Smarter Gov Tech, Stronger MerITocracy
federal workforce worker hired-min

After an overhaul of the user interface, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has made progress on improving the USAJobs website by tracking metrics, providing more clarity for applicants, and offering guidance to agencies for job postings. […]

Bob Kolasky, Director of the National Risk Management Center (NRMC) at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), today pronounced state and local election authorities “well positioned” to conduct secure elections next month. […]

GSA

The General Services Administration’s 18F office has released “de-risking” guides to help agencies deliver successful IT projects on both the Federal and state levels. 18F, which is part of GSA’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS) organization, partners with Federal agencies to assist them in improving the user experience of government services by helping agencies build and buy technology. […]

TIC Talks

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) 3.0 guidance has taken center stage this year not only as a long-planned policy evolution, but also as a potential life-saver for Federal agencies to employ new use cases applicable to their need to implement wide-ranging and long-lasting telework. […]

The Federal Electronic Health Record Modernization (FEHRM) program office last month released to Congress its interoperability strategy which aims to optimize the interoperability of information systems that the Departments of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) use to support health care of active duty military and veterans. […]

CISA
video conferencing
AI

The American Council for Technology-Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) released the its Ethical Application of AI Framework whitepaper on Oct. 8 to help government leaders ethically determine how much confidence to place in technologies that comprise AI. […]

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is aiming to make improvements to a program designed to share cyber threat data between government and the private sector entities – at the same time as the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued a report calling for several specific program improvements. […]

Department of Transportation

Looking ahead to a post-pandemic future, Department of Transportation (DoT) CIO Ryan Cote said at MeriTalk’s October 7 CIO Crossroads webinar that the workplace structure will be forever changed as organizations and Federal agencies realize the value of technology implemented throughout the mass shift to remote work. […]

telework

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) CIO Karen Evans said today she needs to make sure that the agency’s ability to conduct large-scale telework remains sustained as uncertainty continues over future developments with the coronavirus pandemic. […]

Federal agencies have made significant progress on open data, but the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has not issued implementation guidance or performance reports under the OPEN Government Data Act, according to a report released today by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). […]

CISA
GSA General Services Administration

The General Services Administration (GSA) on October 7 released a request for information for vendors and other interested parties on “resource-efficient technologies that improve commercial building health and resilience.” […]

election security

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Acting Secretary Chad Wolf said today that his agency has not identified any threat that could change vote tallies in next month’s elections, but did say citizens should expect that the final results of all elections may not be clear by the conclusion of election night, November 3. […]

General Services Administration GSA

Tasked with distributing stimulus checks during the pandemic, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has been hobbled by decades of insufficient funding and legacy IT causing agencywide inefficiencies at a time when Americans rely heavily on the agency’s services. Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., an official from the Government Accountability Office, and the IRS commissioner all agreed today that sustained modernization funding is necessary to bring the agency up to date and meet mission critical objectives. […]

Officials from the Department of Labor and the Army Corps of Engineers reported this week that their organizations are continuing to make progress on IT modernization despite hurdles created by the COVID-19 pandemic, and are approaching modernization with data as the centerpiece. […]

USDA

Department of Agriculture (USDA) CIO Gary Washington is crediting the agency’s modernization efforts for smooth service delivery and mass telework during the COVID-19 pandemic, but he’s also saying that the agency isn’t slowing down its transformation efforts as it looks toward a post-pandemic future. […]

DHS Homeland Security

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued a new rule that will expand its insider threat program to cover “the categories of individuals to all individuals who have or had access to the Department’s facilities, information, equipment, networks, or systems.” […]

military private sector government contract spending procurement-min 1

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is suggesting that the U.S. Army improve its use of alternative agreements and approaches for contracts – such as technology competitions and granting access to Army labs – by analyzing how those approaches are working and sharing lessons learned enterprise-wide. […]

Veterans Affairs VA Vets
Gerry Connolly

The Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is crowdsourcing for answers on how to apply differential privacy solutions to complex data sets regarding public safety, and is dangling $276,000 in cash prizes to jumpstart the effort. […]

innovation

The House on Sept. 30 approved the Modernization Centers of Excellence Program Act, a bill introduced earlier this year by Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., that would require the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services group to establish a Modernization Centers of Excellence (CoE) “to facilitate the adoption of modern technology by executive agencies.” […]

NIST

The bias and ethics of artificial intelligence application are still being worked out on a case-by-case basis, and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) IT Lab Chief of Staff Elham Tabassi said yesterday that an assessment process to minimize harm is not necessarily in the near future. […]

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