Emerging Technology and Innovation Conference

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and mandatory telework measures, the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Division within the GSA Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO) developed an automation that assists in the daily tracking of employee work locations. The Daily Check-In Automation provides GSA Leadership with real-time intelligence on the working disposition of GSA staff. The automation allows OCFO to understand where their employees are working from and will also allow OCFO to track when employees begin to occupy GSA office space as COVID-19 mandatory telework subsides. Specifically, the automation quantifies the number of employees that are reporting to a job site and their location, as well as the number of employees teleworking or on leave. The automation enables GSA leadership to accurately monitor occupancy status and trends at GSA facilities, ensuring health and safety strategies are appropriately deployed. The Daily Check-In solution leverages a broad range of technologies to deliver this capability including Google Apps Script, Google Forms, Google Sheets, Google Mail, Listserve, and Data Warehousing - all orchestrated into a seamless workflow.

Drawing from accelerator, venture, and training models, Dcode is a wholly unique company that cannot be pigeon-holed into one category. The company leverages what has already existed to avoid recreating the wheel and without competing directly. First came the accelerator when Meagan saw a gap in the market. What was available then before Dcode was especially not friendly to tech founders and missed the mark overall in terms of effectiveness. Most shops at the time were former government leaders charging way too much for minimal results, leaning on their personal network to drive their businesses without the concrete expertise to actually help tech companies scale in the federal market. So, Dcode took the opposite approach and set out to make the federal market accessible so that the government could bring in better tech fast. Meagan initially and now the tech scouting team reaches out to venture capitalists to educate and work with them to bring the top emerging tech Dcode’s accelerator. The key ingredient? Community. Emphasizing the importance of community, Dcode lowers the barriers to entry and minimizes risk for all parties involved: the tech, government, venture, and industry partners. With its profitable model, Dcode set a trend and has seen many copycats since its founding. Still, no competitor or tangential brands know all sides of the government innovation ecosystem with the same degree of expertise and connectivity.

Google Cloud was selected by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to prototype an AI-enabled digital pathology solution at select DoD facilities. The project includes the delivery of augmented reality microscopes to DoD’s medical facilities and access to artificial intelligence (AI) models that can help military doctors with cancer detection tasks on multiple disease areas. The early access to the digital pathology platform is for research use only. DIU is the organization exclusively focused within the Department of Defense (DoD) on scaling commercial technology across the DoD. The goal of the DIU-Google Cloud project is to help improve the accuracy of diagnoses, assisting physicians who face an overwhelming volume of data when making diagnostic and treatment decisions--and to help lower overall healthcare costs. Working with DIU, Google Cloud will prototype the delivery of an augmented reality microscope that overlays AI-based information for doctors, providing pathology-based cancer detection tools at the point-of-care. Google’s approach will leverage TensorFlow, an open-source framework to help deliver machine-learning models as well as the Google Cloud Healthcare API for data ingestion and de-identification to maximize patient privacy.

Applied Cyber Technologies (ACT), a product office within the Army’s Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems, was established to identify the most innovative ways to rapidly assess, integrate, acquire and field advanced defensive cyber solutions for cyber soldiers. In 2020, ACT prototyped Defensive Cyberspace Operations Resource for Updates, Innovation and Development (DRUID). This cloud-based continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline resides within ACT’s broader Pipeline Ecosystem and enables secure collaboration between cyber soldiers, industry, military and academia. Critically, it resolves the long-standing challenge of how to effectively bring various entities into an environment where they can assess, test and develop tools collaboratively. DRUID is the first pipeline of its kind in the Army’s defensive cyber enterprise, and it is changing the paradigm of how we assess, develop and acquire solutions for cyber forces. DRUID removes the technical limitations of a physical space and creates a virtual environment for rapid and iterative collaboration. Designed to deliberately drive innovation, DRUID allows for seamless vendor inputs by providing industry access to ACT’s environment via the public cloud. DRUID houses a fully automated workflow (“pipeline”) to build, scan, harden, integrate and package application sets that DCO currently uses on its fielded platforms. DRUID leverages the accessibility of the public cloud while maintaining the security level of private infrastructure. Critically, DRUID’s automated pipeline enables vendor tool integration to happen in a matter of hours instead of months. Vastly increasing the speed of tool development is critical to our ability to win in cyberspace. DRUID offers automated workflows to the defensive cyber enterprise without requiring the swapping out of the entire infrastructure to support containers. DRUID allows industry solutions providers to collaborate with us in adaptable, open-source code, making them true partners in a way that wasn’t possible before. DRUID significantly enhances cyber force readiness as well. Cyber Soldiers can now build, scan, remediate and push complex application images to the integration environment with 100 percent automation. Additionally, the outputs from DRUID create an application “marketplace” in ACT’s existing Pipeline Ecosystem, thereby expanding cyber forces’ access to unique skill sets from industry, academia and government, across a global network.

The Sequence Read Archive (SRA) is the largest repositories of raw genomic sequencing data, hosting over 36 petabytes of sequence data to date. This rate of growth presents unique challenges for efficient storage and accessibility to this invaluable database. To that end, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) invited the biomedical research community to provide input on next steps for the future of the SRA. NIH sought to reduce the size of the SRA by eliminating base quality scores (BQS), making them more efficient to work with and store at scale--however, BQS are considered by leading researchers to be a vital attribute of raw genomic sequencing data. Together with Amazon Web Services, NIH is transitioning the SRA to the AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program. This move will surface petabytes of genomic sequencing data in world-readable cloud storage, allowing data users to locate and retrieve their data of interest. It will also minimize the complexity by which researchers can locate and retrieve SRA data. Because the Open Data Sponsorship Program functions by covering the cost of storage, egress, and transfer of sponsored datasets, the move will also provide an avenue to maintain the valuable indices of sequence quality.

The Democratizing Data project addresses the challenges of leveraging the vast amount of Veterans Health Administration (VHA) clinical data to better understand, present, and respond to Veteran issues. The objective of Democratizing Data is to develop and test solutions that improve the user experience of accessing meaningful data to advance user-identified goals. This project, and the underlying data architecture, allows rapid access to statistically valid synthetic data and address the issues of data inaccessibility, siloed data, and protecting patient privacy. Synthetic data sets allow the unlocking of data access to engage the widest possible audience in innovation, research, and quality improvement across a wide range of opportunity areas. It addresses the issue of accessibility by allowing a self-service user interface. It reduces complexity by incorporating and meaningfully organizing diverse, large data sets including data not typically found in electronic health records. Further, it protects personal health data and allows a limited set of internal users to access patient data, while providing the option to secure synthetic data sets quickly for more generalized audiences. Democratizing Data uses synthetic data from the MDClone platform. The data includes patient-oriented data, including both clinical and non-clinical data. The platform can extract information for any event on the care path. The highly skilled team that developed the data made it possible to interact with the data using simple terminology and does not require programming skills to use. The flexible infrastructure makes it possible to continuously add new data sources, capture institutional challenges, or create new events, including analyzing unstructured data using natural language processing capabilities. Compared to the speed of most methods of data extraction, this tool is 100-1,000 times faster. The initial collaboration with MDClone centers around suicide prevention, chronic disease management, precision medicine, health equity, and COVID-19.

The US Department of Interior implemented an innovative solution to employee recruitment and retention. DOI was interested in providing a new way to show employees what career paths are available to them beyond just job postings. The new AI-driven feature will provide a training plan to reach the new career. On the new DOI Careers page (doi.gov/careers), users are invited to "Find Your Path." After answering a series of questions, they are given potential careers that best match their experience, skills and desired work environments. As a next step, DOI is developing AI that will show current staff what courses they should take to gain the skills necessary to qualify for the desired positions.

With the guidance and determination of the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) Enterprise-wide Shared Services Program (ESS), DOL has transformed its administrative services to become more efficient and customer-centric. DOL introduced the ESS concept in April 2018 to streamline and improve DOL’s internal administrative services. This program was driven by several Federal directives from the past several administrations to consolidate administrative services under a central authority and to resolve Departmental challenges in compliance and collaboration. The human resources (HR), information technology (IT), personnel security, and procurement functions were included due to their disparate structure of staff and oversight throughout the Department. The team led these functions through initial research and stakeholder engagement, to transition planning, and finally completed implementation in 2020 with the transition of 800 staff into shared services organizations.

The ADG is the State Department’s software startup group with a "Field First" focus and recognizes the need for custom software solutions to fill in the gaps between off-the-shelf applications and the unique needs of US diplomatic missions and their employees. The ADG’s field first investment benefits all US diplomatic missions by supporting real technological solutions to solve common problems in the field. The ADG leverages 20% of the regular duty time of qualified LE staff and Eligible Family Members from US diplomatic missions in every geographical region. ADG members support operations, ensure security compliance, train application users, and develop new software. This investment in US Government staff encourages innovation, advances skills, and augments their professional experiences.

The Department of State (DOS) Global Talent Management (GTM) Bureau - Executive Office (EX) develops, maintains, and supports over 70+ Human Resources (HR) applications. These HR applications support DOS HR efforts including those related to Foreign Services Officers (FSOs). FSOs play a critical role in DOS’s mission to represent America's foreign policy abroad, and to advance the interests and security of the American people. In 2018, GTM leadership kicked off an effort to replace one of their FSO specific legacy applications - the aging Foreign Service bidding (FSBid) application. FSBid managed the internal job application (or “bidding”) and assignment processes for FSOs and has been a source of frustration for FSO users. As a tool FSBid was counterintuitive, users dealt with lack of centralization and unreliable open position data. Yet the system played a significant role in their career trajectory within DOS. The legacy system has met the end of its lifecycle due to limited technical innovation and enhancement options. In Fall 2018, GTM/EX started development to replace the legacy application with a modern, scalable, user-centric designed application called TalentMAP - a Department-wide workforce planning and talent management platform for Managing the assignment processes, Aligning people with positions, and Projecting DoS workforce planning of the future. GTM/EX went outside of their usual tech stack and processes to develop the new bidding and assignment solution. TalentMAP’s primary goal is to bring about a more secure, reliable and dedicated system through Agile Development, Human Centered Design, and Open Source Technology. These 3 project pillars were critical in bringing innovation and business value to GTM/EX and its user base.

Principle 6 of VA’s Digital Modernization Strategy states: “Every service will be equally available in desktop and mobile environments.” On VA.gov today, nearly 40% of all traffic comes from users on their mobile devices. This traffic is typically driven by users that want to complete quick transactions, such as viewing the status of a claim or locating a VA facility. A flagship VA mobile application was created to more fully realize VA’s Digital Modernization Strategy, and to test the hypothesis, validated by user research, that native functionality in a mobile app would allow Veterans to more easily complete key transactions across VA health and benefits services. This innovative method of access will provide a seamless, faster experience for Veterans. A constellation of 30+ VA mobile apps exists today – the vast majority of which are single-feature health apps with specific tools for interactions like prescription refills or tracking pain relief. Although not the first, this mobile app offers a new kind of access for Veterans, bridging resources across VA organizational structures, like VBA and VHA. The VA chose this multi-purpose approach because qualitative co-design sessions and quantitative research on benefits utilization reveal a desire to consume and manage both health and other benefits in one place. The app will include the following features:
-Biometric login: simplifies the sign-in process, which has long been a pain point for Veterans
-Profile: Veterans can view and edit their personal information, including direct deposit information for payments
-Claims & Appeals Status: Veterans can view claim statuses and manage some claims
-Facility Locator: directs users to their nearest VA facilities
-Appointments: Veterans can navigate to their appointments, view, or cancel them
-Veteran Crisis Line: Veterans can access the crisis line and integrate with their phone’s SMS features as needed
-Secure Messaging: Veterans can message their VA health providers through the app
While currently in prototype, the VA mobile app is scheduled to be released on Google Play Store and Apple App Store in May 2021.

VA Online Scheduling (VAOS) is a suite of software applications that deliver enterprise-wide online scheduling capability at the VA. In 2020, VAOS was reimagined as a Veteran-driven experience with the goal of making it a Veteran’s preferred method for scheduling and managing appointments. By applying human-centered design practices and redesigning VAOS on the VA.gov platform, VA has improved usability of the application, improved satisfaction of the online scheduling experience, and enhanced the system’s long-term maintenance using modern and innovative technology practices.

The Department of Veterans’ Affairs (VA) Digital Transformation Center (DTC) Center of Excellence (CoE) accelerates health/benefits outcomes for veterans and military families. The DTC was developed to rapidly turn around IT projects and programs through a large scale modernization. One of the only implementations of COTS products in the public sector of this scale, the DTC program has closed the gap in the existing time-to-value delivery of services at VA. By moving technologies to the cloud, onboarding SaaS and PaaS products to meet a wide range of needs, and streamlining governance and security of the products/solutions, the VA is able to move quickly while customizing pre-built tools in order to meet its needs. Each tool has been pre-approved for use in the VA environment, meaning it has been shown to be secure and reliable, and because the team is not starting from scratch with each additional task, layers of approval and testing have been stripped away. This shared ATO model – where the ATOs granted to the DTC program cover a broad range of functionality for shared platform solutions – is unlike anything that had been attempted before at VA and is the ultimate catalyst for innovation on DTC. Building upon the flexibility offered by a shared ATO model, VA has prioritized the use of low code features and integrations with a focus on sharing and reusability. It has also offered flexible contracts for quick implementation services using both IT and non-IT funding, while solidifying agreements for enterprise licenses that enable wider accessibility to enterprise tools for VA business offices, including standard terms and pricing.

FSA’s Digital and Customer Care (DCC) program is an outgrowth of the Department’s ambitious strategy to dramatically reimagine the customer experience for all FSA participants, including students, and their families, financial aid providers, regulators, governmental entities, or other stakeholders. The Department partnered with Accenture Federal Services to tackle this transformation, embracing the bold vision of a Next Generation Financial Services Environment (NextGen), an innovative and streamlined world-class solution to benefit students and parents. The team incorporated human-centered design techniques to inform the development of a seamless, inclusive solution where borrowers can learn about, apply for, and manage their federal financial aid, all in one place. DCC integrated and consolidated previously disconnected websites, customer care solutions and communications platforms. Using Cloud technologies with robust capabilities such as Amazon Web Services and Salesforce, the Department rolled out a scalable and secure platform with the requisite agility to support FSA’s innovation agenda by using:
• A single digital platform that integrates 13 different legacy websites and serves as a borrower’s front door to FSA services via the StudentAid.gov website and the redesigned myStudentAid mobile app, eliminating the need for multiple log-ins.
• A modern marketing platform supporting real-time, personalized email and SMS communications.
• A consolidated customer care platform empowering customer service agents and back-office processers to better manage customer inquiries.
• The ‘Aidan®’ virtual assistant, a 24/7 service using natural language understanding to answer FAQs about student aid and provides key transactional functions, including checking loan balances and making payments.

The DEEE Playbook helps government agencies get started and drive digital transformation and innovation in their business processes. It enables agencies to use digital and emerging technologies to identify cost savings, improve customer experience, and enhance controls via digital transformation. The DEEE Playbook is a simple approach and a set of tools to quickly identify inefficient business processes and effective solutions to drive large scale cost savings and efficiency gains. DEEE shifts away from the current trend in automating individual tasks (i.e., “point solutions”) and looks at transforming the entire process, which is where much greater cost saving opportunities exist. A common challenge agencies face is knowing where to get started with transformation and how to think about all the potential technologies in the marketplace. The DEEE Playbook provides tools and job aids to quickly find the best areas for efficiency gains using data-driven criteria. It also presents a simple easy-to-follow approach that incorporates leading practices of Human-Centered Design (HCD) to analyze processes. Finally, it provides educational material and decision aids to understand and evaluate a wide range of digital and emerging technologies that are best suited to their needs (including Robotic Process Automation, Data Analytics, Smart Workflow, Conversational Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Intelligent Optical Character Recognition, and Blockchain).

This virtually deployed innovation pairs together a suite of intelligent automation tools to create an end-to-end “no human touch” automated document solution which processed the agency’s 30-year archive of 525,000+ drug safety reports. Data that was previously unusable by drug reviewers is now automatically integrated across workflow and analytics tools enabling quick and easy access to visual data and custom reporting. Robotic Process Automation is used to collect incoming files, initiate data extraction, and perform post-processing analysis and reporting. Intelligent Optical Character Recognition extracts over 120 complex fields across a dozen versions of the safety report form with 99% accuracy. A data wrangling tool performs over 500 data cleansing steps in less than 3 minutes.

Provides the latest commercial IT technical training to anyone in the Air Force. Features "paths" to guide Airmen into the technical training our software factories need the most. Also features skills and "force multipliers" to help Airmen just get their feet wet in a topic and increase digital literacy. Highlights the open positions in software development, user experience, AI, etc. to encourage completing training. This training is available on demand, as needed, to help Airmen solve technical challenges in the short term plus build skills for the long term. The site is available on personal devices and requires no prior registration, approval, etc. The user experience is intentionally modern and commercial. The site is now live and collecting user data which will feed into backlog for updates.

Discover Dovel is a a showcase of our technical solutions – spanning the IT spectrum: full lifecycle using agile development, Cloud integration, hybrid deployments, and advanced data analytics. Discover allows Dovel a digital platform that can adapt to today’s business environment. We use Discover to:
Show how to build an agile and scalable digital platform by creating and integrating reusable APIs and multiple Cloud environments.
Offer a central place where business and IT leaders can critically assess our core capabilities for potential implementation into their environment.
Give users a place to experiment and see our unique advantages and competitive differentiation.
Provide use cases that showcase the business metrics and successes that our technical capabilities offer our customers.

DoD Cloud IaC is a game-changing solution for the Department of Defense, allowing the Department to move to the cloud at speed. DoD Cloud IaC is expected to decrease cloud deployment automation timelines from 30 weeks down to potentially as little as 2 hours, allowing customers to focus on mission critical tasks, including data analysis and application development. DoD Cloud IaC will provide real-time continuous monitoring and compliance and support architecture standardization across all Impact Levels and data classifications. Currently, DoD entities wanting to move to the cloud face significant complexity in the design and engineering necessary to secure cloud services. This is specifically visible in cloud virtual networking environments, auditing, least privilege access, and authentication. Due to the amount of authorization and accreditation paperwork required and a lack of templates, mission owners can often spend anywhere from 12 weeks to over a year on this routine upfront engineering and security work and lose critical time towards cloud adoption. The Cloud Computing Program Office (CCPO) created DoD Cloud IaC to solve for this long-standing challenge by providing pre-authorized baselines that serve as a platform to host mission applications. Each baseline includes inheritable controls in Enterprise Mission Assurance Support Service (eMASS). These controls allow an Authority to Operate (ATO) package to inherit security controls previously approved in IAC and saves mission owners valuable time during the Assessment & Authorization (A&A) process. The controls significantly reduce the security requirements for which mission owners are typically responsible for by leveraging inheritance from the Cloud Service Provider’s (CSP) Platform as a Service (PaaS) services significantly streamlining the process and cutting down on duplication of efforts. Whenever possible, DoD Cloud IaC leverages native security services offered by CSPs over traditional data center tools for improved integration with cloud services. Moreover, DoD Cloud IaC baselines can be built into DevSecOps pipelines to rapidly deploy the entire environment and mission applications. Within its first year of production, DoD Cloud IaC baselines successfully shortened the deployment of the networking, identity, and security policies for security compliance down from weeks to mere hours.

For years, the Department of Defense (DOD) agencies have relied on multiple, disparate IT contracts, using various platforms and tools, creating budgetary and interoperability challenges. As cyber threats intensified and the world became increasingly remote due to the pandemic, this disjointed network of tools became a significant barrier to collaboration and security. With mission-critical decisions being made every day, the DoD needed to implement a solution that was cloud-based, secure, device agnostic, globally available, flexible and easy to adopt. To seamlessly integrate messaging, content management, productivity and collaboration applications and tools, DoD and the General Services Administration (GSA) released the RFP in May 2020 for the Defense Enterprise Office Solution (DEOS). The contract tasked a group of industry-leading technology companies–Dell Federal, General Dynamics IT and Minburn Technology Group LLC-–to provide a solution to this long-standing problem by unifying and modernizing legacy IT services such as DOD Enterprise Email, Enterprise Portal Services, and Defense Collaboration Services to enable enterprise-wide collaboration and ubiquitous access to information across the DoD. The cost savings for the initial purchase order for AADP2 alone saved the government over $20 million. Hassan Harris, GSA’s Special Projects Branch Manager and Supervisory Senior Contracting Officer, has been working closely with contractors responsible for the DEOS work to seamlessly integrate multiple capabilities, including:
• Messaging: email, calendar and contacts
• Content management: web portal, file sharing, storage, archive and index, search, and filter, workflows and orchestration
• Productivity suite: word processor, spreadsheet, database management, drafting and diagramming, project scheduling and tracking
• Collaboration: one-to-one instant messaging, presence, persistent group chat, web conferencing, native audio, native video, white boarding, and desktop sharing

Retired U.S. Army Major Terri Ohlinger serves as the Nurse Case Manager of Eye Surgery at the Cincinnati VA Eye Center. In her role as Nurse Case Manager, Terri noticed two extremes when it came to post-operative outcomes. For some, Terri found herself asking the doctors to refill patients eye drop prescriptions earlier than anticipated. For others, she noticed a significant lack of adherence to recommended dosing. An anecdote that seeded the idea of the innovation was that a patient, when asked why he was not using his eye drops, said that he could not grip, squeeze, and aim the bottle. After researching the issue, she found that no commercially available device did both: aim and squeeze. In response, Terri developed Drop Ease to help patients with manual dexterity issues effectively administer their prescription eye drops. Drop Ease is a simple, easy to use eye drop delivery system designed for manual dexterity issues that allow patients to aim and dispense eye drops with minimal effort.

In late 2019, the Office of the Secretary of State of West Virginia began developing a new cloud-based system that would enable businesses, charitable organizations and other licensees to complete their entire licensing and registration process online. "Even though we didn’t see the pandemic coming, we try to develop services and infrastructure that allow us to recover from disasters or shift if something goes really, really wrong," says Dave Tackett, CIO. Our IT department had already delivered a one-stop online business registration portal as well as Alexa voice assistance technology that allows constituents to ask questions like "How do I register to vote" but Licensing was one of the last customer service functions that still relied on mainly manual processes, requiring constituents to mail applications and documentation, email them or visit in person. The office wanted to provide a modern user experience where customers could apply as conveniently as possible and in a way that would allow workers to quickly process their applications. The main goal: Eliminate paper-based processes and reduce staff workflows by five to ten percent while staying in compliance. The interface is configured to provide better data collection, using business rules when populating information to ensure required fields are entered. Individual user dashboards show alerts, notifications, invoices, and information on recent transactions without having to search the system. In addition we wanted to maintain public record integrity. The licensing application runs natively in the cloud, providing the highest level of security in the industry. Configurable interfaces and API settings provide the adaptability to interface with 3rd-party systems or with other agencies, allowing data to be securely sent and received from the application. This includes industry best practices from NIST regarding security, information protection, and authentication methods to protect citizens and the administration.

Introduced under the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Grants Management Modernization (FEMA GMM) program FEMA Grants Outcomes (FEMA GO) consolidates the agency’s 40 plus grants programs and 10 legacy IT systems into one platform. These programs represent over 11 billion dollars a year in grant money and 2.44 million grant transactions per day. Entering production in 2020, the platform will provide full grants lifecycle management. In its final state users may apply, track, and manage both disaster and non-disaster grants from one location. The agency sought a solution to address both the addition of new grants programs and the full grants management cycle while modernizing legacy programs. To address these complex challenges, FEMA GO uses a cloud native solution combined with microservices implementation. This hybrid solution leverages open source tools, Agile, DevSecOps, and microservices to layer functionality and efficiency within the data and platform architecture while minimizing risk and cost. The result is a platform that supports ongoing consolidation of grants programs while enabling the rapid onboarding of new programs without disruption to the system. This innovative modernization approach should both reduce sustainment costs and improve Operations and Maintenance while streamlining business processes. Because the platform gives FEMA the ability to introduce a new grant program with minimal disruption to the existing system it empowers the agency to develop new programs in a way that might get aid to communities faster. Its flexibility allows grants to reach communities quicker. The platform is currently deployed. The FEMA GMM team successfully added grants programs throughout 2020. These included grants supporting fire departments and disaster mitigation efforts while simultaneously introducing a new grant program to quickly fund PPE for COVID-19 first responders.

Securing and managing multiple clouds is complex and challenging. ManTech’s innovation, Fernglas (patent pending) provides a comprehensive solution to manage all phases of a multi-cloud journey. FERNGLAS is a single pane of glass or single command and control unit for managing thousands and/or millions of cloud assets across multiple hyperscale cloud providers. The supporting integration is achieved via a vendor neutral multi-cloud management platform for enterprise using ManTech’s LaunchRAMP® cloud adoption framework and plug and play architecture.
Fernglas capabilities include:
— Multi-cloud IAM and governance and centralized RBAC access for ALL cloud accounts
— Multi-cloud Cost Management and Optimization
— Service catalog and end-to-end automated provisioning
— Multi-cloud Continuous security and compliance
— Multi-cloud Application portability and interoperability
— Predictive multi-cloud operations management
— Cross-domain multi-cloud data security.

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) newsletter demand increased exponentially overnight, and by the end of March 2020, the average daily page views of CDC.gov website leapt to 20 times the pre-pandemic numbers. The CDC understood the critical impact of delivering the right information—which would frequently change by the hour—to citizens who needed it as soon as possible, and they would only be able to do this with the right analytics and communications tools. Recognizing that a demanding constituent base was growing and needed timely information, CDC required better analytics and communications to determine the information millions of people wanted as well as how to proactively send it to them. To avoid losing time to trial and error, they formed a cross-functional task force team to create a new process that would eliminate interruptions and delays in important public communications, reduce or remove the need for IT support, and improve the citizen experience. The CDC partnered with Adobe and utilized their Experience Cloud, including Adobe Analytics and Adobe Campaign to 1) quickly send out time-sensitive information in emails, alerts, and newsletters to an exponentially growing subscriber list, and 2) tailor and rapidly update website content and alerts to meet the variety of questions and information needs of millions of citizens. Today, more than 2 million people receive up-to-date information related to COVID-19 via email, SMS text and newsletter subscriptions. With one multichannel communication tool, the CDC now reacts quickly and nimbly to reach millions of US citizens with critical, time-sensitive, and personalized alerts and advisories on public health issues like COVID-19. With the timely distribution of uniform, data-informed, and relevant content, the CDC continues to increase public knowledge and positively impact public safety.

According to federal data, one in six Americans (or 48 million people) is sickened and 3,000 die from foodborne diseases each year. The unfortunate fact is these figures are likely to be far higher, as most food illnesses go unreported. FDA Commissioner responded, in part, with a pledge that the agency would act to speed up recalls, including the release of new guidance on recall communications with consumers. One change under consideration is publicly disclosing information about the retail and food service locations that sold or served recalled products. FDA releases recall information via website, social media and other methods which are not timely and efficient to the consumers daily life. On the other hand, when consumers are facing food related issues, reporting adverse events back to regulatory agencies such as FDA to take further action is not timely and efficient, and sometimes is troublesome. Our solution is to leverage cutting edge technologies, such as Machine Learning, Image recognition, and Mobile technology to build a robust bidirectional communication channel, to allow food consumers to receive the latest food related personalized information, and also automatically detect food related safety signals in a timely manner by leveraging consumer reported big data on the food safety domain.

Fresh Haystack Enterprise Industrial Security is a hyper-automation tool for the Federal Government, Defense Industrial Base, Federal Systems Integrators, State & Local Governments, Higher Education facilities as well as any highly regulated industries where any background investigation and continuous monitoring is needed to further help the security mission and national, industrial and personnel secrets are a concern. Fresh Haystack is a modular SaaS based solution offering capabilities for Pre-screening On-Boarding Personnel/Contracts/Facilities Management and Continuous Monitoring Insider Threat Enterprise Risk Analysis & Management. Fresh Haystack enables a solution for National Industrial Security Program (NISP) compliance through realtime personnel security case management. Comprehensive workflows addressing eFOCI, Facilities Clearance Management, Candidate Prescreening, Collateral & SCI Security, Federal Suitability & Public Trust & Adjudication. Fresh Haystack orchestrates the routing of forms, handoffs and approvals, and automates cross-functional communication with Recruiting, Human Resources, Security, Program Office and Government customers/NBIB (National Background Investigation Bureau) for accurate, auditable and secure clearance and continuous evaluation/insider threat case handling. Fresh Haystack offers a unique hyper-automation solution built with an integrated risk analysis engine that provides our clients with the ability to automate much of the pre-screening and on-boarding of cleared personnel and contractors. Fresh Haystack also helps the federal government & the DIB/FSI industry address challenges of CMMC and TW 2.0 as we provide a continuous monitoring ability of all cleared personnel and contractors with a risk analysis of their outside influences called CARES.

The U.S. Army is facing exponential growth in cybersecurity attacks from sophisticated nation-state actors that aggressively target and gain access to the Department of Defense Information Network (DODIN), compromising, stealing and destroying critical information. Defensive Cyber Operations (DCO)’s Cyber Platforms and Systems (CPS) program faces the challenge of not being able to sufficiently monitor and analyze the large amounts of data within the DODIN, or properly allocate defensive resources to detect, deter, deny or disrupt malicious activity. CPS’s Garrison Defensive Cyberspace Operations Platform (GDP) Packet Capture Node (PCN) provides a different and innovative approach to cyberspace threat detection and response than traditional network and security monitoring applications. PCN delivers efficient access to all network traffic while storing it for forensic analysis, reducing threat detection time from weeks to hours. Over the next several months, CPS delivered all requirements in a footprint that was 70 percent smaller than its nearest competitor, reducing the entire deployment to a three rack-unit compact form factor about five inches in total rack height. This form factor reduces the size, weight and power (SWaP) needed to run mission-critical applications with powerful processing chips.

The State of Georgia partnered with a private entity to implement a new, more efficient, vehicle titling system that completely transformed the state’s approach to administering millions of vehicle registrations. The new system is formally known as the Georgia Driver Record and Integrated Vehicle Enterprise System project but is commonly referred to as DRIVES. Not only did this innovation completely replace aging technology, but it also streamlined various systems for vehicle titles and registration management into a single and fully integrated system for motor-vehicle administration. The system’s foundation is built on FastVS software which incorporates industry best-practices leveraging knowledge gathered from various motor vehicle agencies across the United States. This base allows for the efficient processing of common transactions associated with vehicle-administration services. In just 18 months, state and FAST project personnel delivered the new system to production by tailoring the base software to meet Georgia Department of Revenue’s (DOR’s) distinct requirements for the state’s vehicle title and registration programs. A deployment of this magnitude typically takes state motor-vehicle agencies five to 10 years to achieve. The new DRIVES system is the backbone for tracking and managing all vehicle-related transactions in Georgia. The DRIVES system is used by 159 Georgia county offices to provide vehicle-related services to the public. Implementing a system of this scope and scale involved incorporating input from various stakeholders from law enforcement agencies and that of officials from state, county, and city governments. DRIVES interfaces with nationwide systems, such as those designed for vehicle fraud and detection by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA), and private-sector systems that allow motor-vehicle services to be provided outside of standard office environments, such as in grocery stores.

GCSS-Army’s MEDLOG Minimum Viable Solution was developed at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in urgent response to the Army’s need for a unified, streamlined system providing real-time data on unit preparedness and the availability of potentially life-saving medical equipment and personal protective equipment (PPE). Due to their disjointed and stand-alone operations, the Joint Medical Systems were unable to harvest and aggregate real-time data in combined reports, leading to delays in determining PPE inventory levels, locations and the arrangement of transportation to areas where it was most needed. The data challenge prompted Headquarters Department of the Army, and Army Materiel Command leaders to decide to move multiple Joint Medical Systems’ capabilities into a single, integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The stakeholders agreed to a minimum viable solution using the existing GCSS-Army procurement process for supply chain management and the existing ground maintenance process for preventative and corrective maintenance, and readiness of medical equipment. The GCSS-Army MEDLOG Minimum Viable Solution — designed to adapt existing GCSS-Army functions to unique medical logistics needs — would enable the medical logistics community to make sound, informed decisions in mission-critical operational environments through real-time, accurate and insightful information.
At a high level, the solution would enable the medical logistics community to:
• Provide medical supply chain management
• Supply medical asset management, preventative maintenance and readiness of medical equipment
• Oversee medical property accountability within the operating force environment in a manner that is as responsive, capable, and efficient as direct patient care activities
• Make sound, informed decisions in mission-critical operational environments through real-time, accurate and insightful information
PEO EIS’s GCSS-Army product office began deploying the solution to the field in phases. Partial new functionality was implemented in August and December 2020. The remainder of the functionality is tentatively scheduled for implementation in May 2021.

The Global Combat Support System-Army (GCSS-Army) Army Prepositioned Stock (APS) will address the Army’s imminent need for a modernized, streamlined APS system that not only increases response and readiness during combat, but also greatly enhances the planning of future operations. APS includes combat equipment, materiel and supplies in multiple, dispersed locations around the world that are issued to Army units deploying rapidly during crisis situations. The Army currently lacks an automated, national to tactical, end-to-end process for managing APS property accountability and maintenance information. When fielded, the GCSS-Army APS solution will enable the issuing of complete sets of equipment to deploying brigades in four hours, as compared to 96 hours using today’s systems, and the 48 hours required by the Combat Developer, U.S. Army Combined Arms Support Command. The GCSS-Army APS solution will receive, store, maintain and issue materiel stored in APS based on National Command Authority orders. Once fully fielded, the integration of the APS solution into the GCSS-Army baseline will provide a single system for anticipating, allocating and synchronizing the flow of resources in support of combatant commanders. GCSS-Army APS will integrate enterprise information and provide all echelons with access to critical logistics information that may affect the outcome of combat operations, combat power and planning for future operations. The solution also eliminates the current paper records for property accountability and financial management, as well as automates the handoff of equipment in the battlespace, thereby making the system more efficient and effective. The GCSS-Army APS solution will account for, manage maintenance for, receive, issue and store equipment for approximately 300 battalion and 200 company sets of equipment when fully fielded. It is scheduled to begin deployment in March 2021 and complete deployment in December 2021.

The Global Engagement Center (GEC) is responsible for leading the interagency effort to identify and counter foreign disinformation and propaganda. In Summer 2019/Spring 2020, the GEC launched a cloud-based analytics and information-sharing platform, GEC-IQ, providing unprecedented capabilities for interagency and international coordination to support this mission. The first analytical collaboration system of its kind, the GEC enabled over 700 end-users to-date, across 20+ government agencies and organizations to work in a single environment and build a common operating picture of global disinformation threats. The platform provides advanced data science and analytical tools to an interagency community of analysts, transforming previously siloed research into collaborative and accelerated global efforts to counter disinformation and propaganda. The platform provides disinformation analysts access to advanced analytical tools, including social and traditional media monitoring, data visualization, and statistical analysis tools. GEC-IQ further enables partner-capability building through codifying algorithms, standardizing best practices, and sharing analytical tradecraft across the community. Most critically, GEC-IQ significantly highlights disinformation and propaganda efforts by adversaries through knowledge sharing. The platform gives analysts and their organizations access to a centralized repository of data, a library of learning material, and published finished analyses. All this culminating in an increase in organizations’ ability to recognize, understand, and counter disinformation and propaganda. GEC-IQ has innovated this space by bringing these elements together on a single platform. Disinformation practitioners and decisionmakers are now able to perform the research, use analytical tools, publish findings, and communicate those findings seamlessly with a global community of practitioners.

GLȲD(Σ)™ provides a unique solution to longstanding challenges manually performing sampling and extrapolation. GLȲD(Σ)™ is a statistical analysis application for perform Sampling and Extrapolation. It takes many of the manual steps out of the Sampling and Extrapolation processes and performs accurate and reliable calculations with the click of a button, thereby relieving managers, statisticians, and analysts from time-consuming statistical calculations, which could result in inaccurate results and lead to misinformed decision making. GLYDE provides consistent and repeatable sampling and extrapolation methodologies that have been successful in multiple Medicare and Medicaid overpayment appeals, and produces uniform reports for review and decision making. Extrapolation in Payment Integrity often results in a party owing an extrapolated dollar amount back to the government. This can understandably be controversial and extrapolation results are often challenged in formal government hearings. These hearings often involve contesting the statistical methodology used to reach an extrapolated overpayment amount. In Medicare alone, there were over 3,000 appeals cases requested in fiscal year 2013 and the number continues to grow. Parties that appeal adverse Medicare payment decisions have success rates higher than 60 percent and are extremely skilled in picking apart any statistical methods that led to the payment decision. This makes GLȲD(Σ)™’s transparency and reliability incredibly important to healthcare program integrity. Increasing the ability of overpayments to withstand these frequent challenges could save the government millions of dollars. GLȲD(Σ)™ is an innovative statistical analysis application, which will help Federal, State, and private healthcare systems perform statistical analyses, including sampling and extrapolation. GLȲD(Σ)™’s extrapolation feature relieves managers, statisticians, and analysts from time- consuming statistical calculations, which could result in inaccurate results and lead to misinformed decision making. The sampling and extrapolation process is defined by transparent calculations and strict guidelines. Analysts and managers can quickly run sample data through GLȲD(Σ)™ and extrapolate results to a population, leading to more informed decisions about where and how to spend resources.

The Grants Management Blockchain Demonstration Project is attempting to develop and demonstrate a different business operating model where all parties involved in a grant award can provide grants management information once, in a standard data taxonomy, using a single user/system interface that fits their needs, and can access the information they need throughout the life cycle of the grant, from award through closeout. The Grants Management Blockchain Demonstration Project is also attempting to demonstrate a different solution delivery model that is not reliant on solely federal government funding and a federal government-managed, centralized architecture. First, the solution is using distributed ledger technology (DLT) and a multi-node distributed architecture. Second, the solution is being developed by multiple industry teams of grants management solution and blockchain technology providers partnered with federal, state, and community-based grantmaking agencies and grant recipients. If this consortium of public-private entities is successful, the Grants Management Blockchain Demonstration Project can serve as a model for modernizing the grants management ecosystem in the next few years.

HealthPrism™ uses data on 240+ million adults across the United States with 1,500 social determinants of health data points to identify tailored intervention recommendations for highly vulnerable populations. HealthPrism™ data is curated from public and commercially available sources. HealthPrism™ includes predictive risk models for diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, opioid use disorder, depression, and many other health conditions. Importantly, HealthPrism™ provides upwards of 8 years of historical SDoH data to inform pathways and patterns critical to early identification, improved health outcomes, and reduced healthcare costs. HealthPrism™, formerly known as Opioid360™, was initially built in early 2019 to apply Deloitte’s predictive population health analytics capabilities to the opioid epidemic that had swept across the country. In March of 2020, the HealthPrism™ team worked to transform Opioid360™ existing capabilities to combat the spread of COVID-19. Within a matter of weeks, the tool had been re-engineered and deployed to help state decision makers better understand populations most at-risk for COVID-19 complications and hospitalizations. The HealthPrism™ solution provides insight into inequities and disparities due to social determinants of health factors that are prevalent within a selected population, making those populations at higher risk during the pandemic. HealthPrism™ is currently being used in multiple states and federal health organizations to support COVID-19 response and recovery. Since March 2020, the organizations using HealthPrism™ have developed additional predictive models that are beneficial in protecting vulnerable populations. These new predictive models include housing insecurity, unemployment, food insecurity, transportation insecurity, as well as behavioral analytics that model hesitancy and openness to change. Our team working alongside state and federal health agencies have used these models to identify, protect, and immunize vulnerable populations.

Oracle worked with HHS and another partner Data Robot to create the HHS WATERS (Wireless Automated Transmission for Electronic Reporting Systems) Blockchain platform. The WATERS platform was also named in honor of Dr. Michael Waters, an FDA Scientist who worked on finding accurate and quick tests for COVID-19 until he passed away in September, 2020. The intent of the platform is to be an information superhighway for COVID-19 data, securing the information in a shared single source of truth through blockchain. This system is in production on a FedRAMP-certified Oracle Government Cloud and has received a conditional authority to operate (cATO). There have already been over 800,000 patient test results that have passed through the system. By this summer, it is expected that there will be millions of test results passing through this system. We believe this is the largest production implementation of blockchain in the U.S. federal government.

The HireVue platform is the industry leading video interview and assessment platform and the only solution with a FedRAMP ATO. With the sudden pivot to "remote everything" over the past year, the HireVue solution has become a very timely solution to a pressing and long-standing problem in federal agencies: reducing the time to fill open positions while enforcing unbiased assessments that promote more diverse and inclusive outcomes. Using the power of conversational AI to facilitate candidate engagement and natural language processing AI to assess candidates' answers to structured interview questions, HireVue is currently making an impact in agencies with pressing hiring needs. HireVue enables candidate engagement through mobile messaging channels, allows candidates to record and hiring managers to evaluate interviews at their respective convenience, freeing up valuable time from scheduling and ensuring that under-represented communities have an equal chance to participate in the interview process.

Hopper is a Managed Platform-as-a-Service (MPaaS) solution that accelerates software delivery through cost-effective automation and scalable infrastructure. At its core, Hopper is a software factory in-a-box composed of a set of integrated development, security, and operations tools designed to increase productivity and accelerate the path to agency Authority to Operate (ATO). Hopper removes barriers by accelerating installation and configuration more quickly and efficiently. CVP Hopper provides a combination of intelligent, self-healing, automated infrastructure to enable a faster way to build, secure, deploy, and scale enterprise software. Based on over a decade of CVP’s work with clients and its own Research and Development laboratory, Hopper accelerates the establishment of environments and then provides the governing Enterprise Architecture to facilitate a “cloud-native containers culture.” Powered by CVP’s Service Catalog of pre-defined government-vetted components and technology solutions, environments can be deployed via Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to any public cloud or VMware-based datacenter with the single click of a button. As new tools emerge on the market, CVP augments its Hopper Service Catalog accordingly, and those catalog items are immediately available to clients of the MPaaS offering. Hopper also supports an accelerated path to ATOs via third-party partnerships, from which all required security controls are baked in, and all ATO documentation is automatically generated at a Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) moderate or high certification level. In addition, continuous ATO is enabled via automated compliance and security posture management. Hopper either directly supports or integrates seamlessly with DevSecOps environments and processes, whether in-house or outsourced as a Managed Service.

Hopper – NSF's Tools Incubator provides a platform for NSF staff (local innovators) to share tools and solutions with colleagues that have been developed to improve work outcomes at NSF; collaborate on the creation of new tools to address emerging needs; and refine tools to improve and expand their capabilities and functionalities. Once shared in the portal, tools become visible to all NSF staff, allowing innovators to showcase their tool(s) and foster use across NSF. Tools and solutions can include simple templates or efficient workflow documentations, software automations and beyond. Sponsored by NSF's Innovation Management Group (IMG), Hopper aims to consolidate, organize, and classify shared tools with the goals of reducing duplication, increasing transparency, and fostering collaboration across NSF. The IMG manages NSF's IT Investment Portfolio that focuses on innovation, research and development (R&D) and emerging technologies. IMG's purpose is to establish related process methodologies and innovation framework for identifying, prioritizing, incubating, and integrating innovative solutions and offerings, as well as measuring, monitoring, and reporting.

The How’s My Waterway (HMW) Team is a cross-agency team that delivered a new game changing product that changed how the general public interacts with water information. Following a services-first and user-centered design approach, the HMW team delivered a first-of-its-kind application that provides easy access to information on state water quality assessments, permits, drinking water, water quality monitoring, protection projects, protected areas, wild and scenic rivers, watershed health scores and activities underway to restore water quality. HMW v2 is a revolutionary application released in June 2020 that has transformed how EPA is able to communicate with the general public about water quality. It is the capstone application from a decade-long process of implementing and promoting data standards, promoting data integrity, developing electronic reporting methods, opening data access via web services, and integrating data across EPA systems. It is a responsive, map-centric, mobile ready web application that integrates data from several different systems at EPA and beyond via web services to give an overall picture of water quality on three levels: community, state, and national. HMW v2 was developed through close partnership with states and tribes, and this partnership has been critical to the success of HMW v2. The HMW v2 team has accomplished something phenomenal and never before seen in government. They have shown the true potential of EPA’s Digital Strategy and exemplify the best practices and data sharing principles that are so important for a tool to function seamlessly. HMW v2 also speaks for itself. You can see it at https://mywaterway.epa.gov.

Our solution automates the adjustment of complex financial transactions for the DoD using AI (AutoML) and Robotic Process Automation. HUNT can help the DoD financial management workforce spend 30% less time on unmatched transactions, which cost the department billions each year to correct manually. The novel innovation accomplishments of HUNT include: Integration of AI with RPA, AutoML - quickly building, experimenting and testing to build highly accurate AI models, Getting data AI ready with autolabeling, Integration of AI into DoD cloud environment, and an Agile mindset that delivered the promised results within the 6 month timeline. HUNT is a collaborative effort between the DoD Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), DoD Comptroller and Summit2Sea Consulting.