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Before the pandemic, federal agencies were experimenting and testing emerging technologies on a small scale with the goal of streamlining, simplifying, or accelerating what they already do. The complications of the past year and a half have only heightened the urgency of these ideas.
To do this, several agencies have followed a model of restructuring their IT stores, adopting artificial intelligence and automation, or developing programs with fewer silos. One of those to be restructured was the Department of Labor, which consolidated all the IT workshops under one office of the Chief Information Officer about two and a half years ago.
Krista Kinnard is the Head of Emerging Labor Technologies at OCIO and the first person to fill such a role. Her main job is to work as a customer service organization, providing technology solutions and leadership that advance Labor’s mission, she said. Customer service and technology must go hand in hand.
“I don’t need to build the best technology in the world that no one can use. It also doesn’t help me not to talk to end users to interact with them, to really understand their business challenge to be able to create these technology solutions, ”she said at FCW’s Emerging Technologies Workshop. September 14.
As such, Labor’s Emerging Technologies organization has four strategic goals: building the DOL IT platform, modernizing the agency’s existing applications, securing and improving IT infrastructure, and transforming the customer experience. Kinnard said OCIO is trying to operationalize emerging technologies and make their existing processes more efficient, so exploratory research and development is less important at this time.
That’s where their idea of an innovation incubator was born – and the General Services Administration’s 10x program for crowdsourcing federal employee ideas.
“We don’t want to just explore it and say we’ve explored it, we want to take what we’ve explored and put it into practice,” she said.
In the case of the military, emerging automation and man-made technologies have helped accelerate the pace of progress. The Liability Determination Assistant (DORA) bot is estimated to have saved up to 13 days of administrative procurement time per year by automatically verifying certifications and contractor registration information. It checks SAM.gov, including for Sec. 889 provisions prohibiting the federal use of certain Chinese state-owned telecommunications equipment and services.
“We were inspired by a successful pilot of a liability determination assistant bot that was piloted by the IRS in 2018,” said Elizabeth Chirico, head of acquisition innovation for future operations, in the office of the Deputy Under-Secretary of the Army. for supply. “So the Entrepreneur Responsibility Robot… it collects formats and provides Entrepreneur Liability Status to our outsourcing professionals. And it’s designed to help our contracting officials determine whether a potential contractor is responsible or not.
DORA was flown in November 2019 and deployed across the Army contracting company in January 2020. It then expanded to the Air Force and Navy with protocols for ‘signed agreement.
Chirico said his team’s goals include decreasing contact time on low value tasks; increase the decision-making time of contracting officers and the time spent on tasks that require more critical thinking; and better acquisition strategies, contract-like decisions and trading results.
“And that gives us more time to do post-award activities. Also compliance with less contact time and a decrease in the number of monitoring hours required, ”she said.
To do this, the organization uses metrics such as number of hours and dollars saved or cost avoidance, purchasing, administrative time, contracting officer satisfaction, and number of errors reduced. or compliance, Chirico said.
Emerging technology is also seen as a way for U.S. citizenship and immigration services to reduce redundancies and inefficient or siled processes that have plagued the agency for years. Efforts towards a real-time streaming and event architecture, as well as an API-driven methodology and delivery mechanism, can help USCIS organizations deliver their product.
But USCIS chief technology officer Robert Brown said redundancy persisted when delivering functionality and code to different operational directions. Thus, their approach was “essentially an inverted Conway’s law”, according to which a software interface structure of a system will reflect the social boundaries of the organizations that produced it.
“[It] deals with illustrating what the architecture should be and then pushing that through the different teams, the delivery and product teams, as well as the business units themselves, ”said Brown. “And really, what we started to discover as we formulated that, from architecture to organizational constructs, is to see these groups come together, the operational groups and the different product delivery teams, and really focus. and understand what those business functions are, as opposed to just eliminating the user story and then writing code against it, without having a very good understanding of the business function behind it. “
He said the dividends from this work are starting to be felt.
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