the challenge, and in collaboration with the IT division, found a solution that stayed within the DoN IT regulations. They built a database utilizing Structured Query Language (SQL) on a SQL server that resulted in reducing the time to process a personnel package in half. The Crane Request for Personnel Action Tracking System (CRTS) is remote accessible, auto populates forms, has built-in status notifications and provides leadership with key metrics.