The Wrap: CDO Underwood Exclusive Interview; JWCC Tallies; Feds and Fintech

Welcome to The Wrap for Monday, October 9! ??

From the newsroom at MeriTalk, it’s the quickest read in Federal tech news. Here’s what you need to know today:

Where Rubber Meets the Road on DEIA

What are the next crucial data points in measuring progress on the Federal government’s diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) efforts? Dr. Janice Underwood, who joined the Biden-Harris administration in 2022 as director of the Office of Personnel Management’s Office of DEIA and governmentwide Chief Diversity Officer, said in an exclusive interview with MeriTalk that she is watching for results from the 2023 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) to see what difference a year makes. Following up on the administration’s 2021?DEIA executive order?(EO), Underwood established a DEIA index in the 2022 FEVS survey, and the result was pretty positive: 69 percent of Federal employees reported positive perceptions of agency practices related to DEIA. Now comes the harder part: boosting that score by six percentage points by fiscal year 2026. Advancing the DEIA score is “something that we’re all staying tuned towards,” Underwood said. “It does keep me up at night because that’s my metric of success. That’s what I’m here to do,” she added. “Everything we do funnels into raising that DEIA index because it really is the way that we in the Federal government for the first time are going to measure are we doing what we say we’re going to do.” Please do hit the entire interview for Underwood’s discussion of technology and how it needs to be a key driver across the several existing generations of the Federal workforce.

JWCC Contract Tallies

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) – which oversees the Defense Department’s (DoD) $9 billion multi-vendor Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) cloud contract – said it made four initial awards for cloud services under the contract vehicle, two to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and two to Microsoft. AWS received the sole source contracts for a joint DoD intelligence community edge cloud pilot and a public key infrastructure initiative in the secret cloud. Microsoft received two sole source task orders for enterprise messaging (EM5) and an enterprise email security gateway pilot. As part of the JWCC program, each vendor participating in the program – Google, AWS, Oracle, and Microsoft – must compete on individual task orders that are rolled out in batches. The exception to this rule, however, is that “only one awardee is capable of providing the supplies or services required at the level of quality required because the supplies or services ordered are unique or highly specialized.” DISA did not provide any specifics regarding the values of the task orders. DISA Director Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner announced that the Pentagon awarded 13 task orders totaling more than $200 million under the JWCC contract earlier this year, nine of which are associated with the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control. Since his announcement, DISA has awarded more than 17 JWCC task orders.

Feds and Fintech

A new?report?from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is urging Federal financial agencies to do more to identify critical financial technology – or “fintech” – skill gaps in their workforce and improve those skills – such as data analysis – to better oversee fintech and make policy for it. According to GAO, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) require their staff to have some level of financial tech skills. Some examples of these skills include knowledge of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and cloud adoption – as well as knowledge of how financial technology partnerships operate. “However, the agencies have not systematically or comprehensively collected data on their policymaking and oversight staff’s technological skills related to financial technology or conducted assessments to determine the financial technology skills these staff need,” the GAO report says.

NASA UFO Research Chief

Congrats to Mark McInerney, who has been appointed by NASA as the agency’s director of research in its efforts to help the government find out more about unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) – or what you and I more commonly refer to as unidentified flying objects (UFOs). His appointment to the new position follows a Sept. 14?report?from NASA’s independent UAP study team saying that?NASA needs to take a more permanent role in the Federal government’s UAP research effort for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is to help reduce the taboos and stigma associated with UAPs. Most recently, McInerney served as NASA’s liaison to the Department of Defense, covering limited UAP activities for the agency. In his new director role, McInerney will centralize communications, resources, and data analytical capabilities to establish a robust database for future UAP research or sightings. He will also leverage NASA’s expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and space-based observation tools to support the broader government initiative on UAPs.

EPA Air Quality IT

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has had on its wish-list for some time the replacement of two 1990s IT systems that power the agency’s ability to produce near real-time air pollution data for the public based on input from monitoring sites run by state, local, Tribal, and territorial government agencies. The two systems – the Air Quality System (AQS) and AirNow – would be combined into a new single system, but obstacles to starting on the work are familiar – think resources and competing priorities at the agency. But in a recent report, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is pointing to more process-related factors it says EPA should also be paying more attention to, including documenting an operational analysis for the two systems, and developing and documenting a business case for a “new IT system for air quality data based on considerations for how such a system could address the challenges currently posed by AQS and AirNow,” including an analysis of alternatives. EPA said it agreed with those steps and will proceed accordingly.

Once again, let’s “call IT a day,” but we'll bring you more tomorrow. Until then please check the MeriTalk breaking news website throughout the day for the latest on government IT people, process, and policy.

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